I was 3 years old and Mary Poppins [1964] made an impression on me that was seismic, apparently. I fell into some kind of total creative, imaginative rapture over that movie that propelled this industry of Mary Poppins drawings, plays, performances - just an obsessive, creative reaction to it.
Todd HaynesAs an independent filmmaker, to develop the money and the financing and the structure and the whole process, and then promoting them and traveling with them, which is a part of the process that I've always enjoyed and I've learned a great deal from.
Todd HaynesI used to fall hard when I was younger, and it occupies a lot of journals and redundant preoccupation and analysis. It is a state in which you are in an overheated fervor of production - of mental production - where you're analyzing everything that happened. And what they said! And how they looked! Did that touch mean something, or not? Everything is sort of endowed with meaning, but you're also hopelessly boring and out of the world.
Todd HaynesI sort of have a dog-minded single strategy but I am a little more open to stuff that's out there, now and looking at scripts in the world and seeing if something that already exists can spark my interest and my curiosity.
Todd HaynesFeminist theory has left an indelible mark on my own criticalโand creativeโthinking . . . For me, everything I questioned about what it meant to be a man โ and how much my sexuality would perpetually challenge those meaningsโcould be found in arguments posed by feminists. What can I say? I identified.
Todd HaynesPeople define gay cinema solely by content: if there are gay characters in it, itโs a gay film... Heterosexuality to me is a structure as much as it is a content. It is an imposed structure that goes along with the patriarchal, dominant structure that constrains and defines society. If homosexuality is the opposite or the counter-sexual activity to that, then what kind of a structure would it be?
Todd Haynes