Focus Features

I'm Not There confirmed Todd Haynes' reputation as one of the most imaginative filmmakers working today. No one could have anticipated a film about Bob Dylan where the singer was embodied by five different actors – and one actress! And he pulled it off, just as he pulled off his homage to the 50s melodramas of Douglas Sirk, Far From Heaven.

Oren Moverman (who co-wrote I'm Not There, as well as writing and directing The Messenger) interviewed Todd Haynes about Safe for Projections:

"Frightfully pale, dangerously lean and irreproachable, with a submissive, doll-like presence that's often diminished or compartmentalised within the frame, Carol White, the hyper-allergic, milkoholic protagonist of Safe, arrives at a chemically-free zone in New Mexico where she is told to give herself to love. An environmentally-ill homemaker from the San Fernando Valley, Carol has retreated to Wrenwood, a New Age colony, in order to understand and overcome her 'Twentieth Century Disease'. After weeks of medically inexplicable convulsions, nausea, headaches, and bleeding in reaction to ordinary fragrances and fumes, she must embrace the ironically communal, masochistic notion that she is the cause of her illness as well as its cure. It's an unsettling, provocative therapeutic notion of purification in a post-modern age of referential doom and metaphorical disease, but it's delivered with such intelligent cinematic restraint that Safe has left some viewers groping for a guiding hand, much like Carol White.

Before shocking himself and audiences at the 1991 Sundance Film Festival by winning the Grand Prize for his first feature film, Poison, Todd Haynes was an underground film-maker with an outlaw 43-minute dramatic film Superstar, The Karen CarpenterStory, in which he cast Barbie dolls to re-enact, with great humour and poignancy, the 1970s singer's demise owing to anorexia nervosa. The film became a cult favorite when the Carpenter family blocked its distribution. A formalist, strikingly original film in its own right, the Jean Genet-inspired Poison pushed Haynes into mainstream controversy at its release. The film received a completion grant from the National Endowment for the Arts and was attacked, as part of a right-wing overall assault on the NEA, by the American Family Association. As a result, Poison received greater publicity than expected and went into wide distribution, reaching large audiences throughout the world.

Haynes seemed to be on the verge of moving out of the fringes of low-budget film-making into the wider public domain. But that was not the road that Haynes decided to take. In 1993 Haynes directedDottie Gets Spanked, a 30-minute telefilm about a boy's sexual awakening and obsession with a 1950s-style sitcom star. It would take four years after Poison before the completion and release of Haynes’ second full-length feature film Safe became a reality.

Oren Moverman: There seems to be a big Antonioni influence in the emotional barrenness of the film and the way the aesthetics are controlled.

Todd Haynes: When I was talking to Alex Nepomniaschy, the director of photography, the first time, he asked, 'Have you seen Red Desert? It's the first film that came to my mind when I read your script.' I hadn't seen it, and so he got me a tape and I looked at it. It's a beautiful film, but I was really inspired even more by the technical rigidity and control that you see in Antonioni. I knew that Safe would be done in long shot.

Oren Moverman: You're famous for storyboarding every shot in detail. Doesn't storyboarding distance you from the actual material, from the hands-on film-making on set and the immediacy of the images?

Todd Haynes: No. Film is images. Of course it's about narrative and story, but it's also about a construction of images that's played out temporally. To pretend that you're capturing something authentic and true by making it look, or feel, less controlled plays into a whole set of values and ideas about art that I find oppressive. It's more liberating for me to think of film as a series of lies; knowing they're lies gives you a much greater ability to be responsible for what you're doing out there. When you think film is truth, you give up that responsibility; you're fluffing yourself up thinking that you're putting into the world something that's authentic and organic, but it's a language, it's a very prescribed set of terms that you're reiterating to people in a highly controlled way. To pretend that you're inventing it as you go along is really a disservice to the audience. It's all artifice; it's all a series of constructions.

Extract taken from Projections 5: Film-makers on Film-making (Faber & Faber, 1996).

I'm Not There confirmed Todd Haynes' reputation as one of the most imaginative filmmakers working today. No one could have anticipated a film about Bob Dylan where the singer was embodied by five different actors – and one actress! And he pulled it off, just as he pulled off his homage to the 50s melodramas of Douglas Sirk, Far From Heaven.

Oren Moverman (who co-wrote I'm Not There, as well as writing and directing The Messenger) interviewed Todd Haynes about Safe for Projections:

"Frightfully pale, dangerously lean and irreproachable, with a submissive, doll-like presence that's often diminished or compartmentalised within the frame, Carol White, the hyper-allergic, milkoholic protagonist of Safe, arrives at a chemically-free zone in New Mexico where she is told to give herself to love. An environmentally-ill homemaker from the San Fernando Valley, Carol has retreated to Wrenwood, a New Age colony, in order to understand and overcome her 'Twentieth Century Disease'. After weeks of medically inexplicable convulsions, nausea, headaches, and bleeding in reaction to ordinary fragrances and fumes, she must embrace the ironically communal, masochistic notion that she is the cause of her illness as well as its cure. It's an unsettling, provocative therapeutic notion of purification in a post-modern age of referential doom and metaphorical disease, but it's delivered with such intelligent cinematic restraint that Safe has left some viewers groping for a guiding hand, much like Carol White.

Before shocking himself and audiences at the 1991 Sundance Film Festival by winning the Grand Prize for his first feature film, Poison, Todd Haynes was an underground film-maker with an outlaw 43-minute dramatic film Superstar, The Karen CarpenterStory, in which he cast Barbie dolls to re-enact, with great humour and poignancy, the 1970s singer's demise owing to anorexia nervosa. The film became a cult favorite when the Carpenter family blocked its distribution. A formalist, strikingly original film in its own right, the Jean Genet-inspired Poison pushed Haynes into mainstream controversy at its release. The film received a completion grant from the National Endowment for the Arts and was attacked, as part of a right-wing overall assault on the NEA, by the American Family Association. As a result, Poison received greater publicity than expected and went into wide distribution, reaching large audiences throughout the world.

Haynes seemed to be on the verge of moving out of the fringes of low-budget film-making into the wider public domain. But that was not the road that Haynes decided to take. In 1993 Haynes directedDottie Gets Spanked, a 30-minute telefilm about a boy's sexual awakening and obsession with a 1950s-style sitcom star. It would take four years after Poison before the completion and release of Haynes’ second full-length feature film Safe became a reality.

Oren Moverman: There seems to be a big Antonioni influence in the emotional barrenness of the film and the way the aesthetics are controlled.

Todd Haynes: When I was talking to Alex Nepomniaschy, the director of photography, the first time, he asked, 'Have you seen Red Desert? It's the first film that came to my mind when I read your script.' I hadn't seen it, and so he got me a tape and I looked at it. It's a beautiful film, but I was really inspired even more by the technical rigidity and control that you see in Antonioni. I knew that Safe would be done in long shot.

Oren Moverman: You're famous for storyboarding every shot in detail. Doesn't storyboarding distance you from the actual material, from the hands-on film-making on set and the immediacy of the images?

Todd Haynes: No. Film is images. Of course it's about narrative and story, but it's also about a construction of images that's played out temporally. To pretend that you're capturing something authentic and true by making it look, or feel, less controlled plays into a whole set of values and ideas about art that I find oppressive. It's more liberating for me to think of film as a series of lies; knowing they're lies gives you a much greater ability to be responsible for what you're doing out there. When you think film is truth, you give up that responsibility; you're fluffing yourself up thinking that you're putting into the world something that's authentic and organic, but it's a language, it's a very prescribed set of terms that you're reiterating to people in a highly controlled way. To pretend that you're inventing it as you go along is really a disservice to the audience. It's all artifice; it's all a series of constructions.

Extract taken from Projections 5: Film-makers on Film-making (Faber & Faber, 1996).