Todd Haynes famous quotes

Last updated: Sep 5, 2024

Music and film are parallel experiences: they are linear, they are narrative.
-- Todd Haynes

#Narrative #Film #Linear
People define gay cinema solely by content: if there are gay characters in it, itâ€™s a gay film. . . .Â I think thatâ€™s really simplistic. 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 counter-sexual activity to that, then what kind of a structure would it be?
-- Todd Haynes

#Character #Gay #Thinking
Feminist theory has left an indelible mark on my own criticalâ€”and creativeâ€”thinking . . . For me, everything I questioned about what it meant to be a man â€“ and how much my sexuality would perpetually challenge those meaningsâ€”could be found in arguments posed by feminists. What can I say? I identified.
-- Todd Haynes

#Men #Thinking #Feminist
Pop music can get inside us and enter our memory bubbles. It provides those true Proustian moments, unlocking sensations, unlocking our imaginations. Music inspired me as a filmmaker.
-- Todd Haynes

#Memories #Imagination #Unlocking
I liked to act in plays when I was a kid, and then in college. But that's the last time I really acted. I always loved it. But my interests were more in looking at the whole, rather than getting completely swallowed up in a single part of the whole.
-- Todd Haynes

#Kids #College #Play
You always feel like rock critics are frustrated musicians. I envy musicians their ability to live their art and share it with an audience, in the moment.
-- Todd Haynes

#Art #Rocks #Envy
I think by around the time I was about 8 or 9, the idea of filmmaking probably took hold. I made little Super 8 extravaganzas when I was a kid, the first being my own version of 'Romeo and Juliet,' and where I played all the parts except for Juliet.
-- Todd Haynes

#Kids #Thinking #Ideas
I'm drawn to female characters, not all of them are strong characters. I think I'm drawn to female characters partly because they don't have as easy or as obvious a relationship to power in society, and so they suffer under social constraints or have to maneuver within them in ways men sometimes don't, or are unconscious about, or have certain liberties that are invisible to them.
-- Todd Haynes

#Strong #Character #Men
When Cate Blanchett starts directing, it's over for all of us.
-- Todd Haynes
I was about 6 or 7, I would have said I wanted to be an actor and an artist. And that just kind of kept honing itself around film and getting closer to film.
-- Todd Haynes

#Artist #Actors #Kind
In the end, whether I write the script or, in this case, somebody else did, there's a point where you let it go when you're making a movie. You just have to. The thing that you shoot is not what you imagined in your head - it never is exactly that. And it shouldn't be.
-- Todd Haynes

#Writing #Let It Go #Scripts
Nostalgia could be considered a disease because you're living now.
-- Todd Haynes

#Disease #Nostalgia
I'm not ready to give up gayness in and of itself as something unique and different. A litmus test for me for all of it was the bisexual imagination and the androgynous imagination of the Glam era. Because that meant everybody was implicated in this uncertain sense of sexual self, and it meant that everything was unstable. I guess I'm just not that interested in stable notions of identity, whatever they are.
-- Todd Haynes

#Giving Up #Bisexual #Unique
There is no single approach that actors take to their craft. And the best thing you learn is that you have to really listen and respect each actor's own process and own method, and that takes a kind of delicate, non-imposing patience and openness, I think, to get the very best out of the people you work with.
-- Todd Haynes

#Thinking #People #Actors
A refusal of nature as a model is a tradition that goes right back to Oscar Wilde.
-- Todd Haynes

#Oscars #Tradition #Wilde
When I write my scripts, there's a point at which if I'm not starting to see them visually, I feel like I'm kind of cheating. So my scripts are laden with a lot of visual description, which makes them not so much fun to read - I kind of weigh them down.
-- Todd Haynes

#Cheating #Fun #Writing
The Johnny Depp generation has this kind of brooding, weighty, introspective quality, very James Deanish. Which is nice, great for a lot of characters.
-- Todd Haynes

#Nice #Character #Quality
What was so interesting about the glam era was that it was about bisexuality and breaking down the boundaries between gays and straights, breaking down the boundaries between masculinity and femininity with this androgyny thing.
-- Todd Haynes

#Gay #Interesting #Eras
In a way, I think Roxy Music is high camp, in a brilliant way.
-- Todd Haynes

#Thinking #Way #Brilliant
In my research, all roads led back to Oscar. It's definitely in a way trying to understand the truly English element to glam-rock. It really does not come from American culture.
-- Todd Haynes

#Rocks #Glam Rock #Trying
In male-driven [films], the protagonist is not the person who's necessarily in harms way. There's a sense that they're going to figure out how to persevere and take on the obstacles and foes and you don't necessarily know if that's going to happen with the subjects of love stories.
-- Todd Haynes

#Males #Stories #Way
The ways in which Oscar Wilde was attacking the Romantics that preceded him, and the Romantic ideas that preceded him, were very similar to what the glam-rockers, particularly Bowie and Bryan Ferry, were attacking in the earnestness of '60s culture. Trying to shock, but with wit, cleverness, and homosexuality.
-- Todd Haynes

#Ideas #Trying #Culture
In fact, to me it's liberating to not think of identity as some organic property that we have to find and stick to, but actually something that is constructed, or that's imposed, that we can then counter by taking a different route and re-dressing it, and then re-dressing it again, and then re-dressing it again.
-- Todd Haynes

#Thinking #Identity #Different

You may also like:

Bob Dylan
Musician
Carter Burwell
Film Score Composer
Cate Blanchett
Actress
Christian Bale
Actor
Christine Vachon
Film producer
Dennis Quaid
Actor
Douglas Sirk
Film director
Evan Rachel Wood
Actress
Heath Ledger
Actor
James M. Cain
Author
Jonathan Raymond
Writer
Jonathan Rhys Meyers
Actor
Julianne Moore
Actress
Karen Carpenter
Singer
Kelly Reichardt
Screenwriter
Kyle Chandler
Film actor
Patricia Highsmith
Novelist
Rooney Mara
Film actress
Sarah Paulson
Film actress
Todd Solondz
Screenwriter