The Oscar-nominated director shared the anecdote about his upcoming Pedro Pascal-starring romantic noir drama “De Noche” at the Lumière Film Festival on Tuesday, offering a glimpse into his approach to filmmaking, from the music and sounds that shape his movies to the senses that cannot always be expressed on screen.
“We see movies with our ears and our eyes,” Haynes explained. “But movies that evoke smell and touch and other kinds of senses are the ones that keep allowing us to fill in.”
Haynes is in Lyon with longtime producer Christine Vachon for a retrospective featuring four of his films: “Poison,” “Safe,” “Far From Heaven” and “I’m Not There,” including newly restored versions of the first two.
The director – whose latest film follows the story of a detective (Pascal) and a younger schoolteacher (Danny Ramirez) who flee the corruption of 1930s Los Angeles for Mexico – described the homework he sets himself before each production. He said he immerses himself in films that share its genre or cinematic style, rather than necessarily its historical setting.
“It’s as if I give myself an assignment each time,” he said, explaining how that research feeds into what he calls his “image books,” which he shares with his collaborators.
While putting together the image book for his Oscar-nominated “May December,” starring frequent collaborator Julianne Moore alongside Natalie Portman, Haynes began listening to Michel Legrand‘s score for Joseph Losey’s “The Go-Between.”
Having watched the restored version of “Safe” the previous evening in Lyon, Haynes praised sound designer Leslie Shatz for the unsettling soundscape of the 1995 drama, in which Moore plays a woman suffering from a mysterious illness.
He described “all of the strange, lurking, unconscious sounds” in the film, that created what he called “a kind of magnetic field in which the contamination she senses from her surroundings becomes literally audible.”
Turning to his six-time Oscar-nominated 2015 romance “Carol,” Haynes recalled how journalists kept congratulating him and stars Cate Blanchett and Cannes Best Actress winner Rooney Mara for portraying strong women. Blanchett, he said, would object: Carol wasn’t some invincible heroine but a woman constrained by her time, struggling to understand herself and how she wanted to live.
Haynes also paid tribute to Vachon, who helped rescue “Safe” when he was struggling to raise its $1 million budget. The film, he said, wouldn’t exist without her.
“I said, you know what, Todd? Make it 90 minutes,” she recalled.
“I feel like we are creating a new generation of cinemagoers, but we’re just not giving them enough movies to see,” she said.
The Lumière Film Festival runs in Lyon through Oct. 18.
