Todd Haynes on May December, controversy and being rejected by Bowie: ‘All my movies feel headed for disaster’

The filmmaker Todd Haynes is American cinema’s chief translator of desire and repression, but he doesn’t feel that way on set. “All of my movies feel headed for disaster when I’m making them,” he says. “Just, like, dancing on the precipice of it.” He’s fixed his eyes on me, winsome behind dark spectacles. “But isn’t that why we’re on this earth? Do something scary! Do something you haven’t seen done before! Put things together in a way that just makes sense to you! And maybe, if you’re lucky, it’ll make sense to somebody else.”

Across nine feature films, a documentary about the glam chaos of The Velvet Underground and one 40-minute short in which Karen Carpenter’s tragic self-destruction is dramatised by a Barbie doll, Haynes has yet to meet a dangerous premise he couldn’t wrestle to the ground and tame. No one was eager to make his David Bowie simulacrum movie Velvet Goldmine (1998), with its glitter, feather boas and Christian Bale and Ewan McGregor rutting on a rooftop. Nor his offbeat biopic I’m Not There (2007), which cast six different actors as Bob Dylan – among them a small Black child and a bewigged Cate Blanchett. And who else has been able to get not one but three films off the ground about desperate women corseted by societal sickness and sexual dissatisfaction? Those were Safe (1995), Far from Heaven (2002) and Carol (2015), for the uninitiated – the first two helped cement Julianne Moore as one of our greatest living actors, the latter saw Blanchett and Rooney Mara ache for one another over a perfume counter at Christmas.

He’s reunited with Moore for his latest film May December, a scorching, metatextual melodrama about sex, narcissism and movie stars. “I’ve always explored subjects of tremendous personal allure, of libidinal fascination,” Haynes tells me, flexing his fingers while waiting for a hotel concierge to bring him his coffee. “I enter this whole other realm when I’m making it, then come out the other side and hand it off to other people. It means I can never quite experience it the same way again.”

Haynes arrived amid a wellspring of queer filmmakers at the top of the Nineties, bringing radical ideas into the (heterosexual) mainstream, along with directors such as Gus van Sant (My Own Private Idaho) and Gregg Araki (The Living End). His repeated digressions in tone and subject matter (2017’s Wonderstruck was practically a silent film; 2019’s Dark Waters was an angry, paranoid environmental thriller) have long made him one of cinema’s most exciting auteurs and inspired a particular kind of devotion from audiences.

Different people have different favourites when it comes to his work. I resist the urge to fanboy over Safe, in which an increasingly unwell Moore moves – ghost-like and coughing – through eerie Eighties suburbia. But we end up talking about it anyway. Safe was indebted not only to the Aids crisis, and the fringe groups that insisted self-love could cure it, but also bad made-for-TV movies about ill and troubled women. May December nods to that same genre of filmmaking, revolving around the fictional villain of a Nineties tabloid scandal, whose life was dramatised in at least one TV movie. We meet her 20 years later, with her life story about to be turned into another movie – only a classier one, this time… or so its star insists.

Moore plays Gracie, a pet shop employee who, in the early Nineties, was caught raping a 13-year-old boy named Joe (played as an adult by Riverdale’s Charles Melton). Gracie became pregnant, the pair insisted they were in love, and were married once Gracie was released from prison. Actor Elizabeth Berry (Natalie Portman), meanwhile, has been cast in a movie about them and arrives at their family home for a week of research. Gracie is all baby-voice and quiet predation. Elizabeth is sensual and sly, with a ruthlessness that borders on sociopathic – at one point she tells her movie’s director, with hilarious nonchalance, that the 13-year-old boys auditioning for the role of Joe just aren’t “sexy enough”. Elizabeth watches how Gracie talks and moves, starts to talk and move just like her, and revisits the scene of the crime, kissing and stroking the air as if trying to interact with a phantom.

Between the paedophilia, the age gap, and issues of grooming, Haynes is poking a hornet’s nest of hot-button subjects here. We’re speaking a few weeks before it hits cinemas, and Haynes admits to being curious how people will respond to it. “I’m encouraged, though, by the fact that people so far have been stimulated and excited and amused by it,” he says. “We’re talking about complicated subjects that we think we have absolutely firm ideas about. The movie doesn’t let you stay in one place. It keeps shifting the ground under you, and people seem ready to handle it.”

He adds that it provokes the kind of feelings that made him fall in love with cinema in the first place. “The best movies always make you uncertain about things,” he says. “When I was coming of age, those were movies that were a little over my head or a little disturbing, but enough that they made me want to learn more, or question more. If any of that is possible in today’s world – which feels more fundamentalist and afraid and polarised and politicised – then I couldn’t be happier for this movie to be one tiny example of it.”

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Haynes is tall, tanned and impeccably well read – he has the air of a film professor who surfs on the weekends. He was a child prodigy who fell hard for Mary Poppins and Zeffirelli’s Romeo & Juliet, studied art at Brown University, then discovered experimental film while studying for a master’s in fine art. His early shorts, Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story (1987) and the eccentric coming-of-age comedy Dottie Gets Spanked (1993), trace lines between queerness and the worship of female celebrity. Poison, his 1991 feature debut, is a triptych of tales revolving around otherness, sexual transgression and the monstering of queer lives. “It was a way of applying our rage in a more practical and useful form,” he recalls.

Subversion and fantasy have always been key to Haynes’s work, far more than straightforward reality. The total opposite is explored in May December. Elizabeth frames her impending portrayal of Gracie as an altruistic act – she wants to gain Gracie’s trust, insisting she wants to find the “truth” of her. Haynes says he’s never been interested in finding “truth” in any of his movies, but he has had charged dynamics with real people that he’s semi-dramatised on film.

Bowie, his childhood idol, was one of the key inspirations for Velvet Goldmine’s Brian Slade, an androgynous bisexual rock star who comes to reject the provocations of his early work. Bowie declined Haynes the use of his music for the film, forcing him into making Velvet Goldmine a fictionalised amalgam of Seventies glam rock rather than a straight biopic. It worked in the film’s favour, but Bowie himself became one of its major detractors, gently mocking it whenever he was asked about it. “I think because of [Haynes’s] own particular sexual politics, he wanted to make something that represented queer cinema in that way,” he once said. “I guess he did OK.”

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Did it matter to Haynes whether Bowie liked the film? “Of course it mattered to me,” he says. “I wanted him to like it, if only in a private, intimate way. But I also knew it was a film that [addressed] what I saw as Bowie undoing that part of him – the denial and disavowal of the things he was doing when he was at his campiest and queerest. No one could have been more overt and aggressively provocative in their queerness than Bowie and company at that time. I felt like he ended up changing his ambitions as an artist. He rejected, literally and figuratively, what he had done before.”

That transformation, to full-blown pop megastar of the early Eighties, was something that Bowie ended up rejecting, too, and Haynes says he hoped Bowie would have had enough perspective on it all to embrace the film – and its depiction of the world’s most famous bisexual rock star kickstarting the Eighties with a more commercial, conservative bent. “He gave it a kind of distant acceptance,” he recalls. “He put it in a category of, like, ‘oh, yes, a gay director would want to explore that period of time…’.” He shrugs.

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It was a very different experience, he adds, to when he made I’m Not There. “Working with Dylan was a far scarier prospect than working with Bowie,” he remembers. “And I was totally wrong about him. He was the most open a person could be about another person representing him. Not only did Dylan stay away from the whole project until the very end of it, he finally did see it and said very nice things about it. And we picked the most misogynistic versions of Dylan in certain stories… arrogant, delusional – and no one ever said, ‘You can’t do that’.”

I’m Not There earned Blanchett an Oscar nod for her portrayal of Dylan at the peak of his celebrity, while both Far from Heaven and Carol received acting nominations from the Academy (for Moore, Mara and Blanchett again, respectively). But Haynes himself has received just one Oscar nod, for scripting Far from Heaven. It’s been a point of contention for many of his closest collaborators, with Blanchett once calling out Academy Awards “conservatism” for their “bewildering” decision to snub him for Carol.

Does Haynes care about awards? “Deeply and truly no,” he laughs. “If releasing one of my films coincides with an awards campaign, that’s all good, but it’s not what drives me at all. I just feel very lucky that I get people and financiers to take risks with me, and actors willing to get on board with scripts that sometimes are hard to make heads or tails out of.”

That’s the thrill of watching a Todd Haynes movie, too – danger, uncertainty, then the sigh of relief when it’s inevitably pulled off.

‘May December’ is in cinemas from 17 November, and is released on Sky Cinema on 8 December