TODD HAYNES

I'm drawn to female characters; not all of them are strong characters.

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.

It's absurd: half the movie audience are women, but Hollywood bosses are still aiming for men who are 20.

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.

It's very funny because every time I make a movie, and I've heard this re-echoed by other filmmakers and actors I have worked with, you kind of feel like you're naked again. You have to figure it all out from scratch, as if you had never done it before.

I love how 'melodrama' is a denigrated term - a lower-class citizen to other genres. And yet that's what life is, man.

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.

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.

I think all my films can be enjoyed. In fact, they've often surprised me with how they're received.

You can be a smarty-pants director, but that won't matter if the movie doesn't work emotionally as well as intellectually.

I think when I was about 6 or 7, I would have said I wanted to be an actor and an artist.

Like the music and the period, I wanted 'I'm Not There' to be fun and full of emotions, desires and experiments that were thrilling and dangerous.

Making a film is so scary, and there's such a kind of void that you're working from initially. I mean, you can have all the ideas and be as prepared as possible, but you're also still bringing people together and saying, 'Trust me,' even when you don't necessarily trust every element.

Making a movie about the love between two women was really a tribute to the lesbian people in my life, my dear friends who are seminal in my life.

The highest-caliber dramatic work produced for TV - not just in cable but something like 'The Good Wife' at network - is consistently great.

I don't think there's any more synesthetic medium than film.

I've been really lucky with critical reaction, overall, even if my films don't often resemble each other.

'Carol' is so distorted by point-of-view.

My very first movie, 'Mary Poppins,' which I talk about, it just turned me into an obsessive, creative creature who had to sort of reply to the experience by drawing things, making things. It was like it forced - it made me into this obsessive, creative creature... I don't know any other way of putting it.

I saw experimental film-makers teaching in college. They did what they wanted and didn't worry about the market, but the circumstances ended up offering me other possibilities.

We yearn for the desire to triumph, and it almost never does in the greatest love stories because we're left yearning for it more in the end, and we wish the world were different as a result. I do love that.

I see things about the present more clearly when I'm looking through the frame of the past: I think it's very hard to assess the present moment that we are in.

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.

Some directors do recut their films, but I don't if I disagree, and what you suffer is a less passionate marketing campaign, less investment in the film at the other end, which is... fine. I get it.

You have to be somewhat ruthless with your work. You have to let things go. Even your favourite little part might not work in the end.