Julianne Moore and her “miracle” collaborations with Todd Haynes
Julianne Moore has worked with some of the biggest and most interesting names in the film industry. Think Paul Thomas Anderson, the Coen brothers and Robert Altman, to name just a few. So it’s safe to say she has plenty to praise when it comes to her collaborators.
Continuing to land diverse and complex roles across both independent and big-budget studio films, Moore truly has her pick of the best.
There’s one director she always comes back to with nothing but praise – Todd Haynes, not just a frequent collaborator but a proper mate. Moore, known for being able to take on just about any role thrown her way, often gravitates towards women who are a bit messy, complicated, rough around the edges. And nowhere does she do this better than in Haynes’ films, which frequently explore themes of selfhood, identity and subversive sexuality.
Most recently, the pair worked together on 2023’s May December, a film about an actress studying the life of an infamous paedophile she’s set to portray in a film. A layered, complex and genre-spanning film that has garnered praise from pretty much every corner of the industry. Speaking to The Cut about the film, Moore said of Haynes, “The miracle of Todd is that he has this unbelievable wealth of cinematic knowledge at his fingertips and has such a formidable intellect.”
Anyone who has watched Haynes’ films probably knows exactly what she means. This isn’t the usual praise of a director that only his colleagues are privy to; it’s something that’s immediately evident from his films. He’s not a filmmaker that’s playing at something intelligent, trying to say more than he actually knows – he’s one of the rare ones who actually knows. And it probably has something to do with the fact that he studied art and semiotics at uni, instead of film.
Haynes’ post-modernist preoccupations with identity, sexuality, and the self as socially constructed concepts are evident in the films he’s done with Moore. Before May December, there was Far From Heaven, a romantic drama where Moore plays a different kind of housewife. This time, it’s the 1950s, and she’s a housewife dealing with her husband’s extramarital homosexual affairs while befriending the son of her African American gardener, to the consternation of the white supremacist society around her.
Here, Haynes uses the framework of 1950s melodramas, namely the films of Douglas Sirk, to explore the lighthearted themes of gender, race, class and sexuality in midcentury USA. But not only does he deftly explore these themes in the film, he does so alongside incredible attention to detail. His formal use of colours, lighting and angles demonstrates the deep cinematic knowledge that Moore praises him for.
And then there’s the first film the duo worked on together, 1995’s psychodrama Safe. Moore portrays yet another housewife, but this time she’s a contemporary woman suffering from a mysterious illness. Once again it explores all those themes Haynes loves to explore with Moore. It wasn’t a great commercial success but received critical acclaim and set the stage for Haynes and Moore’s ongoing collaboration.
