“That beautiful lineage that I now seem to have entered”: Todd Haynes names his three favourite movies
Over the course of his ten features to date, Todd Haynes has developed a number of stylistic and thematic motifs that tend to crop up more often than not in his work, and it’s an approach that’s yielded no shortage of acclaim and status as a modern great.
From 1991’s sci-fi horror drama Poison – inspired by three novels written by celebrated author Jean Genet – to May December and its lifted-from-the-headlines reinterpretation of the Mary Kay Letourneau scandal as told through a fictional lens, the filmmaker has thrived on applying a number of universal sentiments to a rich array of diverse films.
Whether it’s blurring gender roles, subverting societal norms, exploring the definitions of normalcy and how they apply to the characters within, or the nonconformist of any given individual, the lines between fact and fiction are regularly toyed with. Whether it’s Velvet Goldmine‘s fictional musical sensation or loose Bob Dylan biopic I’m Not There, to the indisputably true Dark Waters and documentary The Velvet Underground.
Haynes is one of the most distinctive auteurs of the last 30 years, and a solitary Academy Award nomination in the ‘Best Original Screenplay’ category for penning Far From Heaven is hardly reflective of his contributions to independent cinema in the United States during that time. However, as it applies to his own personal favourites, he outlined to the BBC how his tastes lean towards two stone-cold classics and a toss-up between two intertwined greats that directly inspired one of his own films.
At this stage, it would be more of a surprise were a well-known filmmaker to not name Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey as one that made a huge impact on them, such is the array of legendary names to have celebrated his existential sci-fi epic as a high point of the artform that simply can’t be matched.
Still, that doesn’t disqualify Haynes from jumping into that boat, which he explains by deeming it as “the longest and most experimental film ever committed to the mainstream market.” Alfred Hitchcock is another lauded by future generations as one of the best to have ever picked up a megaphone, but Haynes puts Vertigo on a level above the rest of the heavyweights helmed by the ‘Master of Suspense’ for being “the most complex and brilliant film by one of the most complex and brilliant filmmakers.”
Some might say he’s cheating by naming two movies for his third and final candidate, but that’s not necessarily true as it applies to Douglas Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows and Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Ali: Fear Eats the Soul. The latter was directly inspired by the former, although it flipped the narrative from having an affluent widow fall for a younger man to an older German woman getting caught up in a romance with a Moroccan migrant.
Haynes’ Far From Heaven was deliberately evocative of Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows and Imitation of Life, so it makes sense that he included them both “for that beautiful lineage that I now seem to have entered” after he paid tribute to them both with his own Oscar-nominated and romantically-inclined period piece.
Todd Haynes’ favourite movies:
- 2001: A Space Odyssey
- Vertigo
- All That Heaven Allows
- Ali: Fear Eats the Soul
