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Rooney Mara and Cate Blanchett in Carol.
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Todd Haynes sat on a couch at the Four Seasons Hotel in Beverly Hills, looking at the decorative magazines on the coffee table in front of him. He had been there all day to talk about Carol, a favorite from this year's Cannes Film Festival. In nearby rooms, the film's stars, Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara, were undergoing a similar junket ritual in order to promote the film, which opens in limited release this weekend. As Haynes thumbed through the luxury magazines, pretending to read one rudely as the interview began, he pointed out Kate Winslet on its cover. "That's my other Kate," he said, referring to his and Winslet's 2011 HBO miniseries collaboration, Mildred Pierce. Then Haynes gave a little gasp after noticing that Julianne Moore — who starred in his films Safe (1995) and Far From Heaven (2002) — was on one of the other covers. "Come on, man," he said. "I'm a lucky guy."
Carol is Haynes' sixth feature, and the only film he has directed that he did not write. It's based on Patricia Highsmith's 1952 novel The Price of Salt— Highsmith used the pseudonym "Claire Morgan" to avoid the taint of scandal from its lesbian plot — and adapted by Phyllis Nagy. The movie tells the story of Therese Belivet (Mara), a young aspiring photographer working as a department store clerk who becomes infatuated with Carol Aird (Blanchett), a wealthy, soon-to-divorce suburbanite. While Therese — who is the book's narrator, and largely the film's point-of-view character too — falls for Carol immediately, Carol has bigger things to think about: convincing her estranged husband, Harge (Kyle Chandler), not to take their daughter away as punishment for her romantic interest in other women. Nevertheless, when Carol needs to escape from her life, Therese is there — but can their relationship turn into more, especially in New York City in 1952? That is Carol's question, and the source of its tension. It's almost a mystery.
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Blanchett, Haynes, and Mara at the 68th Cannes Film Festival in May.
Anne-Christine Poujoulat / AFP / Getty Images
Haynes' features are dense with ideas that are surrounded by the physical beauty of their production design, cinematography, and costumes. Perhaps fittingly then, in the case of Carol, he originally heard of the project in 2012 from its costume designer, Sandy Powell, who had worked on Haynes' Far From Heaven and Velvet Goldmine: She told him there was a "frock film" that might interest him. After eventually being hired to direct it, Haynes filmed Carol in spring 2014 in Cincinnati, which passed much more easily for ’50s New York than current New York could. "Cincinnati had an architectural integrity that was rare for a smaller city today," Haynes said. "We literally shot on certain streets with existing signage to stand in for 1952 New York City."
Haynes talked with BuzzFeed News about constructing this complicated love story, working with Blanchett and Mara, and why it's still important to tell queer stories in a way that marks them as "unique and different."
What drew you to Carol once you were approached to direct it?
Todd Haynes: I love that novel. I thought it was so powerful, and thought it was such an acute portrait of the kind of early grapplings of love — the disempowerment of that position that we've all been in. I used to fall hard when I was younger, and it occupies a lot of journals and redundant preoccupation and analysis. It is a state in which you are in an overheated fervor of production — of mental production — where you're analyzing everything that happened. And what they said! And how they looked! Did that touch mean something, or not? Everything is sort of endowed with meaning, but you're also hopelessly boring and out of the world.
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The Weinstein Company
And Phyllis Nagy's script had been something she was working on for years, trying to get this movie made.
TH: I thought the script was beautiful. I thought that I sensed perhaps the marks of some de-fanging of the story in an attempt to get it financed. When I talked to Phyllis about that and said, "Some of the tensions in the book I think are so great — maybe we c