Todd Haynes Believes He Got a Better Performance Out of Barbie

Todd Haynes is, in this writer’s opinion, one of our greatest living filmmakers. Ever since his 1987 film, Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story, a moving examination of the singer’s battle with anorexia using Barbie dolls and created while he was at Bard College, his unique voice has enraptured audiences. Safe. Velvet Goldmine. Far From Heaven. Carol. The Velvet Underground. There are too many classics to mention.

In his latest film, May December, Haynes has reunited with his muse Julianne Moore for their fifth collaboration over nearly three decades. She plays Gracie Atherton-Yoo, a homemaker in Savannah, Georgia, with a disturbing past: When Joe Yoo (Charles Melton, revelatory), was 13, and she a depressed housewife in her 30s, she had sex with him in the back room of a pet store. It became a tabloid scandal and the two trauma-bonded, never leaving each other’s side. With the last of their kids about to go off to college, they’re paid a visit by Elizabeth Berry (Natalie Portman), a movie star who’s about to play Gracie in a film who wants to soak up everything she can about her like a sponge. Lines, inevitably, are crossed.

“You don’t know how true anything is in this movie, and that’s part of the fun of it,” Haynes tells Rolling Stone. “This is a crazy, disturbing, unnerving story, but it’s really about how far people go with the insane inability to look at themselves and question the choices that they’ve made in their lives, and in that way it’s the most universal human story you can imagine.”

Haynes, who gleefully refers to the film as “deranged” and “twisted” over the course of our chat, is sitting across from me in a room deep in the bowels of the New York headquarters of Netflix, the film’s distributor. He’s showing me a lookbook for May December that’s filled with images from Ingmar Bergman’s Persona, Woody Allen’s Manhattan, and Mike Nichols’ The Graduate, and discussing how his latest, written by Samy Burch, was inspired by the Nineties case of Mary Kay Latourneau, a teacher who had sex with her 12-year-old student, Vili Fualaau, went to jail, married him when she got out, and was left by him before her death. And he’s also being honored this year with retrospectives in Paris and New York, causing him to reflect on his own body of work.

I remember the Mary Kay Latourneau case. I’m guessing Gen Z doesn’t.
Though there have been many Mary Kay Latourneau’s since.

Right. It almost seemed novel back then and worthy of a national scandal. Now, these cases of a teacher sleeping with their underage student pretty much get relegated to local news.
I know! I kind of missed it. My peers were way more clued into it when it was actually unfolding in the Nineties. There are a lot of aspects to that backstory and how it informs Gracie and Joe’s story in this that became helpful for trying to understand Gracie better. When I first read Samy’s script, I had creative respect for what she had done, but also a sense of trepidation about wanting to dive into the backstory right away. I was like, “Let’s start of it as a fiction to differentiate that story from this one, and let’s build on that.” Conversations that Julianne and I were having back and forth in the months before production on the movie opened up a real interest in finally addressing it and looking at the documentaries.

Did you try to talk to Vili Fualaau?
We did not. And we were advised from a legal standpoint to try to keep a separation between the two. And one wants to just respect his whole process and whatever that has been like since [Latourneau] passed away. And Mary Kay Latourneau as a subject is a very distinctive power or force, some of which inspired our tabloid imagery in the film that Natalie’s collected. We all needed ways of understanding how this myth was erected in her head that allowed this to occur.

Did it take any convincing for Julianne to do this?
No.

It is certainly a controversial role that not many actresses in Hollywood would take on.
Absolutely. And I think that defines so much about who she is and what’s always attracted her as an artist and actor. She wanted to know for sure that I was directing it, but she responded so strongly to the script like I did, and Natalie had.

Next year will mark 30 years since you and Julianne filmed Safe, so really three decades of working together. What’s that journey been like, and why has she remained at the top of your mind for so many of your films?
Look, it’s hard to find words to fully address the depth of that relationship and how foundational it’s been for me, and I think for her as well, and what happens with creative partnerships that are a continuum and also absolutely distinct from film to film each time. But I have said, and it’s true, that she came to me fully formed as an artist and an actor. The project that began our long tenure together was one of the most challenging that you could imagine giving any actor at any age and with any amount of experience, and her connection to it and her comprehension of who that person is, and how that could be represented as a body and a voice on the screen, to materialize that into something real, I don’t think I fully appreciated how impossible it was to actually perform it. Her agent was like, “You don’t have to read for this guy!” But she was like, “No, I’m gonna read for the guy and if it’s not what he’s imagining, then that’s fine. But if it is, great.”

Looking at when the Mary Kay Latourneau case happened, this was in the late Nineties when the term MILF was cresting in the zeitgeist. It was around the time American Pie came out with Jennifer Coolidge playing the “MILF.” And “MILF” and stepmother pornography remain popular categories. People like to think incidents like these are aberrations divorced from popular culture, and they’re of course crazy things to happen, but they don’t happen in a vacuum.
You can also step back centuries and look at the Greco-Roman boy who was the subject of epic poetry and emperors’ devotional lives around the young, beautiful, teenage male body, and you realize that the young, beautiful male body has played a role. We always think the beautiful, young female body is the object of erotic fixation, and that’s true, but it’s not a surprise that the male body has also played a role in that history, and in many ways, it’s maybe even more subject to confusion because it’s the male body and we endow it with a kind of power in a male-dominated society that it doesn’t really possess yet.

The character of Joe in this film is 13 at the time of the incident, and it’s a fascinating dynamic because you don’t usually see teenage boys being the victim like this onscreen.
Part of the way they share this myth — this fantasy of that romance — is in a confusion about who has the power, which is evoked in the film itself. Who was in control? And that’s part of their erotic narrative, and, in the case of Gracie, possibly a sense of wanting to be rescued by a young male body and the sense of a confident, emerging young person that embodies a kind of certitude and strength. In our backstory, we surmised that they both shared this backstory of her “rescue.” She’s this princess in the tower of this domestic situation of disappointment and marriage and family that he’s going to save her from. And you see vestiges of that myth in how she presents herself, the way she speaks, how she dresses, and the roles that they assume behind closed doors.

There’s a beautiful unnamed panic that lurks around this whole film that has nothing to do with even Elizabeth’s arrival. The kids are about to leave, and suddenly, they’re going to be alone with each other in that house. There’s nobody in the way. There’s nobody to pick up from soccer practice. That’s such a gorgeous reframing that Samy’s script puts around this story, in addition to it all happening twenty years in the past, and an actor entering the scene to try to chip away at it.

Joe is also half-Asian and that plays a role as well. In the Nineties, in the case of Joe’s character, there was an added sense of alienation as a teenager.
Absolutely — the sense of him being even further exoticized in this white suburban culture and endowed with a powerful sense of “the other,” and being looked at with desire by somebody where one can only assume that that’s not been experienced by him on the same terms as white kids in his class, all of that is a concoction that is intoxicating and almost impossible to ignore.

There’s a queerness to this film. You’re not sure if Natalie’s character’s obsession with Julianne’s is also sexual in nature.
I considered it as soon as I started to think about movies like Persona, which was an immediate reference — the mirroring, merging, mutual attraction, and repulsion. Although I’ve made many movies about women’s lives in domestic settings, few of them are like May December — driven by female desire and agency and willfulness and stubbornness and blindness and a duel between the two female characters. It’s almost something that you think as coming out of the 1930s with Joan Crawford.

This is a film about performance too, and how exploitative playing the role of a real-life person can be.
Absolutely. I think Samy was having fun with taking shots at the culture of privilege with actors and “getting to the truth” and being in possession of that. Whether it’s a real person or a living person, the act of telling stories — of creating stories that are not real but made to look real and provoke an emotional reaction — there’s something corrupt about it all. I don’t know if it’s a clean medium or an ethical process. In a way, this is the dirty, corrupting world that we all share. This runs through all of our bloodstreams. We’re complicit in it, we’re all victimized by it, and it’s our language. It’s all exchange. All of that is in here, and yet, with all the collateral damage that Elizabeth is willing to propel in her selfish, privileged, suspicious idea of getting to the truth in her story, it’s also the frame that’s being held up to Joe.

She does help him, to a degree.
She does help him — in way that makes you wonder. He has to look at himself.

Heath [Ledger] had already directed an entire slew of rock videos and short films, and they were extraordinary. And each one had a distinctive style, from one to the next. That guy… it was deep how far it went.

There are a lot of lists of the “Greatest Christmas Movies,” but we don’t often see Carol on these lists. Do you consider it to be a Christmas movie?  
I mean, look: There’s different kinds of escapism that we can share with our family members and a different kind of sentimentality that we turn to. I’m a little biased, but it’s also this thing I do when confronted with my whole body of work in Paris and in New York, is that your movies, when they’re finished, they have their own lives. You really let them go. They are like your children. I don’t have kids, but I’m around kids, and it’s like you sit them down and have a conversation with your now 12-year-old, and you’re like, “Wow… I don’t even know you. You’re like a new person.” And that’s so fantastic. That’s what should be the case.

Is there one of your films that’s really matured for you in an interesting way?
All of them, in a funny way. It just depends on how much time has passed since I’ve seen them. Carol, I don’t think I’d seen since we were promoting it and I had forgotten how the story turns. I was watching it like, “Wow… I hope they can get back together!” I was completely emotionally sucked into it as an outsider. And I saw the Bob Dylan movie [I’m Not There], and that landed for me this time. The way the film ended up — how things got besmirched by the marketing and what we’re doing now, where it got divided into “Who’s your favorite Dylan?” and “Should one of the stories be cut out of it?”— that lingered in the way I regarded it, and I saw it so much as a whole and it was really cool to watch it.

And you got to work with Heath Ledger on that film in one of his final performances.
I got to work with Heath. That was such an incredible, meaningful part of it. We got very close and he was still with Michelle [Williams], and they were both in the movie. He was planning his first feature film to direct: The Queen’s Gambit, about the chess-playing. That was the material that he was going to do. All the other actors came and went while we shot that movie in succession in Montreal, and he just stayed. He kept sucking in what was happening every day with my team and loved what he was seeing. He wanted to work with Ed Lachman, my DP, and he wanted to work with Laura Rosenthal, my casting director. But I will also say: Heath had already directed an entire slew of rock videos and short films, and they were extraordinary. And each one had a distinctive style, from one to the next. That guy… it was deep how far it went.

Someone tweeted the other day asking about the most egregious Oscar upset. Some went with How Green Was My Valley over Citizen Kane, but for my generation it’s Crash over Brokeback Mountain. And it gets worse with each passing year.
Oh no. Oh my god. How that other film stepped up… A truly egregious low point for the Oscars.

The Hollywood strikes recently came to an end and I’m curious what you learned from them? What did they say about the state of the industry? May December is a Netflix film and they were at the center of things when it comes to disrupting the industry.
I don’t know if I have a full answer to the question, which I think has breadth, except in a more narrow answer: Unions are an essential part of this industry and always have been, and so the way we negotiate and have to confront technology, changes in venue, changes in streams of revenue through the collective bargaining of the union is something to be proud of, and we’re seeing more union activity in general in the last few years of this country.

We do have a pro-union president right now.
I agree with you there and I want people to catch up to what Biden has been doing. And a lot of other things he does are under-discussed. He’s one of the most consequential presidents that we’ve had.

What ever happened to your Peggy Lee biopic that Billie Eilish was producing?
Michelle Williams was starring in it and Billie was going to be in the film. I love how her song was used in Barbie, by the way. It got struck right at the last moment. It was tough on everybody involved. It cleared the way for May December to happen, so in that way we really seized the moment that we were given by a change of plans last year. We pulled it together really fast for very little money.

There’s also this film project you’re working on with Joaquin Phoenix about two men in a heated romance in the 1930s. Could you tell me a little about that? I hear it’s supposed to have plenty of sex and we don’t really see much sex in mainstream entertainment anymore.
Euphoria is kind of an example of a prurient, showy, provocative entertainment for the sake of being provocative. This is an original script that came out of conversations I had with Joaquin and I brought my writing partner and friend, Jon Raymond, into the process and the three of us created something really special. It’s set in the Thirties in Los Angeles and it’s a love story between two very unlikely people. We haven’t found the other guy. It’s a Native American character and I think it will be a discovery. Although I’m so into Reservation Dogs — the acting and the writing is so incredibly impressive — but they’re all too young or too old, at least from what I’ve seen so far.

There are two great Barbie movies, in my opinion: Barbie and your Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story. Have you seen Barbie? And what did you think of it?
I can now say I have, finally. I wanted to see it and was too busy, so I didn’t see it with the crowds over the summer. You know, they couldn’t be more different in not just their scope, style, budgets, scale and audience, but their subjects. Mine is about Karen Carpenter and her anorexia and Barbie is the subtext to how to describe a story about women struggling with their body images. Whereas Greta [Gerwig] really takes on the cultural questions about Barbie and riffs on that and deconstructs that, but in the vernacular of a mainstream entertainment that four-year-old daughters can watch with their 80-year-old grandmothers and both enjoy in the same setting. In that regard, I find it to be a remarkable achievement — an insanely successful venture and nobody could have done it like Greta. But… I got a better performance out of Barbie. [Laughs]