TSPDT

Key Production Country: USA
Key Genres: Drama, Period Film, Gay & Lesbian Films, Biography, Documentary, Melodrama, Short Film, Satire
Key Collaborators: Christine Vachon (Producer), Ed Lachman (Cinematographer), Julianne Moore (Leading Actress), Affonso Gonçalves (Editor), James Lyons (Editor), Carter Burwell (Composer), Pamela Koffler (Producer), Maryse Alberti (Cinematographer), Cory Michael Smith (Leading Character Actor), Mark Friedberg (Production Designer), Cate Blanchett (Leading Actress), Christian Bale (Leading Actor)

"A key figure in the new queer cinema of the 1990s, Todd Haynes became infamous years before the movement was named when he used Barbie dolls instead of actors in his short Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story (1987), and the film was banned after the Carpenter family and the Mattel Corporation objected." - Linda Badley (501 Movie Directors, 2007)

"Haynes has been categorized as one of the most significant forces within the ‘New Queer Cinema’, a loosely defined group of gay and lesbian filmmakers whose work demonstrates a queer agenda, both politically and aesthetically. Despite his involvement with ACT-UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) and ACT-UP art collective, Gran Fury, Haynes’ films address queer issues only obliquely. His films - from Poison to Dottie Gets Spanked and Velvet Goldmine - are more interested in the historical construction and determinants of gayness than in accounting for contemporary queer life or falling in line with standard genres of gay/lesbian films (e.g., the ‘coming out’ film)." - Justin Wyatt (Fifty Contemporary Filmmakers, 2002)

"Part of the New Queer Cinema, he has moved closer to the mainstream whilst still creating films about outsiders and transgression." - Chambers Film Factfinder, 2006

"Todd Haynes has been a cornerstone of the American independent film world since the early 1990s and remains one of the groundbreaking artists of our time. In films such as Safe (1995), Velvet Goldmine (1998), Far from Heaven (2002), Carol (2015), and his latest, May December (2023), Haynes refracts queer cultural and social history through an artist’s lens, creating indelible films of an extraordinarily tactile nature… From the 1980s to the 2020s, from music videos to television series, from early shorts and breakthrough features such as Dottie Gets Spanked and Poison, to recent films such as Wonderstruck and The Velvet Underground, Todd Haynes has consistently pursued his own path, taking on projects that few filmmakers would dare attempt, both utilizing and subverting storytelling conventions." - Museum of the Moving Image, 2023

"Todd Haynes has made a fascinating career out of examining the artificial through a variety of prisms, including Barbie dolls, glitter rock and the 1950s suburban housewife. One of the pioneers of the New Queer Cinema that evolved out of American independent film’s breakout phase in the 1980s, Haynes abandoned overtly gay themes beginning with his masterpiece, Safe (1995) - an existential horror movie about a Los Angeles woman allergic to her own environment." - Andrew Bailey (Cinema Now, 2007)

"For me, Velvet Goldmine was a serious disappointment after Poison and Safe—the latter one of the most arresting, original, and accomplished films of the nineties, in which abstraction and a very strange human situation were perfectly embodied in Julianne Moore’s immense but tenuous presence. At that point, the semiotics student from Brown had a fair claim as the most talented independent filmmaker in America… Far from Heaven was a breakthrough for Haynes, and a gorgeous recreation of Douglas Sirk. Beyond the detailed ditto of 1957, one had to ask why. Might the film have been more urgent still set in 2002? So Haynes seemed more talented, yet more hidden, too. Except that I’m Not There—his Bob Dylan film—was excruciatingly pretentious." - David Thomson (The New Biographical Dictionary of Film, 2010)

"The leading director to emerge from the New Queer Cinema, Haynes repeatedly examines the fraught relationship of the individual to society: how conventions (or the rejection of them) form, constrain or liberate personality and experience… Haynes’ strengths are not only his astute, provocative analyses of the way the personal and political intersect but his readiness to adopt whatever cinematic style suits his material: the Barbie dolls used to represent the Carpenters were both a budgetary necessity and a comment on their image, [Safe] employed muted colours and claustrophobic framing to suggest its protagonist’s entrapment, Velvet Goldmine mirrored glamrock’s baroque artifice. Audacious and imaginative, Haynes is undeniably one of today’s most radical, intelligent film-makers." - Geoff Andrew (The Director's Vision, 1999)