Award-winning filmmaker Todd Haynes …..he has won both the Queer Palm (‘Carol’) and The Teddy (‘Poison’) ….. is so busy spreading the gospel of Haynes On December 1st his latest movie the critically acclaimed MAY/DECEMBER will be streaming on Netflix. It’s an uncomfortable real-life melodrama about the scandal of a 36-year-old mother (Julianna Moore) whose boyfriend/future husband back in the 1990s is a 7th grader: and now many years later, is to be made in a movie starring Natalie Portman.
Meanwhile in conjunction with this Museum of the Moving Image in NY are honoring him with their Award for Career Achievement on December 4. to be accompanied by a complete film. At the same time, they are mounting Behind The Screen a retrospective, gallery exhibit of some of Hayne’s work. It center on his elaborate “image books,” albums that gather visual inspirations for each of his productions, with a focus on May December. The exhibit will also feature video interviews with Haynes and additional production material drawn from the archive recently donated to the Museum.
This will include acquired recently acquired “Carol” and “Safe” director’s film production archive into its collection, including notes, scripts, and sketches from every feature film made by Haynes, as well as his short films.
Plus there will be Hayne’s new book, Todd Haynes: Rapturous Process, published by the Museum, is an adaptation of Centre Pompidou’s book published on the occasion of its own Haynes retrospective earlier in 2023, but with new material for English-language readers.
It includes an in-depth 2023 career interview with Haynes by the Pompidou’s Judith Revault d’Allonnes, a new essay by Michael Koresky, a conversation about May December between Haynes and filmmaker Kelly Reichardt, and a foreword by Julianne Moore. The book features more than 200 pages of materials from Haynes’s archives, including drawings, paintings, storyboards, notes, on-set photographs, costume and set designs, and more—much of which is drawn from Haynes’s production archive, which is part of the Museum’s permanent collection. Plus for the whole momth, the Museum will present a complete retrospective including all of Haynes’s feature films from Poison (1991) through May December (2023) as well as early short films, and television work.
AND THERE IS. MORE Haynes is currently working a sexually ‘explicit’ gay period drama with Joaquin Phoenix. Haynes told Variety Magazine “It’s a love story between two men set in the 30s that has explicit sexual content that or at least it challenges you with the sexual relationship between these two men. One is a Native American character and one is a corrupt cop in LA. It’s set in the 30s. They have to flee L.A. ultimately and go to Mexico. But it’s a love story and with a strong sexual component.”
The biggest surprise (to us anyway), Haynes has publically said that the idea to shoot the film was Phoenix and he is the one “pushing it further into more dangerous territory, sexually.”
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