Quotes from Todd Haynes

I don't think there's any more synesthetic medium than film.

I think many of the ideas that opened up in the '60s got implemented in the '70s and that certain minority voices that were not being heard in the '60s, like women and gay people, were being heard in the '70s. Black Civil Rights had also found its foothold, and those ideas were also very pertinent.

After 'Superstar,' I was encouraged. I felt audiences wanted to be challenged.

Pop music can get inside us and enter our memory bubbles. It provides those true Proustian moments, unlocking sensations, unlocking our imaginations. Music inspired me as a filmmaker.

When you're shooting concert scenes in films, we try to bring in, where appropriate, as much of a sense of live performance as possible.

At the time I made 'Safe,' I was really intrigued by the whole culture around AIDS, which was turning to people like Louise Hay and these other West Coast New Age thinkers.

I see things about the present more clearly when I'm looking through the frame of the past: I think it's very hard to assess the present moment that we are in.

There's no better place to do a longform project than HBO. I loved the creative teams I got a chance to work with.

I came out of a sort of experimental background, and I didn't ever really expect - or even desire - a career as a feature filmmaker.

I love how 'melodrama' is a denigrated term - a lower-class citizen to other genres. And yet that's what life is, man.

By the time I finished 'Poison,' the New Queer Cinema was branded, and I was associated with this. In many ways, it formed me as a filmmaker, like as a feature filmmaker I never set out to be.

My problem on 'Safe' was that when I liked something, I would giggle.