With its lush Elmer Bernstein score and Technicolor palette, Far From Heaven, written and directed by openly gay filmmaker Todd Haynes, evokes the Douglas Sirk melodramas of the 1950s such as All That Heaven Allows, Written On The Wind and Imitation of Life. Haynes brilliantly captures the spirit and the mood of the late 1950s, particularly in lily-white Connecticut suburbia, where a closeted homosexual husband and a friendship with a Black gardener can cause tongues to wag. The movie theater scene, complete with cruising and a balcony hook-up, and the scene in the gay bar, ring with a cinematic familiarity, and the heterosexual conversion sequence is both funny and scary. The exceptional cast, including Julianne Moore ( with whom Haynes has previously worked ) as beleaguered housewife and mother Cathy Whitaker; Dennis Quaid as Frank, the handsome husband with the secret; Dennis Haysbert as Raymond, the widower and father with the green thumb; and Patricia Clarkson as Eleonor, Cathy's best friend and confidant, also make this a production a taste of heaven.
Gregg Shapiro: You are working, once again, with Julianne Moore. What do you think makes your working relationship so successful?
Todd Haynes: We just have a big crush on each other. No, she's phenomenal. I do think we share a lot of similar traits as creative people where we do a lot of preparation. We come very prepared. We're kind of anal, but we hide it from our personalities. It results in an unspoken trust where we don't have to analyze and discuss … which I'm perfectly willing and happy to do for actors for whom that is their working process. With Julianne, it's not. We talk a lot at the beginning and we do a little bit of rehearsing, mostly just to get a sense of movement through space. With other actors, I would be doing a lot more rehearsing for a part like this, because the acting has a very specific tone to it or the quality of the acting that I'm looking for requires a very specific tone. With Julianne, it's not necessary, and to be honest, it really wasn't necessary with either of the Dennises ( Quaid or Haysbert ) , or any of my lead actors. They came with so much understanding and innate ease with what the style was trying to do. Even if it wasn't an intellectual process, if it was an instinctive process, I don't always know, but the results were consistent and subtle and beautiful. If the film achieves its emotional impact, that we all hoped it would, it is due mostly to the performances.
GS: Was the character of Cathy written with Julianne in mind?
TH: Yes, totally ( laughs ) .
GS: The casting of Dennis Quaid as homosexual husband Frank is truly inspired.
TH: ( Laughs )
GS: Was he your first choice for the part?
TH: He was a top choice for the part.
GS: I think people are going to be surprised to see him in this role.
TH: Yes. I think so, too. I didn't have an actor in mind, for any of the other characters, when I was writing the script. What I did know about Frank was that I wanted him to come with a ready masculinity and a series of associations that would make this struggle much less predictable. Not necessarily that it's the big secret of the movie that you can't give out, because I don't really think it works that way. Just physically, even in his chemical make-up, that you wouldn't imagine it being his particular struggle. What is seems to do to Dennis Quaid's physicality is something I've never seen in any of his other performances. He's wound like a coil in this movie. I think the effect is so sad and touching, but also difficult and human in that way. He can be really nasty to Cathy, and yet it's something I think we all know, how when you're going through something and you're struggling, and then this person is around you trying so hard to be nice and be extra sweet, you get irritable ( laughs ) , and it's a very human reaction.
GS: Yes, it makes it much more real.
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Julianne Moore and Dennis Haysbert.
Dennis Quaid and Julianne Moore.
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TH: Yeah.
GS: I love the attention to detail in Far From Heaven. The period dialogue is just peachy, as they would have said back then.
TH: ( Laughs )
GS: Can you please say something about the dialogue?
TH: Thank you for noticing the specificity of it. What's funny about the script is that it was one of the easiest scripts for me to get into a first draft, of anything I've ever written. I think I tapped into that kind of reservoir of memory around these kinds of films that we all have, particularly people who love movies and work in movies. I kept thinking, "You should be watching the ( Douglas ) Sirk films while you are writing this. You really should be getting to the specific pieces of them." But I knew them so well. For some reason I was digging the process, I was having fun. Which, of course, made me completely mistrust the results. It's not my experience. Of course, the script required a lot of honing and refining and finding exactly that right word for that particular phrase, which came later. The basic bulk and thrust of the story and the conflicts were pretty quickly achieved. I think it was just that innate reservoir of associations.
GS: Just in listening to the way that Cathy speaks to the children and the way they respond to her. Kids don't talk that way to their parents anymore, and they may have, in real life, back then. But, certainly on film they did.
TH: Yeah. Everything about this movie is "on film they did." The range of words and phrases. The possibilities of this gesture or that gesture. What the camera does. Even the palette of color is stuff that comes from movies. That's something that's really exciting about it is that it comes from movies. But, it comes from the kind of movies that have been devalued in terms of their emotional pertinence or relevance in a contemporary audience's mind to such a degree that because they're that outmoded that they spark something genuine. I'm not exactly sure how that is happening, but it's exactly what our goal was, and it's amazing to see that responded to by the press.
GS: I'm really glad that you mentioned the "palette of color," because there is such a vivid use of color—especially the autumn setting in which the movie begins.
TH: Yeah.
GS: What was the significance of beginning the film in that season?
TH: I think it all came from a really vivid image I got in my head of Julianne in dark sunglasses, assuming her hair was still going to be red in this movie, and the blue sky and the autumn colors behind her in a purple scarf. I drew a picture of that exact image in marker and stuck it on the glass windows I was working in front of in Portland. I looked at it the whole time when I wrote the first draft. It became that kind of leading image from which the whole film unspooled.
GS: Far From Heaven addresses the common issues shared by both the LGBT and African-American communities, such as "Being the only one in a room" and mixing in other worlds.
TH: I don't know when I got that idea. I remember saying to myself after Velvet Goldmine, which exhausted me in every possible way, that production, "Todd, you don't have to put the universe into your films every time." I was like, "OK, I'll just do a mild-mannered, lovely, small, little domestic melodrama ( laughs ) about a woman in a house," and before long I had these two dueling themes. They tend to balance each other out in a strange way, in ways that I'm not sure how members of the African-American and gay communities will respond to. But, one residing very safely under wraps and in concealment and the other so intensely, overly visible that it creates misinterpretation. The fact that they're separated by Cathy and her experience and that only we are privy to the ways in which these two both mirror and oppose each other. Ultimately, the real theme is about women's status in the midst of all of this and we find that they really occupy the bottom rung of access to one's needs. I think that is sadly often really the case.
GS: As with Velvet Goldmine and parts of Poison, Far From Heaven is a period piece. What do you find most appealing about making movies set in another time?
TH: Definitely, it's part of that whole adventure of dressing up into them, and indulging and learning, basically, about their textures and colors, and even the language of the camera work that is associated with these times. They're not always just historical moments, they're genres that are associated with those moments, as well. Again, they're always linked to a cinematic history. It's about how these moments have been visualized and how we remember them through those visual means that are as integral to that experience in making or conveying them as anything else. Even Safe is set seven years earlier ( laughs ) than the time it was made in. I think I feel like you end up learning more about where you are when there's that metaphoric distance. It becomes a surrogate for our contemporary issues. It's that classic thing of when you leave home, you see it more clearly once you've gained distance from where you are.
GS: It's all about hindsight.
TH: Yeah, that old adage. That's very much my motivation. Even when it's not completely conscious, when it's from an instinctive excitement about going elsewhere, it's always rooted in where we are today.