Christine Vachon Talks Todd Haynes, The Writers Strike & Reveals The One Project She Still Wants To Make — Karlovy Vary Int’l Film Festival

Zac Ntim
·5 min read
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EXCLUSIVE: Christine Vachon offered her outlook on some of the industry’s most pressing issues at a keynote masterclass session Monday afternoon at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival.

The session, moderated by Deadline’s Mike Fleming Jr., opened with a focus on Vachon’s career before blossoming into a wider discussion about the industry, including what Vachon believes exhibitors can be doing to encourage audiences to get back into cinemas.

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“It’s about creating environments that make the experience feel more like an event,” she said of the moviegoing experience. “I know in Europe this is old, but in America, the idea of eating a meal or having a drink in a movie theater is still relatively new, and creating an event where your seat is extraordinarily comfortable with actually decent projections.”

Vachon, a native New Yorker, later joked: “I don’t know if in New York you are ever going to get rid of the subway rumbling.”

The Killer Films producer was later asked if she’d ever thought of attaching herself to some of the movies that make a lot of money at the box office, where “the cast are dressed in spandex and save the world” — a reference to superhero films.

“Why would anyone have me do that?” she quickly replied. “It would be really great if one of the movies I made made a lot of money, but I’m not well suited to make a Marvel movie. I’m just not interested.”

Elsewhere, Vachon dug into some specific titles from her career including the groundbreaking 1999 drama Boys Don’t Cry, which she said originally was set under a different name.

“The original title was Take It Like a Man and a few months before when the movie was in post-production, we got a cease-and-desist letter. I can’t even remember from who, but there was a company that was making Boy George’s memoir Take It Like a Man into a movie,” Vachon said. “They had copyrighted the title, so we couldn’t use it. Kim was devastated. Finally, we came up with Boy’s Don’t Cry. At the time, we all thought it was a comedown, and now I can’t imagine the movie being called anything else.”

Vachon dug even further into her filmography when quizzed about the 1987 short Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story (1987) she worked on with her now-frequent collaborator Todd Haynes.

The experimental pic was shot by Haynes when he was an MFA student at Bard and uses archival material, dramatized talking heads, and stop-motion animation featuring Barbie dolls to tell singer Karen Carpenter’s rapid journey from obscurity to pop stardom and her untimely death due to anorexia-related-complications.

Vachon isn’t listed as a producer on the pic but receives a “Special Thanks” from the filmmakers. She told the audience in Karlovy Vary that Barbie’s parent company Mattel paid a visit to their office when the film was released, but Haynes was able to trick his way out of any legal bother over the use of the doll.

“Todd bought all those dolls in garage sales. They were Barbie rip-offs, so he was able to prove to Mattel that it was an off-brand. That it wasn’t Barbie, but it was what you got if your parents couldn’t afford Barbie,” she said.

The 43-minute pic went on to enjoy a successful run in the downtown New York experimental film circuit and played at several international festivals, including Toronto, but has been withdrawn from circulation since the early 1990s after Richard Carpenter, Karen’s brother, and longtime collaborator, filed a lawsuit against Haynes, which the director lost. Haynes made the film as an MFA student at Bard College and used many of Carpenter’s songs in the film without obtaining permission.

“The reason he didn’t seek permission for the songs was because he didn’t expect the film to blow up the way it did,” Vachon said. “It pops up on YouTube all the time. It’s kind of like Whac-A-Mole. It pops up and gets taken down. Pops up again and gets taken down, so you can almost certainly find it. And now it’s been restored. There’s a wonderful version that keeps popping up and it’s the true director’s cut.”

At the tail end of the keynote, Vachon was asked about the current situation in Hollywood, with writers striking and SAG-AFTRA negotiating with the studios.

“I remember the 2008 strike and how devastating that was. Killer Films barely got out of it intact,” she said. “I know a lot of young writers and how hard it is for them, especially the ones just getting started in their careers. Most of the demands on the table are right. The streamers have upended the business so much, and they’ve got to make it right.”

Concluding the session, Vachon, whose credits include Carol, First Reformed and Zola, said she had one project left that she would like to complete during her career.

“I really want to do something about the ’80s in New York. I feel like everything I’ve seen about that period hasn’t gotten it right,” she said.

“The ’80s bleeding into the ’90s, that period in New York City which was a time of extraordinary collision of art and music and fashion and cinema, but also the time of the AIDS crisis. I just haven’t found a good story.”

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