'Safe' Director Todd Haynes Talks About Julianne Moore's Early Greatness
Julianne Moore in 1995’s Safe
It’s been a great year for Julianne Moore. In May, the actress picked up a Best Actress prize at Cannes for her role in David Cronenberg’s Hollywood satire, Maps to the Stars. And there’s been lots of Oscar talk surrounding her performance as an early onset Alzheimer’s patient in the new drama Still Alice. So it’s only appropriate that the Criterion Collection picked this moment to release one of Moore’s earliest — and best — movies on Blu-ray. Arriving in theaters in 1995, the Todd Haynes-directed Safe unnerved audiences at the time with its chilling depiction of a woman so allergic to the contemporary urban world that she retreats to an isolated desert community where residents live in plastic bubbles. Speaking with Yahoo Movies about the long-overdue Blu-ray release of Safe, Haynes says he’s excited that Moore seems to be the current awards season frontrunner. “If this is her year, man, I couldn’t be more thrilled. I’m her first fan.” The director also told us about the first time he met Moore, how Safe was inspired by the AIDS crisis and the cult surrounding his 1998 glam rock opus Velvet Goldmine.
Among the bonus features on the Criterion disc is a recent interview between you and Julianne Moore that includes footage of her first audition for Safe. What do you remember about meeting her that day?
I don’t know if I’ve ever had a more singular kind of shock of discovery in another creative person. And in this particular case, the character, Carol White, was created without all of the expected ways audiences can latch onto the protagonist of a movie. She’s someone who is so passive and just barely fits in to the codes of her world, because I wanted to see how someone with that fragile sense of self would play in the viewers’ minds. All that’s fine when you’re thinking of it abstractly, but suddenly I needed her to also be real!
And what I didn’t realize is how much an actor needed to respect that distance and mystery and not try to fill in the gaps and make Carol this sensible person right away. That was the most amazing thing about Julianne: her understanding that the actor doesn’t have to do all the work to reach out and pull the viewer into the story. That’s a way of describing what some of the movie stars in the Golden Age of Hollywood did — whether it was Greta Garbo or Marilyn Monroe, there was always something about them that was just out of reach. And Julianne somehow has maintained that in a culture where everything has become more accessible and familiar.
Safe was one of her earliest leading roles and the first that made a lot of people sit up and take notice. Have you noted any specific ways in which the experience helped shape her subsequent career?
I think it was maybe one of her first roles that sort of necessitated a certain amount of research into a particular condition and that was interesting to watch. Julianne and I spent time with people who were chemically sensitive and then there were all these tapes of interviews and testimonials we watched. We also spent some time going to clubs and restaurants in the San Fernando Valley, studying the culture and the way people spoke and dressed and moved and all of that. I grew up in L.A. and my parents lived in the Valley, so I knew the tenor of that voice, and it was something I had never really seen in a movie before. Julianne doesn’t come from L.A., but she completely tapped into it. She’s somebody who thinks a lot about the film as a whole and doesn’t like to do a lot of analyzing and talking and yapping about it on set.
She’s gotten so much acclaim and awards attention for her roles in Still Alice and Maps to the Stars this year, and it’s striking just how different those performances are.
I haven’t seen Maps to the Stars yet, but I’m dying to. Her comic abilities are so remarkable; people forget that she’s an amazing comedic actress. She was so surprised by her [Best Actress] award at Cannes. I’m very dear friends with the Still Alice directors Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland and I couldn’t be happier for everybody involved. And, you know, she’s playing another person in Still Alice who succumbs to a devastating and mysterious illness. That character is completely different from Carol White, but you watch the calibration of her performance and, as a starting point, it’s not dissimilar to Safe in how you observe the degeneration of a person.
In your interview with Julianne, you mention how Safe was inspired in part by the AIDS epidemic, but seen today it also seems to presage the current survivalist movement, which often espouses a profound distrust for government and modern medicine.
Absolutely. The survivalist thing may dovetail with aspects of popular conservative and libertarian instincts, which also have deep roots in the American idea of self-reliance and mistrust of government and of power. It all plays into that. 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. They were doing their best to cope with this new era of illness and uncertainty, but I found it troubling that it was all about blaming yourself and not the society or culture around you. It was about loving yourself more and “don’t trust the government, don’t trust medicine.”
Watch a trailer for Safe:
The line that really stands out to me now is when the leader of the retreat admits to no longer reading the news. That sentiment feels especially strong these days within certain circles.
I [actually] heard about the environmental illness on tabloid television and these little news capsules on TV. There was just starting to be some journalistic awareness of it in the early ‘90s and they called it “20th Century Illness,” which immediately got my attention. What was so freaky and interesting to me was that, instead of finding some kind of natural response like using natural cleaning products, these stories described taking women into silicon-coating igloo enclosures in the middle of the desert as a recourse. It felt like their lives became more and more like science-fiction; their desire for achieving a kind of material purity is almost not possible in our modern world. I found all of that to be evocative, and it definitely registered at the time because of HIV and the panic around that. I feel like it plays out in each generation — there’s never a lack of other panics around the corner, Ebola being the most recent.
Todd Haynes earlier this year
Until Criterion got their hands on it, Safe had been a hard film to track down. Why was it out of circulation for so many years?
I don’t really know exactly what happened. It was released by Sony Pictures Classics and I think they just didn’t have enough prints. It really was extremely hard to find for awhile; I’d have retrospectives of my films at festivals and it was always the one that was hardest to find a good print of. It was always a specialty item, so I think it slipped through the cracks. But SPC has been incredibly generous and worked very closely with Criterion in the release of the Blu-ray.
I’m just happy that Criterion finally released two hard-to-find ‘90s gems this year, Safe and Steven Soderbergh’s King of the Hill.
I haven’t seen King of the Hill since it came out! I really dug it at the time and it was already a different direction for Soderbergh from his other films. I’d love to see it again. I feel like in this era of diminishing 35mm projection and people watching movies on their phones, we have Criterion Collection and Turner Classic Movies and those are two extraordinary resources that shouldn’t stop. It’s important for us film nerd types to keep them going.
Is it more challenging to secure financing for your films today than it was in the era of Safe?
Each production is its own experience. We just completed a film I’m incredibly proud of, Carol, starring Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara. We shot it on 16mm, but it was a tight budget for a period film set in the early ‘50s. But you figure it out — we got through it and everybody involved really cared about it. I feel lucky and fortunate. I have a whole slew of things in development now; you never know which is going to bite when. I do think what’s happening in cable television is providing a lot of energy and healthy competition for works that are tough and that take risks.
Carol takes place in the early ‘50s, chronologically in between your HBO adaptation of Mildred Pierce and Far From Heaven. Coincidence or is this part of an unofficial trilogy?
It isn’t really, it’s quite different. Carol takes place in the really early ‘50s before Eisenhower has taken office. It’s based on a Patricia Highsmith novel, her second and most autobiographical book and the only one outside of the crime milieu. What’s so interesting about it is that it turns on the idea of this unknown and unspoken love, which is ultimately the love between two women, and that was a part of [the author’s] own life. But it’ also explores the idea that falling in love turns the lover’s mind into the criminal’s mind, which is always seething and creating various scenarios and obsessing over certain details. There’s this sense of danger and criminality at the centerpiece of the novel and we’ve opened it up a little bit in the film, but it’s still ultimately the story of the young woman’s point of view.
Going back to the beginning of your career, will your banned Karen Carpenter film Superstar ever find its way into legal circulation? [The movie — which depicts the singer’s life story using Barbie dolls — didn’t have proper licensing for the Carpenters’ songs.]
There’s been solid resistance on the part of the estate and Richard Carpenter. It’s unfortunate, because it’s a film that only ever meant to bring Karen Carpenter back into the discussion for younger generations with incredible love and respect, even if my method of telling the story was unconventional. And if I take some shots at the family dynamic that was a factor in the conflict she faced as an emerging pop artist, it was always meant to honor her and bring that voice back into peoples’ ears. I never had any other intentions than that, but I understood that it could be misconstrued. I’d love for more people to be able to see it and Criterion would be thrilled if I’m ever able to get it out, so I know where I’d go with it!
The film of yours that really seems to have found a second life is Velvet Goldmine. Have you enjoyed seeing the cult that has sprung up around that movie, particularly online?
It makes me really happy. It’s a film that was inspired by the kinds of movies I would get obsessed with when I was a teenager, those sorts of trippy movies coming out of drug and music culture from the late ‘60s and early ‘70s. I felt like no one was making those kinds of head-trippy movies anymore and this was a perfect subject to celebrate in that way. It wasn’t something that maybe got the thorough theatrical distribution we hoped or the attention that we hoped; that was the year that Miramax was pretty occupied with some of their biggest heavy hitters from that era like Shakespeare in Love and Life is Beautiful. So we got a little bit lost in the shuffle, but it’s gained this whole new life since it’s been out on video and DVD that parallels with the emergence of the Internet. A lot of teenage girls click into that story even though it’s about all those pretty boys, and I find that to be so cool and surprising as well. When I screen the film somewhere, teenage girls come up to me and I always know they have a copy Velvet Goldmine they want me to sign.
Photo credit: @Everett Collection, @Getty
