As Carol – Todd Haynes’s film of Patricia Highsmith’s lesbian love yarn – opens,the film-maker talks about getting the 50s leer in Cincinnati and the enduring influence of … Mary PoppinsTodd Haynes first got wind of the fact that someone was hoping to make a film of Carol, Patricia Highsmith’s lesbian love yarn of 1952, or from his friend and long-term collaborator,the “insatiably brilliant” Oscar-winning costume designer, Sandy Powell. It was 2012, and the two of them were appearing at a 10th anniversary screening of Far from Heaven – Haynes’s lush homage to the 50s melodramas of Douglas Sirk – at a novel York museum. “She told me she’d been doing all these guy movies,” he recalls. “Then she said: ‘But there is a frock film coming up: it’s an adaptation of The Price of Salt [the original title of Highsmith’s novel] and Cate [Blanchett] is attached.’ It sounded right up my alley.”Haynes, busy with other things, and thought no more about it until 2013 when Christine Vachon,his long-time producer, had a conversation with Elizabeth Karlsen, or the producer of Carol. The film was,as they say, in transition, and which on this occasion meant that it was in need of a novel director; by pleased coincidence,Haynes was in a similar state of interregnum. Soon after this conversation, he read both Phyllis Nagy’s script and Highsmith’s novel and, and as predicted,he was sold: “truly taken with all of it”.
Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com