LYON, France — When Mexican costume designer Anna Terrazas told Todd Haynes that the most important thing about a costume was what it smelled like, the filmmaker had just one response: “You’re hired.”
The Oscar-nominated director shared the anecdote about his upcoming Pedro Pascal-starring romantic noir drama “De Noche” at the Lumière Film Festival on Tuesday, offering a glimpse into his approach to filmmaking, from the music and sounds that shape his movies to the senses that cannot always be expressed on screen.
“We see movies with our ears and our eyes,” Haynes explained. “But movies that evoke smell and touch and other kinds of senses are the ones that keep allowing us to fill in.”
Haynes is in Lyon with longtime producer Christine Vachon for a retrospective featuring four of his films: “Poison,” “Safe,” “Far From Heaven” and “I’m Not There,” including newly restored versions of the first two.
The director – whose latest film follows the story of a detective (Pascal) and a younger schoolteacher (Danny Ramirez) who flee the corruption of 1930s Los Angeles for Mexico – described the homework he sets himself before each production. He said he immerses himself in films that share its genre or cinematic style, rather than necessarily its historical setting.
“It’s as if I give myself an assignment each time,” he said, explaining how that research feeds into what he calls his “image books,” which he shares with his collaborators.
While putting together the image book for his Oscar-nominated “May December,” starring frequent collaborator Julianne Moore alongside Natalie Portman, Haynes began listening to Michel Legrand‘s score for Joseph Losey’s “The Go-Between.”
The music soon became central to the project. He played it on set from the very first day, using it to choreograph camera movements. By the editing stage, the music had become so integral to the film that Haynes asked composer Marcelo Zarvos to rearrange and adapt it. “We couldn’t let it go,” he recalled. “It became a definitive part of the structure, the language, and the energy of the film.”
Having watched the restored version of “Safe” the previous evening in Lyon, Haynes praised sound designer Leslie Shatz for the unsettling soundscape of the 1995 drama, in which Moore plays a woman suffering from a mysterious illness.
He described “all of the strange, lurking, unconscious sounds” in the film, that created what he called “a kind of magnetic field in which the contamination she senses from her surroundings becomes literally audible.”
Turning to his six-time Oscar-nominated 2015 romance “Carol,” Haynes recalled how journalists kept congratulating him and stars Cate Blanchett and Cannes Best Actress winner Rooney Mara for portraying strong women. Blanchett, he said, would object: Carol wasn’t some invincible heroine but a woman constrained by her time, struggling to understand herself and how she wanted to live.
“There is something radical and anti-social about love,” Haynes said, citing great French writer Roland Barthes’ “A Lover’s Discourse,” passages of which he shared with the actors.
Haynes also paid tribute to Vachon, who helped rescue “Safe” when he was struggling to raise its $1 million budget. The film, he said, wouldn’t exist without her.
Vachon, who already had a grasp of the industry’s commercial realities, recalled the practical advice she gave him years earlier when he proposed making his first feature, “Poison” as three interconnected 20-minute stories.
“I said, you know what, Todd? Make it 90 minutes,” she recalled.
The producer made some pointed observations about the state of independent cinema. She sees younger Americans flocking to repertory theaters, including her own 26-year-old daughter, but worries about what the industry is offering them.
“I feel like we are creating a new generation of cinemagoers, but we’re just not giving them enough movies to see,” she said.
Haynes also revisited his childhood obsession with Lucille Ball, which inspired his autobiographical short “Dottie Gets Spanked.” He went on to tease a possible screening of the film alongside “Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story,” his cult short made with Barbie dolls that has rarely been shown publicly since legal disputes over its music rights. The filmmaker was hinting heavily at what might be in store for the festival’s surprise screening Wednesday evening at the Institut Lumière.
The Lumière Film Festival runs in Lyon through Oct. 18.