Shooting “Carol” On Super 16MM
Haynes said they came upon the choice of shooting on Super 16 because when they shot “Mildred Pierce” for HBO on 35MM. And having watched his movie shot on film presented in HDTV, the filmmaker said it lost its grain and looked like digital photography. “So it was like we really wanna see the grain and have it be a movie! Everybody who did ‘Mildred’ came from film, including Kate Winslet, she had never done TV before, and we were all proud of that — that we didn’t know anything about TV. But we wanted [‘Carol’] to look like a movie and so we did and the results were really great and it was kind of fun and radical to downgrade to a 16mm camera.”
Douglas Sirk & The Power Of Melodrama
An audience member wanted to know if — much like Douglas Sirk, who Haynes loves — if there were any other similarly overlooked filmmakers who were due for a critical reevaluation (Sirk was dismissed at the time, but found favor with critics decade after his heyday). Haynes was stumped (though Kent Jones did offer Richard Quine’s “Strangers When We Meet” and the works of Delmer Daves, which Haynes had hadn’t seen and got excited about), but it did lead him to go on about melodrama and “the especially the way melodrama has been denigrated as a genre alongside all the others that are more often associated with male subjects. But there’s something fascinating, radical and gorgeously constructed about these films… but they leave you with a sense of dissatisfaction.” Haynes quoted Sirk, who said, “You cannot make films about things, you can only make films with things.”
He continued, “Basically what [Sirk] is saying, I think, that all I can do is show you the conditions that we all live under and I’m not going to show you these characters figuring them out of them or overcoming them, that’s what you need to go home with. [These films] don’t stroke you, they don’t solve problems for you and that’s makes them less purely satisfying.”
“Carol” & The Qualities Cate Blanchett, Rooney Mara Possess
Hayne called “Carol” a “tribute to the seminal, lesbian women in my life” and joked that when he learned Cate Blanchett was already attached to the film, “that was kind of a drag, but as a director you make due,” he quipped. The director had high praise for the underrated emotional intelligence of Rooney Mara, who he said was wise beyond her years. “In such a short amount of time she’s distinguished yourself as such a totally, thoughtful, serious and gifted actor. When you see a young actor like that who somehow understands the scale of the medium so well that she knows how to underplay, how to reduce down and minimize the gesture and have even more impact through understatement, that’s rare. And that speaks to real intelligence and innate understanding that exceeds her years.”
”Carol” opens in limited release on November 20. Listen to the full Q&A below.
