There’s been an overtone of befuddlement to the reception for Todd Haynes’ latest picture, the legal procedural “Dark Waters.” Where’s the smoldering queer angst, the reverent evocation of a stylized past, the restless experimentalism? The true-life account of lawyer Rob Bilott (portrayed by Mark Ruffalo, returning to the dogged dedication of “Zodiac”) and his campaign to bring the massive DuPont chemical giant to justice after they knowingly poison swaths of rural West Virginia may not have the certain je ne sais quoi we’ve come to associate with the auteur’s films. But follow Bilott’s example, look a little closer, and you may be surprised by the extent to which this film could not have been made by anyone else.
Haynes sat down with The Playlist the morning after “Dark Waters” played to a glowing reception at Lincoln Center, and discussed his migration from the avant-garde fringes, his adoration for the whistle-blower picture, and his fucked-up consistency. (His words!)
Your recent New Yorker profile mentions that after you completed work on the student film “Suicide,” you expressed a desire to stay outside of studio filmmaking mechanisms.
Famous last words, heh.
What motivated you to change your mind?
Well, at that time, I meant “studio filmmaking” to be anything outside of purely experimental film. So as soon as I began to be categorized as a feature filmmaker, I felt like I’d already started moving into a category of movies defined by how they enter the marketplace. Whether that’s “Poison,” which was very much influenced by experimental film, or “Dark Waters,” they enter the market the same way. In some senses, they’re out there competing on a similar footing. They’re promoted by machines and systems. Some of the ambivalences I had about movies were then brought to bear and actually became weaponized, maybe, because the work occupies an uneasy relationship between artistic motivations and commercial ones. I feel like it’s a more useful way of getting into social issues. A more visible platform, and full of the contradictions of fluctuation.
I’d put the focus not on what happens after the movie’s made, but what happens before, how it comes together. I have to imagine this was a smoother process than getting something like “Far From Heaven” off the ground.
Absolutely. Every one of them is a unique process in that regard. There’s no question when there’s a studio, it’s a single-stop source of income. This was a package that I was attached to, just like my HBO miniseries “Mildred Pierce,” and my film with Amazon, “Wonderstruck.” In those regards, it’s a single entity to interact with, and that simplifies your focus, simplifies your needs and how you fill them. Discussions about budget are more straightforward. Doesn’t mean you’re not met with comparable constraints. They only want to spend so much, and executive opinions still enter the process.
For a long time, you wrote all your own films, but the scripts for the past few have come from someone else. Though you clearly exert your own influence over the scripts you take on, was there a change, going from writing your own screenplays to adapting other people’s?
Oh, of course. It’s funny, the process of relay — how in everything you do, no matter whether you work on the script yourself or inherit it from someone else, it’s instantly going to turn into something else once you start putting it on screen. It’s already something outside you, something that will invariably change in all kinds of drastic and disturbing ways. You can’t afford to get precious about this. You have to discard and keep moving forward, no matter the source of the story. You have to understand that it’s all just a blueprint, whether I’ve written it or not.
There was “Mildred Pierce” and some work on “Enlightened” in the interim, but the gap between “I’m Not There” and “Carol” was much longer than your last few films, which have come out every other year like clockwork.
I know, what’s going on with me?
What is going on with you?
It’s weird! It’s fucked up, how consistent I’ve been! But yeah, it’s been hard. It’s changed the pace of my life. It’s been a little closer to that thing other directors do better than I do, which is to always have multiple things developing at different stages that you can keep part of your mind on. I’m such a single-minded person. It’s hard for me to multi-task and not feel like I’m giving short mental shrift to things I care about. But it also means that as soon as the word was out that I would be interested in films I didn’t write myself, lots of interesting stuff started coming my way. And that feels great, getting approached by actors and other artists I love and respect. I often wish I could split myself into clones and do multiple things at once. This one, I had to initially pass on because of conflict stuff with other things I was doing on my own. I thought “Dark Waters” would require more of my concentration than that. It was hard for me to shake, and it reflects a genre of film that I really love.
That genre being the procedural?
Well, the whistle-blower film in specific. The examples that I did look at are less about the legal and more about the journalistic. What they share is someone stumbling onto a story, whatever capacity they’re in, whether that’s writers or lawyers or plutonium workers like in “Silkwood.” They become alerted to something, then there’s a discovery process and investigative process. There are different disciplines applied to this type of story, but the sensation of discovering something covered up, that’s where the pleasure comes from for me.
There’s one shot that unlocked a lot for me, the one after Rob has his fainting spell, the hard cut to a zoom in on him in the MRI machine. Up to that point, I’d thought of the film as a story about the law, but that woke me up to the side of it that’s about the deterioration of the body, probably the most typically Haynes-ian element of the movie. To what extent is this a personal film?
I don’t know that this is a personal film or an expansion on pet themes. But what you bring up, the corporeal and physical cost of a human being standing up and speaking truth to power and taking on corrupt systems of power — that was a driving force. The thing about some of these films more than others, and this is true of “Silkwood” more than others, is that you feel the strain that these bodies are under. People in the plant are getting affected by radiation, getting literally scrubbed down, and toward the end of the film, the contamination reaches Meryl Streep’s house with Cher and Kurt Russell. They start scrubbing the walls, peeling the wallpaper off, putting everything in plastic bags. The feeling of contamination, and how it estranges us from our own bodies, that’s a crushing thing. In this example, I can see how the illnesses, the rotting teeth, and the dead livestock all fit into that. It’s a terrifying peril.
The other quote that stuck with me from the New Yorker piece was about employing a radical form in your methods, to go along with radical subject material. “Dark Waters” isn’t so radical, formally; is there any reluctance there, to adopt that style?
No, but it’s more like I know what’s complicated about a story like this. How hard it is to convey this much information in an organized, coherent way. You don’t want the audience feeling burdened by the specificity of this legal story. Formally, it’s a movie about process, and it moves in a linear way just like Rob’s investigation. It feels like something you can apply to your own life, in the way we make sense of the world by organizing information around us to solve problems. Even though, in this instance, the problems cannot be solved. They can only be opened up and revealed.
“Dark Waters” will arrive in theaters on November 22.