Todd Haynes tells me that May December, his gripping melodrama starring Oscar winners Natalie Portman and Julianne Moore, “aggressively disturbs our moral moorings.”
It’s true, and as I watched the movie — about a TV star (Portman) who arrives in Savannah, Georgia, to shadow the woman (Moore) at the center of a 20-year-old scandal — for a second time recently in Los Angeles, an image of Donald Trump popped uncomfortably into my head.
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Moore plays Gracie, who had an intimate affair with a 13-year-old schoolboy two decades previously, when she was married with a family.
The added detail that they canoodled in a pet store made it perfect fodder to splash on tabloid front pages.
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That Gracie went to jail and had the boy-teen’s child while incarcerated ensured coverage continued for weeks.
Two decades later, Gracie and Joe, the kid, now in his 30s, are married with three kids of their own, and there’s a facade of calm in their relationship — until Portman’s Elizabeth pays the couple a visit to prepare for a drama based on Grace and Joe’s biology lessons in the pet store.
Listen, way back in the day, I worked for UK tabloid The Sun, so I have an inkling of how this stuff goes down.
This Trump picture in my head kept nagging me until I realized that it had to do with the fact that Trump – -until now — gets away with whatever he says or does. But he never, ever paid the kind of price Gracie had to.
She got locked up in a cell for her crime of predatory behavior with a minor.
There’s a tacit acceptance that Trump gets from his supporters for things that no one else would get away with.
Haynes, in London for the BFI London film Festival screenings of May December, laughs, pointing out that he has no truck with the “blanket acceptance and persistence in the investment and the faith“ in the former president as “the voice of the grieved white aging-out population, or whatever the f*ck he represents.”
Waving a finger at me, he explodes: “I don’t give a shit. It’s not relevant to my life. It doesn’t have anything to do with anybody I know anywhere remotely in my life. And in a way, f*ck them all.”
I hadn’t quite expected that reaction to my reaction — rather, one of my many reactions — to May December. It’s a wholly enjoyable film, one that can provoke on many levels, as all great works of art must.
Haynes continues to express his five-alarm siren on Trump.
”Seriously, I’m not interested in trying to understand it. All I want to do is vote against it and rally all the forces of sanity against it,” he says. “And they exist, and they’re a much more diverse, young, interesting, varied, truly American conglomeration of people.
“And that’s what we did last time, and we’re going to f*cking do it again because we have no choice,” Haynes adds. “The fate of the planet … and, look, all my friends who have kids … and I mean, what more does it take than looking into the face of your kid?”
He gulps down milky tea in a room at the Corinthia in Whitehall, London, and declares that “this is about as uninteresting, unnuanced a discussion as we’ve had since Adolf Hitler about what’s right and wrong!”
He adds, “I mean, seriously, the acceptance around Trump I could care less about. I think more of the world in which we actually inhabit, the real world. But that is also the only thing I could say in common with that other alien planet — that we’re all in a state of crisis that’s almost too enormous to fully comprehend.”
I like this fiery Todd Haynes.
Because his schedule opened up just as Portman posted him a copy of Samy Burch’s screenplay, Haynes was ready to jump right in to make “this movie that aggressively disturbs our moral moorings.”
It was one of his most satisfying shoots, he says, because of a “a kind of energy that came out of my own life and that had to do with a project I’d been developing [Peggy Lee movie with Michelle Williams] not happening and having to rebound from that and wanting to revert that energy into something fresh.”
May December came “part and parcel” with a lot of new creative relationships.
“I go to Sandy Powell first,” the multiple-Oscar winner who has designed costumes for him since 1998′,’s Velvet Goldmine and including Far From Heaven, Carol and Wonderstruck, “because I have this deep, profound history and friendship with Sandy. There was no way she could leave London; her mother is ailing and she had to be here [in London]. But that was not going to be possible, so I knew that.”
There were some other costume designers he’d worked with before, and he checked on their availability. No dice.
Then he went to April Napier, with whom his friend, the filmmaker Kelly Reichardt, had collaborated on Showing Up, First Cow and Certain Women. ”And so that was a new relationship,” he explains.
And then on to Sam Lisenco (Judas and the Black Messiah) for production design, after Mark Friedberg (The Whale), “a production designer from my past who’s been working with Barry Jenkins on almost everything. And, once again, completely embroiled and unavailable for many months or years to come.”
So Lisenco was signed.
And he thought Ed Lachman, another frequent collaborator, was going to shoot May December, but he was still busy shooting Pablo Larrain’s El Conde.
But when Lachman was free to do it, he broke his femur bone.
“Oh man, it was a couple of days before I was going to Savannah for preproduction. And so I had to find a DP immediately to replace Lachman, and there’s no way of replacing Ed Lachman!”
Once again he turned to Kelly Reichardt, this time to seek her permission to approach Christopher Blauvelt, who’d shot several of her pictures including Night Moves and Meek’s Cutoff.
Haynes had not worked with Blauvelt before, but they’d known each other for years. “He’d come up under Harris Savides (Milk), ”the amazing DP who I had tried to work with on films in the past” but their schedules never aligned, says Haynes.
“But Chris was within that very, very special Harris environment, shooting a lot of Gus Van Sant films. But I’ve been seeing all the movies that Chris has shot for Kelly since Meek’s Cutoff. And Kelly and Chris have a very, very special primary creative partnership together, but he was really excited and jumped in.
“So it was all these new relationships, acquired because of the speed of the whole thing,” he says, smiling.
“It was like ,”OK, I’m going to bring everybody in together. I’m going to have full transparency. All my ideas I’m going to share right away, so everyone feels part of what I’m thinking on the creative front from the beginning. Because we just didn’t have any time to waste.”
His image mood book, a nicely bound tome packed with images of faces, buildings, windows and heaven knows what else, was circulated to everybody.
He also insisted that Michel Legrand’s score from Joseph Losey’s 1971 classic film The Go-Between be played on set.
Haynes had just watched it on what he called “the greatest resource of cinema that exists in the world: Turner Classic Movies.”
He wanted to have the score adapted for his movie because “it puts you in an active state of readership of the film, as it does in The Go-Between.”
The plan being not to play coy but to go bold. ”The camera is going to be quiet and static and hold its frame — and make you maybe squirm a little” as the score is played.
That method’s used to both hilarious and chilling effect in several instances, memorably when Moore’s Gracie opens her freezer, looks in — dramatic chords play — and cries out that she hopes she has enough hot dogs.
As soon as Lisenco was on board, Haynes says he “took him by the hand and said, ‘Let’s go to Savannah together.’”
And off they went in August of last year.
The film originally was set in Camden, Maine, but there was no way they could shoot in Maine or any place else on the Eastern Seaboard “because we had to shoot in the fall for the month of May.” The whole movie is bracketed by the imminent graduation of two of Gracie and Joe’s kids.
Savannah it was, and that’s where they found the right house for Gracie’s family.
Portman already was attached to play Elizabeth, and Haynes turned to Moore to play Gracie.
Then he and longtime casting director Laura Rosenthal had to find an actor to play grown-up Joe, the lad at the heart of the film.
Haynes didn’t know Charles Melton. He’d watched maybe a part of the first episode of Riverdale, in which the actor plays Reggie Mantle, ”because people were mentioning it.”
They put out a breakdown for a Korean-American actor in his early 30s. Rosenthal screened a bunch of tapes, and Haynes saw eight or maybe 10 of them. “And I saw a picture of Charles, and I was like, ‘Wow, no, that’s probably not going to work.”
Why not?
“Because he look like a model. It’s just not how I ever pictured Joe when I read the script,” Haynes says. “I knew Joe needed to be attractive, and Gracie’s attractive. And in a way, it almost made me nervous how many attractive people were justifiably in this story. But I didn’t picture him like that.
“And then I watched his audition, and I was like, ‘Wow, that’s completely different from what anybody else is doing.’ I kept going back to Charles, and then I would be like, ‘Laura, are you seeing what I’m seeing?’ And she’s like, ‘Yeah.’ And he was so fragile and so quiet and so locked up,” Haynes explains.
“The film’s capacity for our emotions circulate around Joe,” he tells me, “and finally you get exhausted and disturbed and amused and confused by the women and their power interplay throughout the movie. But it’s not where you’re emotional.”
I chatted with Melton a couple of times at parties at Cannes back in May, and the positive attention to his super performance had taken him by surprise. The hothouse atmosphere of the Cannes Film Festival bubble was a bit of a shock too.
But it was a thing of splendor to observe both him and Lily Gladstone, the fabulous, knockout, breakout star of Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon, graciously accepting praise for their acting.
By this point, we’d been chatting for a while, and we both realized that some pastries we’d been promised hadn’t arrived with our tea at the Corinthia hotel in Whitehall.
“You never got your sweet things,” Jonathan Rutter, Premiere PRs executive director, who’d popped by the suite, noticed.
“We are the sweet things, I guess,” Haynes says, laughing as he includes me in his statement.
Rutter swiftly returned with slices of lemon drizzle cake from the Netflix office down the hall.
“That’s really good, yum,” Haynes says, tucking in.
We returned to Melton once we’d scoffed our sweet thingys.
The good fortune of finding Melton was “the fact that what he did on his first instincts, he could manifest in a crowded set with very impressive actors around him with a great deal of experience and the combustion of a production like this. And we all did our part. He will say that it’s all due to me, but I have to remind him that he had already done it before we ever met, and that’s why I cast him. And so he had the instincts, the knowledge, the sensitivity and the incredible skill to put it all together.”
Gracie and Elizabeth, as played by Moore and Portman, are the film’s unreliable narrators.
They’re not to be trusted. There’s a marvelous scene where Gracie shows Elizabeth her makeup routine. They’re looking directly into a mirror, and that shot reveals a lot about who they are.
I think I saw Trump in that mirror too, but let’s not return to him.
May December marks the fifth time that Haynes has worked with Moore, ever since they made Safe together 28 years ago.
“Oh, she’s singular in so many ways,” he says, delighting in talking about Moore.
“There’s this interaction between something transparent and inexplicable, impenetrable about her … or not impenetrable, but there’s an interplay between something that you can’t entirely comprehend and then something you can see right though. And the way she navigates between the two is just a mysterious, fascinating thing that she brings to the medium. And I think she knows that the camera sees things that the human eye doesn’t see in the room, but the camera sees and the audience then sees it on the screen. So everything about this medium is built for things she understands and brings to life.” he tells me.
“And she’s interested in similar kinds of inscrutable subjects and characters as I am, and stories that are not easily resolved. And characters who are far from heaven, far from heroic.”
But Natalie Portman was at the core of all of the newer relationships, and Samy Burch, of course.
Portman sent him the script bearing the message, ”This came from Natalie Portman, and she’d love you to read it.”
They’d discussed a project years ago but, May December, he says, ”was the one that really landed with me.”
Whatever that movie was, somebody else made it. He was happy to finally get to work with Portman, who does such delicious work here. She has the best line in the movie, but I totally can’t give it away here; it would be such a spoiler.
May December got Haynes because “I just thought the script was just remarkable. And it made me uncomfortable and made me question myself.”
How so?
“Oh, the attitudes that you bring to these characters keep shifting,and neither of the women are ever redeemed by the story.And just when you think you know what you feel about a character or an event,something happens and you have to rethink it .That doesn’t happen in a lot of movies today. And that’s what movies are,as far as I’m concerned.”
Haynes was born in Northridge, and then raised in Encino. And he attended a private high school from 9th through 12th grade in Oakwood that kids from all over the city went to. ”All of a sudden, the whole city opened up for me as a kid.”
It’s almost as if he hasn’t stopped exploring what’s happening over his neighbor’s fence in the suburbs.
There’s a deep curiosity about what’s happening next door, I say.
“I think that’s true, yeah. But then you realize that’s what’s happening in your house. So it’s about what’s happening in our own house.”
Like what, I wonder?
“Oh, just that we all deal with families and marriages and love and desire and disappointment and conflict. It’s happening in everyone’s house; it’s not like our house was exempt from those things. It’s happening in everybody’s house,” he repeats. “All the things that make us complicated.”
May December will be released in November 17 select North American theaters and UK cinemas, then launch December 1 on Netflix in the U.S. It hits the UK on Sky Cinema and Now on December 8.
Producers are Portman, Mas, Pamela Koffler, Christine Vachon, Grant S. Johnson, Tyler W. Konney, Jessica Elbaum and Will Ferrell, with the exec producing team of Madeleine K. Rudin, Thomas K. Richards, Lee Broda, Jeff Rice, Jonathan Montepare, Burch, Alex Brown, Thorsten Schumacher and Claire Taylor.
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