The best love stories on film are rooted in the point of view of the more woundable, vulnerable party, the more amorous party.
What was so interesting about the glam era was that it was about bisexuality and breaking down the boundaries between gays and straights, breaking down the boundaries between masculinity and femininity with this androgyny thing.
Films like 'The Godfather,' 'The Exorcist,' 'Klute,' 'Chinatown,' 'Network,' and 'The Parallax View': They were drawn from the genre tradition, but they dressed down the stylistic telling of those traditions and genres.
Films like 'The Godfather,' 'Chinatown' and 'The Exorcist' brought a realism and currency and understatement to their genres that we wanted for 'Mildred Pierce.'
The highest-caliber dramatic work produced for TV - not just in cable but something like 'The Good Wife' at network - is consistently great.
I'm a lover of cinema, and I don't want that to completely expire.
A key part of the process for me is having screenings: not official test screenings, just gatherings of people, some I know and some I don't. We ask what is working and what isn't. So it's not as if I'm shutting out input.
My problem on 'Safe' was that when I liked something, I would giggle.
At the time I made 'Safe,' I was really intrigued by the whole culture around AIDS, which was turning to people like Louise Hay and these other West Coast New Age thinkers.
You'll see in 'Carol' a lot of shots shot through windows, glass and awnings, with interruptions between where we are and where our object is. To me, I hope that that conjures the whole act of looking as a predicament, as something that is never easy and never completely attainable.
I think camp is a really fascinating thing, and it's hard to define and hard to apply consciously. It's almost something you take from material that's already existed in the world, a reading of the world. But I think it speaks of a long tradition of gay reading of the world, before gays were allowed to be visible.
I had really loving parents and a happy childhood.
I think I'm drawn to female characters partly because they don't have as easy or as obvious a relationship to power in society, and so they suffer under social constraints or have to maneuver within them in ways men sometimes don't or are unconscious about, or have certain liberties that are invisible to them.
My very first movie, 'Mary Poppins,' which I talk about, it just turned me into an obsessive, creative creature who had to sort of reply to the experience by drawing things, making things. It was like it forced - it made me into this obsessive, creative creature... I don't know any other way of putting it.
I'm pretty single-minded, unlike a lot of directors who miraculously seem to be holding six projects in their hand at a given time and juggling them accordingly.
I think many of the ideas that opened up in the '60s got implemented in the '70s and that certain minority voices that were not being heard in the '60s, like women and gay people, were being heard in the '70s. Black Civil Rights had also found its foothold, and those ideas were also very pertinent.
Pop music can get inside us and enter our memory bubbles. It provides those true Proustian moments, unlocking sensations, unlocking our imaginations. Music inspired me as a filmmaker.
I have always had an interest in performers who play against the most obvious of expectations and are able to find something secret, something withheld, and some level of restraint.
