I've been really lucky with critical reaction, overall, even if my films don't often resemble each other.
Looking at photographs of New York in 1952, you find a powerfully pre-Eisenhower era - sagging, tired, distressed - and the palette is slightly dissonant.
I have a hard time making movies that affirm life and say life is a good and happy place. That's not true about the world.
I had really loving parents and a happy childhood.
I remember going to see '2001' with my dad.
Each production is its own experience.
Sirkian films really aren't - at least the way I see them, they're not about identification. They don't have voiceover. A lot of the love stories that are rooted, classic love stories rooted in point of view, use voiceover as a mechanism for locating you there.
The highest-caliber dramatic work produced for TV - not just in cable but something like 'The Good Wife' at network - is consistently great.
At HBO, you've just basically got a studio full of artistically driven smart guys and women who really care about the quality first and foremost.
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.
I started 'Carol' as I almost always do, by looking at films from the time, and they were less - they actually felt less relevant to me in terms of their bigness, although we do have some big '50s-type moments in 'Carol.'
I noticed that there were all these kinds of practices in a working set that had to be un-practiced on 'Far from Heaven,' which was so interesting.
It's funny: I don't feel like I have any particular privileged feeling for the Fifties.
By the time I finished 'Poison,' the New Queer Cinema was branded, and I was associated with this. In many ways, it formed me as a filmmaker, like as a feature filmmaker I never set out to be.
I figured I would be teaching my whole life and making experimental films on the side.
I made little Super 8 extravaganzas when I was a kid, the first being my own version of 'Romeo and Juliet,' and where I played all the parts except for Juliet.
It took an entire generation of critical thinking for Douglas Sirk's films to be really appreciated.
After 'Superstar,' I was encouraged. I felt audiences wanted to be challenged.
My problem on 'Safe' was that when I liked something, I would giggle.
Films like 'Velvet Goldmine' are an accumulation of research and references. I create an almost random resource of connections and am constantly distilling that into narrative specifics.
