Honorary guest of the Lumière Festival, Todd Haynes reflects on his first two feature films, Poison and Safe. From the queer provocation of the former to the diffuse anxiety of the latter, he addresses marginality, illness, and how film genres reveal the tensions of their time.
As the honorary guest of the 18th edition of the Lumière Festival, Todd Haynes revisited the early milestones of his bold work. Restored and screened again, Poison and Safe reveal two complementary ways of exploring exclusion, illness, and social norms. In Lyon, the filmmaker discussed their genesis, his dialogue with Jean Genet, and his first collaboration with Julianne Moore.
“Poison”, three stories to disturb the frameworks
Released in 1991, Poison does not follow a classic narrative. The film assembles three autonomous stories, whose tone and visual choices change radically. This fragmented construction nonetheless creates a common thread: each of the narratives observes individuals pushed aside from their environment.
Haynes explains that he wanted to allow several genres to coexist without conflating them. A faux documentary, a horror story, and a prison drama thus compose a deliberately unstable form. By shifting from one to another, the viewer is invited to observe how the codes of cinema influence their perception of the characters.
Distinct genres, a shared experience of marginality
The documentary segment focuses on a child whose disappearance is reported through the testimonies of the adults who knew him. The event remains elusive, as the boy never appears directly on screen. His absence forces both the witnesses and the audience to reckon with what he has profoundly brought into question.
In the horror section, a man is transformed by an experience that makes him a threat in the eyes of others. Haynes evokes the anxiety-inducing images circulated around AIDS, at a time when fear and stigmatization largely dominated public discourse. The B-movie register allows him to make this panic visible while exposing the mechanisms that designate certain bodies as dangerous.
The prison narrative, in particular nourished by Miracle of the Rose by Jean Genet, centers around desire and the relationship between two inmates. Their bond modifies power dynamics without abolishing confinement. These trajectories remain marked by a common tension: the hope of escaping the imposed order clashes with the violence of that order.
Jean Genet, the imprint of an appropriation
Genet’s works do not simply offer Haynes a reservoir of themes. They enable him to reflect on individual freedoms, transgressions, and how society constructs its exclusions. The filmmaker adopts these ideas with a sensitivity that is his own, rather than attempting to reproduce the writer’s universe.
This approach is felt in the very form of the film. The stories seem handcrafted, with visible cuts and breaks that reject the usual fluidity. Haynes embraces these rough edges: they remind us that an author organizes what the audience sees and that no representation is neutral.
The reference to Genet also permeates the way Poison stages rejected bodies. Its characters are not presented as figures meant to reassure or gain general approval. Their presence rather disturbs habitual ways of seeing, rendering sensitive the line between what a culture accepts and what it rejects.
The film does not offer a resolution that would erase the questions raised. The child remains absent, the transformed man finds no real reintegration, and the escape of the inmate ends with Bolton’s death. Haynes leaves it to the audience to confront these fates without providing an easy deliverance.
The New Queer Cinema, between creation and contestation
At the time of making Poison, Haynes felt connected to a community mobilized against AIDS and the forms of discrimination accompanying it. Artistic expression was then just one means of action among others. Artists and activists sought to make heard experiences that were largely ignored, each with their skills and tools.
The recognition of the film at Sundance, where it won the grand prize, helped bring it into the limelight. In the following years, other unique works nourished a landscape that critic B. Ruby Rich would label as New Queer Cinema. Haynes recalls with pride this collective emergence, born from approaches that went beyond merely asking for social acceptance.
These films sometimes favor transgressive, antisocial, or criminal characters, far removed from representations designed to make queer people more compliant with dominant expectations. Their daring lies in showcasing complex lives, without reducing them to uplifting examples. This formal and political freedom shifts the contours of what a narrative can represent.
Thus, the contestation concerns not just the subjects addressed. It also touches on the cultural structures that determine which stories deserve to be told and in what form. This idea resonates, in another historical and cinematic context, with voices that make cinema a space of resistance, as recalled in this interview with Heiny Srour about liberation and its political horizon.
16 mm, a substance that retains its rough edges
The texture of the image also plays a role in Haynes’s universe. The filmmaker states that he loves the grain of 16 mm, to which he returned for the mini-series Mildred Pierce, and then for Carol, with cinematographer Ed Lachman. The format gives the images a sensitive density, far from overly sleek clarity.
For Mildred Pierce, the television production could have been shot in 35 mm. However, the improvement of cameras and lenses risked erasing part of the texture during transmission. Choosing 16 mm allowed for a more perceptible visual roughness.
With Carol, this exploration fits within another experience: that of a film intended for theaters. The grain provides a particular relationship to light, faces, and settings, while echoing the appearance of older films. The choices of format are thus not just a technical preference; they contribute to the identity of each work.
This attention to the materiality of the image also accompanies the restrained staging of Carol, where glances, gestures, and surfaces carry part of the narrative. The film extends in its way the filmmaker’s inquiries into the representation of desires and norms. The story of this collaboration between aesthetics and emotion is also found in this retrospective on Carol, a major film by Todd Haynes.
Through these choices, Haynes champions a cinema where the image retains its share of unpredictability. A slight imperfection can open a space for expression that digital precision tends to homogenize. The texture thus becomes a component of the narrative, on par with framing or acting performance.
“Safe”, when the everyday becomes a source of threat
With Safe, made in 1995, Todd Haynes begins with an illness then referred to by various names, including environmental illness. Carol White, played by Julianne Moore, begins to react to ordinary elements of her environment. Slowly, the house and the suburbs, places that appear protective, take on an unsettling strangeness.
The connection with Poison evolves around illness and the threatened body. Haynes also mentions Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story, another work from his early career marked by physical degradation. In these films, the body becomes a battleground, but also a revealer of collective fears.
The danger of Safe does not emerge in the form of a clearly identified monster. It slips into familiar spaces and may seem to stem from a couch, domestic products, or the ambient air. This diffuse threat borrows from horror cinema while refusing its reassuring explanations.
The film then opens a broader reflection on illness: how to interpret it, make sense of it, and decide who bears the responsibility? Carol eventually is encouraged to think of herself as primarily responsible for her condition. The discourse of healing risks turning care into individual guilt, while the social environment escapes scrutiny.
This evolution gives the story a dark tone. Carol traverses the film in a form of isolation that does not disappear with the new answers proposed to her. Her search for relief raises an uncomfortable question: what does it mean to heal when one must also accept an explanation that absolves the world around them?
A familiar America, observed from a distance
The settings of Safe draw from the director’s childhood memories more than from his characters. His parents, who had progressed socially, ended up living in a spacious house in the San Fernando Valley. The décor, volumes, and layouts of this suburb were thus familiar to him, yet did not seem welcoming.
Haynes describes his parents with affection and mentions their support for their three children. However, he felt out of place with the style of the houses where he grew up. This distance could merge with a more general one that appears when one enters adolescence and begins to separate from the family world.
Several filming locations directly extend these memories. Scenes were filmed in a room of his grandparents’ house, as well as in an uncle’s house in Malibu Canyon. An exterior shot also shows his parents’ garage, while some clothes worn by Moore came from her mother’s wardrobe.
These details do not transform the film into a strictly autobiographical narrative. They rather give its universe a concrete basis, made up of spaces and objects already loaded with personal memory. The apparent comfort of the interiors thus becomes more ambiguous, as if familiarity itself could conceal unease.
The suburb of Safe is not caricatured as a hostile backdrop from the very first shot. It gradually gains an oppressive quality as Carol loses confidence in what surrounds her. The film generates its tension in this gradual transformation of the everyday.
This slow drift distinguishes the threat of Safe from the more overtly spectacular horror of Poison. In one case, anxiety attaches itself to a body already perceived as monstrous; in the other, it seeps into ordinary interiors. Haynes indeed describes the film as a narrative permeated by a strange fatality, where the banal object can suddenly become unsettling.
Julianne Moore, the art of making an enigmatic character visible
The encounter between Todd Haynes and Julianne Moore unfolds around the screenplay for Safe. The actress, who was then transitioning from television to film, had caught the director’s attention in Short Cuts, by Robert Altman. Haynes found her remarkable, although he was not yet sure if she would be the right interpreter for Carol White.
Moore, for her part, discovers the screenplay and wishes to meet the filmmaker. She arrives with a precise idea of how her character might speak and requests to present it to him during an audition. This initiative provides Haynes the opportunity to see a figure he had conceived as almost invisible take shape before him.
Her interpretation relies on restraint rather than emphasis. Moore gives Carol a delicate and nuanced presence, without providing all the keys to her identity. The viewer thus retains the freedom to wonder: what does she know about herself, and what is projected onto her?
For Haynes, this way of acting required considerable courage. The actress accepts leaving uncertain zones and not explaining the character on behalf of the audience. Her work does not reduce Carol to a diagnosis or an enigma; it maintains, on the contrary, an essential opacity to the film.
The filmmaker recalls this audition as a defining moment in his career. The experience immediately made him eager to work with Moore on other projects. Their collaboration would extend particularly to Far from Heaven, The Wonderstruck, and, more recently, May December.
Over the course of these films, a mutual understanding has developed without necessitating lengthy theoretical analyses of the character. Haynes appreciates the trust Moore brings to her work and her precise knowledge of her craft. This common ground allows him to focus on what emerges in the images, sometimes beyond what was perceptible on set.
The director emphasizes that the camera often captures nuances that escape direct observation. The performance then builds as an exchange between the actor, the frame, and the audience’s gaze. Each collaboration renews this exploration, without the mystery of interpretation disappearing.
After Safe, this artistic relationship grew to become, according to Haynes, a rare complicity. They share a history made up of distinct projects and successive experiences, rather than a fixed method. The continuity between their films primarily lies in the trust placed in nuances and silences.
In Haynes’s works, this trust is particularly visible when the character does not fully reveal herself. The viewer must observe gestures, variations in voice, and relationships between bodies. Moore brings to this approach a presence that resists definitive interpretations.
The two restored feature films now offer the chance to rediscover the forms that have nourished this search. From the narrative fragmentation of Poison to the diffuse threat of Safe, Haynes examines how images organize our fears and judgments. Their new screenings have accompanied the mini-retrospective of the Lumière Festival, while the video editions proposed by BubblePop prolong this rediscovery.
From the provocation of “Poison” to the unsettling strangeness of “Safe”
In the interview given in Lyon, Todd Haynes revisits two films that explore, each in its own way, the boundaries of exclusion. With “Poison”, his first feature film, he assembles three stories with distinct forms — faux documentary, horror, and prison drama — to bring forth figures rejected by their community. Inspired notably by Jean Genet, the film subverts genre codes and refuses to make comfortable the questions it raises. Illness, desire, and marginality become both subjects of cinema and territories of contestation.
Haynes describes this approach as a personal and American appropriation of Genet’s work. The narratives do not merge into a single story: their differences in tone and visual language remain visible, like the marks of an acknowledged making. This fragmented form accompanies a reflection on what culture chooses to show or conceal. In the horror segment, the figure condemned by the conventions of the genre speaks up and questions both shame and pride. The narration does not restore order nor promise an easy liberation; it leaves its tensions open.
Two years later, “Safe” shifts this anxiety into the familiar spaces of the American middle class. Where “Poison” showcases socially rejected bodies, the film led by Julianne Moore follows a woman who becomes a stranger to her own environment. A house, a couch, or the everyday air can carry an invisible threat. Haynes evokes an environmental illness, but also the tendency to place the responsibility for suffering on individuals, while collective causes fade away. The calm of the settings and Moore’s restrained performance enhance this sensation of unease, without offering a definitive explanation.
Between these works, the filmmaker evolves his language without abandoning his concerns: vulnerable bodies, social norms, and stories that confine or render visible. The grain of 16 mm, the subverted genres, and the attention to the performers give these universes a singular substance, both precise and unsettling.
