Todd Haynes on enchanting childhood tale Wonderstruck
For the past three decades, Todd Haynes has been one of the most important voices in American indie cinema. Here he discusses new film Wonderstruck, using sign language and the Velvet Underground
In Wonderstruck, two young children, Ben (Oakes Fegley) and Rose (Millicent Simmonds), live in different eras – the 1970s and the 1920s respectively. They are both deaf and both run away from home, hoping to seek the solution to a mystery in the big city, their stories intertwining in an almost magical way. Using silent cinema as inspiration, Todd Haynes’ adaptation of Brian Selznick’s novel of the same name is a bold experiment and a marked departure from his last film, the lesbian love story Carol. When we met up at the Locarno Film Festival in Switzerland last summer, we ask what drew the doyen of New Queer Cinema and the director of Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story and Velvet Goldmine to make his first children’s film.
What appealed to you about adapting Brian Selznick’s novel?
Todd Haynes: What it offered me was – and I hate [the] word – the ‘purest’ elements of cinema because it doesn’t rely on the spoken word. There’s even less dialogue than I realised. It wasn’t until we cut it, I realised there was no talking for an hour. These two kids are deaf – Ben is newly deaf and he has no one to talk to as he’s travelling through New York – so it relies on the editorial language of film; music, performance and faces.
It relies on the most fundamental elements of cinematic language. It lets all those things shine, without feeling gratuitous: they are elemental to how the film works. It also shows off the talents of my team, from Edward Lachman’s cinematography to the production design to the costume, so in that way it’s a real piece of craftsmanship.
The film is set in two distinct historical periods. Which was more difficult: tackling the 20s or 70s?
They were both equally hard. Even where to begin to settle for locations for the 70s, because [New York] has been so cleaned up. But what was logistically the biggest challenge is that we were shooting the movie with kids. So you only have eight to nine hours with any kid and that is way under a normal shooting day.
To make a day work we shot the 20s and 70s both on the same day. You can only imagine what that meant from a production standpoint. We had to have sets, costumes, cars, logistics all worked out to shoot some 20s and 70s on the same day, every day.
Millicent Simmonds in Wonderstruck
Although there’s little spoken dialogue, there is sign language...
Interestingly, there isn’t much sign language. When Julianne Moore’s character shows up, she is an adult who knows how to sign, but Rose doesn’t use sign language and Ben has only recently become deaf and so doesn’t know how to sign either. But this really was an invitation to try and think of ways of bringing the deaf people into the process of making the film and that began with the task of casting Rose.
It just seemed... how could we not cast a deaf kid for the role of Rose? But you have a limited quantity of people to choose from; it took real research and going out of the conventional modes of casting. No agents or anything like that. So we had to go out into the country and find out what cities had deaf communities, targeting them at schools and putting up notices on bulletin boards in hallways, and wait for a response. And it starts to trickle in.
How long did you have to look?
It took about two months. I saw Millicent’s self-audition and something leaped inside. She just conveyed this whole being; her signing, and the way signing uses body gesture and face. And hers just hit me at the core. You just pray that thing you sensed could be supported by a whole other range of disciplines and abilities that you don’t know.
The other cool thing is that we brought all these other actors as players into the silent part of the film, so we could bring even more deaf actors into the process to play hearing roles. A lot of them come from deaf theatre and have long and interesting careers in deaf performance in the community but this was all new for me. But it was fantastic to have all of that play out every day on set, and have the crew have lessons in signing.
Did you learn some sign language?
I learned a bit. It’s hard to retain it when you’re not using it all the time but I know my alphabet really well, so I could also finger spell.
This is your first family film. Was it difficult to make that transition?
Yeah it was. We decided to bring kids into the process of watching cuts all the way through the editing of the film. I do this with all my films; we’ll have family and friends screenings. In this case, we always had kids come in, so my editor and myself were interested in how the kids would respond, even at the simple level of duration, complexity, the double narrative, the lack of dialogue.
A lot of things that one would think in today’s culture, with so much distraction and digital stimulus, were asked: the short attention span, kids can’t sit still, the fact kids aren’t supposed to be interested in movies in general, let alone something of this complexity. And time and again, the kids seemed to be completely up for the experience.
You’ve also just announced a Velvet Underground film...
An invitation to do a documentary about the Velvet Underground came from the Universal Music Group who control the music. They’d been working with Laurie Anderson, who controls the Lou Reed archives, and it was through her recommendation, which meant even more to me.
We are just in the very beginnings of the conversations. I’ve never done a doc before so it’s going to be a learning experience. We’re basically doing the research, seeing who is still alive. There aren’t that many people who survived that era. It’s mainly John Cale and Maureen Tucker from the original band who are still with us.
Is it important where Wonderstruck is going to be seen? Amazon, TV, streaming?
Yeah. Of course, I am first and foremost a filmmaker of cinema. I want my movies to be seen on the screen. Wonderstruck is 2.40:1 aspect ratio and I want Amazon to do that. They still respect and privilege the theatrical experience and have built in theatrical windows into all their releases. And, of course, it will go beyond that into the ancillaries where all movies go, and that’s fine, but I just want it to have a shot in the biggest, most commanding venues.
Wonderstruck screens at Glasgow Film Festival: Thu 22 Feb, GFT, 5.45pm | Fri 23 Feb, GFT, 3.15pm
Released in the UK on 6 Apr by StudioCanal
Read more about Glasgow Film Festival in The CineSkinny – in print at Glasgow Film Theatre and the CCA, and online at theskinny.co.uk/film/cineskinny