Notes from the Production

Director's Statement

"Creating a fifties-era melodrama today and playing it straight, smack in the midst of this pumped-up, adrenaline-crazed era, might seem a perplexing impulse. Yet the strongest melodramas are those without apparent villains, where characters end up hurting each other unwittingly, just by pursuing their desires. To impose upon the seeming innocence of the 1950s themes as mutually volatile as race and sexuality is to reveal how volatile those subjects remain today - and how much our current climate of complacent stability has in common with that bygone era."

-- Todd Haynes

About the Production

With his latest film, writer/director Todd Haynes reinterprets and revisits a great, almost forgotten Hollywood genre - the domestic melodrama. Far from Heaven is inspired by the films of John Stahl (Leave Her to Heaven, Magnificent Obsession [1935], Imitation of Life [1934]) and, more particularly, the films of Douglas Sirk. Not unike those classics of the genre, Haynes' new film explores multiple layers simultaneously.

As with many of the masterpieces of the genre, Far from Heaven is set in a prosperous suburbia, a world of bright bourgeois satisfaction and Technicolor splendor that all but overpowers the lonely inner life of its protagonists. In All That Heaven Allows, Jane Wyman plays a widow who falls in love with a younger man (Rock Hudson); in There's Always Tomorrow, Fred MacMurray portrays a neglected husband who reconnects with an old flame. In these and other films, love and other dormant emotions are ignited - only to be stamped out by the critical moralizing of friends and family. In Far from Heaven, the small, whispered innuendoes and self-satisfied smugness of the community block the changes that Cathy Whitaker (Julianne Moore) is undergoing.

"Maternal melodramas are a tradition that inspired this film and this style of filmmaking," comments Haynes. "They've been part of American film history since it began.

"We tried to approximate a whole look, a whole style, and a whole cinematic language that aren't familiar today. Styles of '50s filmmaking have certainly gone away: backlot Hollywood in Universal Pictures movies, for example, the experience of working in a studio system with seasoned technicians working in a factory of illusion-making that was honed and refined over the years."

"With Far from Heaven, the style and the content are inseparable - as they are in most of the films I respect, where you can't imagine the story being told any other way. The style reflects the emotional experience of the story. There's a distancing effect with the style we're exploring - but ultimately it's not my goal to distance.

"I wanted to have the emotional impact and the stylistic conventions ultimately work as one. I think that what happens in the best melodramas is that there is a sense in which you are observing it from afar and you're seeing what they're doing…but you can't help getting drawn in emotionally at the same time. It's because these films are about subtle social dynamics, very large and very small things that don't really change. They're also about love and despair and disappointment and betrayal - the stuff we all experience. So you can't help but be sucked in - and that's my goal with Far from Heaven."

Haynes sought to recreate the perfect, pristine look of mid-century Hollywood studio films. He assembled a brilliant creative team that included production designer Mark Friedberg (The Ice Storm); cinematographer Ed Lachman (Erin Brokovich); and Academy Award-winning costume designer Sandy Powell (Shakespeare in Love), with whom Haynes had previously collaborated on Velvet Goldmine. Together, the creative team studied the movies of the period and re-created the heightened, intensive perfection of those films' sets, costumes, color palettes, frame compositions, and lighting.

Haynes states, "While the look and style of those '50s melodramas are anything but realistic, there's something almost spookily accurate about the emotional truths of those films. They are hyperreal, that's why we call them melodramas. Because they are about the kinds of things that are close to our private, personal lives, like falling out of love with somebody."

Far from Heaven explores several social themes: racism, homosexuality, and the role of women in families. In making a film set in the 1950s, Haynes notes he "was very aware of the sense of superiority that we all feel about the '50s because in some ways the decade has been reduced to a series of clichés around suburban, conservative Americana. It's shocking to think that the same year Marilyn Monroe was at her peak, Joan Baez released her first album and was n instant sensation. Those two examples of femininity that we now put into such separate categories existed at the same time. So there are all kinds of contradictions to the idea that the '50s was just one thing. It's exciting to use some of those expectations as a way of disarming the audience a little bit for Far from Heaven."

The theme of maternal sacrifice is central to many of the greatest Hollywood melodramas, from King Vidor's Stella Dallas to Sirk's Imitation of Life (1959). In Far from Heaven, the character of Cathy, played by Julianne Moore, shows how much women were forced to give up to sacrifice to their family, while the men ultimately move on in search of their happiness. Says Haynes, "Sadly, it's at the point where she gives it up, gives up her desires or hope for satisfaction, that she gains her voice."

He adds, "We're also still struggling with racism to an incredible degree. People are still grappling with their sexuality, even in a world that offers positive alternatives all over the place. Racial and sexual orientation are still ingrained as conflicts in our culture - they're still very pertinent."

Haynes also sought to explore the differences between parenting today and parenting then. He comments, "Certain aspects of contemporary culture underscore aspects of this particular period more than others - which is always the case when you're in any particular historical period looking back. In today's culture, there is a panic around any kind of crossing of certain lines or rules about how children should be treated or dealt with; children have become the central force of the family and many parents' lives.

"In addition to All That Heaven Allows, Max Ophuls' The Reckless Moment [recently remade as The Deep End] is an influence on Far from Heaven. In the films of the '50s, children are part of the maternal jobs and responsibilities: the good mother is the one who keeps them clean and quiet and in their place. You also see this in beloved TV shows like Father Knows Best, where it's the mother who is more strict and obsessed with cleanliness and manners and all that stuff. Yet you don't hate her; you don't think she's bad or have any resentment toward her. So it's not meant to be a big flaw in the character of Cathy.

"In many of Sirk's films, it's the children - older kids - who are often the most extreme spokespeople for the repressions of their culture. There's no entimentality towards offspring in those films. It's a very interesting concept: maybe being the mother in an American household isn't this fully blessed existence; maybe the children aren't the perfect flowers of your life and the only things in the world."

Julianne Moore, with whom Todd Haynes first collaborated on Safe, was his first choice for the role of Cathy, a woman who finds her entire life shattering. Moore recalls, "Todd sent me the script in the spring of 2000. He said, 'This is the movie that I've been working on and that I want you to do.' It was pretty much a final draft: with Todd, I find that everything that he wants is evident in the script. Having worked with him before, I had insight into what he was going for with Far from Heaven."

In describing their working relationship, Haynes says, "We have a kind of unspoken connection where we don't over-discuss; she is able to interpret my ideas. We clicked from when she read Safe. With Julianne, as with all the best actors, most of the director's work is done by simply selecting them. Every actor needs some element of privacy about what they do, and they protect it. Julianne is drawn to characters that are conflicted and have complexities and are not catering to your sentiment in any overt or direct way. She knows how to hold back and she intuitively understands that what gives an audience the strongest experience watching a film is when you have something to fill in yourself - where the actor doesn't show you every piece of it, and you put yourself in there as an active spectator."

On Gender

Julianne Moore says, "The character that I play is a very traditional '50s homemaker and I particularly wanted her to be a classic American ideal, the women that you've seen in all those movies from the '50s. She should be this ideal - and then you see her life deviate from that ideal pattern.

"In this film, there are issues of bigotry and prejudice, but this is ultimately Todd's most feminist movie. His point is that here might be sexual differences and cultural differences and racial differences, but the first and most important difference is determined at birth - whether you're a boy or a girl. Everything in Cathy's life is defined by her very femaleness. As much as the men in the film are going through all these things, they're the ones who manage to go on. Cathy is the one left behind, because she is female."

Moore, like Haynes, believes that the story in the film is not dated and is completely relevant to our modern lives. She explains, "Although people are kind of loath to say it, I think that there is a way we publicly live our lives. In Far from Heaven, you see people being forced into certain social situations and having to behave in a particular way because of the place they're in and the people they're speaking to. But then there are the private moments, where they reveal other things. As an actor, it's a wonderful thing to do, to be able to do both the public and the private in the same film."

On Sexuality

Todd Haynes notes, "Far from Heaven does deviate from the thematic possibilities afforded films in the '50s in its depiction of homosexuality. Before the 1960s, homosexuality could only be alluded to in American film by way of comically flamboyant or ridiculous supporting characters or cameos."

Douglas Sirk cast a little-known Universal contract player, Rock Hudson, as the lead in his 1954 film Magnificent Obsession. The picture, produced by the openly gay Ross Hunter, was a hit and made Hudson a star. The actor would go on to star in four more films for the same director and producer.

Haynes adds, "So, homosexuality, while behind-the-scenes, was indeed evident in the making of the films - as it was, arguably, in the aesthetics of many directors of 'women's films,' like George Cukor and Vincente Minnelli. While thematically restricted, a gay or 'feminine' aesthetic was free to pervade the profuse visual style of those films: the clothes, the colors, the lavish décor. Far from Heaven may just be bringing into the level of content what was always there, bristling beneath the surface."

In Far from Heaven, Cathy's husband Frank, played by Dennis Quaid, is forced to finally admit to his homosexuality when his wife discovers his feelings. Haynes comments, "At the time, homosexuality was considered an illness. Even in the most civil and well-educated circles, that was considered the tolerant way of looking at the condition. Yet when I did research on homosexuality and its treatment at that particular time, I was surprised. You think of the '50s, you assume shock treatment and all of these horrific, panicky things because we think of the '50s as so patently repressive. In fact, there were breakthroughs in the late '40s and in some writings, doctors were haying that this was not a sickness and that you really can't change it. So it was actually more progressive than I thought.

"But I feel that, for someone like Frank, there are no examples around him of any positive way to look to, to be, to live, to exist in this moat. So the only way for him to get through the day was to decide he was going to fix it: there must be a way to stitch it up and let it heal, or take a medicine or whatever, and that's the way he approached it. But that doesn't work, and it shouldn't and it can't."

The casting of actor Dennis Quaid, who throughout his career has so effortlessly embodied comfortable masculinity on-screen, enhances the role of Frank, the suburban "Pop" and husband who can no longer hide the truth of his homosexuality from himself or his wife.

Quaid notes, "I'd seen a couple of Todd's movies and found him to be an artist, with a very interesting point of view about life. When I read the script, my first impression was that it would be good for me to play this character because I hadn't done a role like this before - and had never seen this character situation in a film. On the exterior, it looks like Frank has the perfect life: he has a wife and two kids and he's a top sales executive for Magnatech TV. But he's very troubled and shamed by his secret life.

"What I appreciated about Todd's writing and direction is that it would have been very easy to parody these people and have a laugh, but he doesn't: there is an emotional integrity to it. It's set in the '50s, a time when people swept things under the carpet; behind those neat rose palaces that people lived in, all kinds of drama went on that we never knew about. Things are more open these days, but people still have the same emotions and feelings."

Haynes says, "Dennis and I talked after he'd read the script. While we spoke about the style being inseparable from the content, one of the things that drew him to the film was the fact that he'd never played a character like this before: a gay man, and one so conflicted. He understood the conflict that Frank is going through not just as an actor but as a person, because he said that he's had some very close friends for whom this has been the case."

Of his on-screen same-sex kiss, Quaid remarks, "It's all about being a human being, it's all about love. Like any love scene, the hardest part was just waiting around to do it. And once you've done the scene three or four times - hey, it's all in a day's work."

Haynes confirms, "There was no problem with Dennis doing that scene. He started, in the initial takes, in a more muscular kind of way. I said that it needed to be more simple - romantic and tender. That is harder, and maybe more threatening, to portray. But he was great."

On Race

Far from Heaven also explores the relationship between blacks and whites in 1950s suburbia. Dennis Haysbert plays Raymond, the widower gardener to whom Cathy is drawn. Haysbert himself was drawn to the film's "emotional content. In the fewest words, it's 'love unrequited.' I loved my character, I loved all the characters, I always wanted to work with Julianne Moore, so I said, 'Let's go.'" That was easier said than done, as the shooting schedule of Far from Heaven was concurrent with the one for the TV series "24," in which Haysbert costars. But the actor managed to work on both projects at once, commuting between the West and East Coasts.

In his trips East for Far from Heaven, Haysbert found his director to be "a man who definitely knows what he wants. At once I felt very comfortable."

Haynes in turn found the actor to be "this amazingly gentle and lovely and smart and grounded man. He is all of those things that you see in the film. Julianne so loved working with him, and between them it worked exactly as it was conceived in the writing."

Haysbert notes, "Raymond is a good man born at the wrong time. He and Cathy live in a time where they just don't fit with what people perceive to be normal. They're two people caught in this world and they're not going to be able to be together because they have too many people close to them that will be hurt. So they sacrifice."

The burgeoning relationship between Cathy and Raymond highlights the taboo that was interracial dating and marriage in the '50s, in both the white and the black communities. Like '50s Hollywood melodramas, Far from Heaven is set primarily in the wealthy, white world. Haynes notes that "there is the whole world of black Hartford that we do not see. We see it all through the little perfectly white happy family keyhole that is Cathy Whitaker's point of view. It's like this moment in Imitation of Life that is so beautiful: Lana Turner has spent her entire life with her maid, Juanita Moore, and the maid is dying. She says she wants a great funeral with all her friends there, and Lana Turner says, 'Annie, I didn't know that you had friends.' And Juanita Moore says, 'Well, Miss Laura, you never asked.' That tells you that this film has left something big out - and not only has Lana Turner never shown interest in her black maid's life, neither have we the audience. We never asked, and we didn't even think about it until it was brought up in the dialogue. It both shows you what's not there and acknowledges that it should have been there and we didn't even think about it. It's not necessarily Lana Turner's problem as much as it is all of ours.

"There's a nod to Imitation of Life in Far from Heaven with the sequence where Cathy is asking her maid, Sybil [Viola Davis], 'You must know of a good charity,' and the NAACP comes but she doesn't have time for them. Even in her own good intentions, Cathy is whisking past real people with real lives that she isn't interacting with in a deep way."

Mindful of life imitating art, Haynes comments, "You know, it's hard to cast a strong actress like Viola Davis and put her in maid's clothes and have her saying, 'Yes, Mrs. Whitaker…No, Mrs. Whitaker.' But we were trying to show the double standard and partial vision of white America. Not just how it deals with race but how that partial vision is reflected in the films that come out of white America. Viola was smart and secure, and loved the film's story."

Haysbert muses, "This is probably the film I've done that I'm most proud of. It's a very interesting period for me to portray. It's so uncomfortable in a lot of ways. People can't seem to get beyond the color of Raymond's skin. But, in trying to act on his sensibilities, he gets it from both sides: the people of color as well as their white counterparts. It's pretty balanced among unbalanced ways of thinking."

Haynes adds, "Raymond represents, for Cathy, a possible liberation from her life and her fate. Raymond represents integrity but he's flawed too. He believes, too much, that the white world and the black world can co-exist. He encourages his 11-year-old daughter, Sarah, to interact with white culture and then they're both punished."

On Actors

Rounding out the principal cast is Patricia Clarkson, who plays Cathy Whitaker's best friend Eleanor Fine. Haynes sees both character and actress as referencing and reinforcing "the tradition of the supporting actress - think Eve Arden, Agnes Moorehead. Patty Clarkson is a chameleon, she completely changes from role to role. She's fantastic. She reads Eleanor's lines and you can't imagine anyone else performing the role.

"Patty brings a great sense of flair and elegance to Eleanor. You look to El as somebody who could probably handle most of the stuff that Cathy feels too afraid to share with her through most of the film. You watch the friendship between these two women get pushed apart."

Clarkson comments, "Todd and I didn't know one another, but he knew my work and wrote me this beautiful letter. The script was wonderful. Knowing how very specifically Todd was going to shoot it, I thought, 'Mmmm, this could be interesting.' Eleanor thinks she's something that she isn't and wants to be something that she isn't, but she clearly has a great love and fondness for her best friend.

"Eleanor fancies herself to be quite sophisticated. She's married but she doesn't have any children. She has the more 'freewheeling life' than Cathy, yet she is unfortunately still somewhat conventional and is in fact not as open-minded as Cathy. Everybody in this film has a secret life somewhere. You realize just how difficult it was for people to live in this time and how trying it was for their psyches and souls."

Moore allows, "I did look at a few Sirk films during pre-production - like All That Heaven Allows, which is a major influence on this film. But the style is embedded in my brain - I've seen Imitation of Life so many times over the years. Far from Heaven required - not realistic acting per se, but a realistic feeling beneath. Absolutely everybody that Todd has found for this movie has been wonderful."

Clarkson agrees: "We had so many great people involved in this. It was an opportunity for me to work with Julianne for the first time: I admire her work so much. And I love Todd. He knows his film perfectly, inside and out, and can just say the tiniest thing and it's exactly right and makes the difference in the scene. He's so enthusiastic that it makes for a great atmosphere to work in. That's important for an actor, to be comfortable and to feel positive people around you in even the darkest scenes."

Quaid adds, "I loved working with Julianne, because she and I work a lot alike, we don't do a lot of 'method' stuff. We're interested in getting it done. Julianne is the kind of actress with whom you don't see the work going on."

Haynes laughs, "They're actors who aren't all 'Don't talk to me!' and 'method.' They're not the least bit indulgent."

Of his own process, Quaid elaborates, "Basically, I've read the script and have thought about it a lot. Then I like to go out there and see what happens in the moment. There does come a time in the shooting of a film when I feel that I know more about my character than the director does. But I'm an actor who likes to be directed: I like to work with very strong directors who have definite ideas and points of view. Todd is one."

Haynes comments, "Dennis adapted his performance to the acting style of the time: a little more heightened, a little bit cleaner and tidier than today's more method-infused naturalism. He brought that into his performance without sacrificing the emotional truth."

On Location

Meticulously recreating fall 1957 and winter 1958 was a challenge that would have daunted larger and higher-profile productions than Far from Heaven. But Todd Haynes and crew were ready. Haynes admits, "It was hugely ambitious, and we had a very tough schedule to keep. But we also had top-notch people across the board. It just permeated the production.

"We had a nicely diverse crew, too, and that made me feel good because that isn't always the case. So, from the start, it felt like it was already collaborative with a lot of different points of view."

Some of the key creative collaborators, such as production designer Mark Friedberg and director of photography Ed Lachman, had not worked with Haynes prior. Costume designer Sandy Powell, though, had, earning an Academy Award nomination for her work on Haynes' Velvet Goldmine. Friedberg, whom Haynes describes as "a driven artist," had a mandate to design "a movie that looked like a '50s studio movie. We tried to make our locations look like sets and our sets look like locations."

Far from Heaven was filmed not in Hartford, Connecticut but in and around New Jersey. Bayonne's Military Ocean Terminal offered office and stage facilities that the production could, and did, take full advantage of. Located just 7 miles from downtown Manhattan, the Terminal was formerly used as the Eastern headquarters for the United States Army. Additional filming was one on locations in New Jersey (including Bloomfield), as well as in Manhattan.

"Todd was well-prepared and had a clear sense of how he wanted to portray this seemingly perfect world. We drew up a map of Hartford, and found that we required about four different streets for 'downtown Hartford'," remembers Friedberg. "These were made up of four different towns, one street for one part of town and another street for another part of town - so that, on-screen, someone is just turning a corner but in reality they were going to the other side of the state.

"There's always a lot of work when you're outdoors on a period film because of the amount of real estate you have to cover. Every façade has to be dealt with, and some have to be put up."

Haynes adds, "It was expensive, for our budget. Any exterior stuff is tough. Mark would say, 'You almost pay by the square foot,' because if you're doing a block of storefronts, one more store is that many more square feet of cost.

"You know how in period films, the cars are spotlessly clean - that drives me crazy. But in Far from Heaven, I wanted them to be spotlessly clean because we were doing a film in homage to Hollywood filmmaking, soundstage backlot films. So we would take these gritty streets of New Jersey, clean them off, clean the building fronts, make the perfect awning…The crew would crack up because I would go back and adjust a little candy dish or move an ashtray until it was just right…"

Friedberg comments, "For me, this was a great thing: he understood the difference between a warm color and a cool color, and he could speak my language. Todd is a director who understands every job: what a painter does, what a carpenter does, what a sound man does. He's like a conductor: the words and the colors and the music will all go together to tell this story."

For sequences set during Cathy and Frank's New Year's trip to Miami, the filmmakers got especially creative. Friedberg recalls, "We got to create Miami with a combination of the set of a terrace restaurant, with a Latin band on a starry New Year's Eve; and a matching location we found in the Rockaways, which was an old beach club modeled after a Miami hut.

"We had to make it seamless - like you're in Miami, you just went outside, this is what you'd find. The trick is for what you do to be beautiful yet not call attention to itself, so that you stay with what's being told in the story. If we do a lot of work, it will look like we didn't do any. If we don't do enough work, then you will notice it and we won't have served the story."

The sequence set at the Hartford Cultural Center's modern art show called for extra materials: the artwork. Friedberg says, "We made all the art for that, which was pretty fun to do. Nothing was a free-for-all. Todd was very specific about the kind of art. We made art in the style of the various abstract painters of the early '50s. And - not paintings, prints."

Special sequences and scenes notwithstanding, Far from Heaven's Whitaker homestead was "our single biggest design challenge," states Friedberg. "Like in a lot of these '50s melodramas, the house is the center of the story.

"We decided we would build the house, although the set itself is broken up into pieces. Originally, Todd wanted a Colonial house. As we talked, we realized that it's a confining architecture and that the Whitakers are a couple at the peak of their success, so they might have something more contemporary. Rather than go completely modern, we mixed it up: the house has Colonial elements in a modern setting. It's an open floor plan, and we also had to see outside to where Raymond works."

Inside the house, the décor has come together through the efforts of homemaker Cathy. Friedberg notes, "It is a reflection of her personality, so that the story can be told. As we join the story, Cathy is a together woman who has probably decorated the house herself or had a hand in it. She's not a modernist, and she's not an architect. She's traditional, but with flair."

Costume Concepts

"The task at the beginning was the same as it as the beginning of any movie," states costume designer Sandy Powell. "Create the costumes for the look of the film and help create the characters through their respective costumes."

Powell had worked with Julianne Moore once before, costuming the actress for her Academy Award-nominated performance in The End of the Affair. "So," the designer elaborates, "I knew her body shape. I knew her coloring - of course, I kept imagining her with red hair, and in this movie she's blonde…We didn't see the blonde wig until the last minute. I steered away from the colors I would normally use for her."

Moore comments, "We decided to go with the blonde wig that I wear to play Cathy rather than my own hair color. Todd initially talked about Cathy just having my own hair color, but I said, 'That's not what you see in American film. You almost always see a blonde.'"

Patricia Clarkson confides, "I dyed my hair for this movie. I do wear one or two vintage pieces, but pretty much everything I wear Sandy has designed - quite a feast for the eye. I couldn't ever eat a big lunch, but what the hell…The hair, the make-up, just having gloves on - my mother is going to be so happy to see me in this film…

"Some of my shirts I wear as Eleanor are Lauren Bacall-esque shirts. They're all vibrant colors, very autumnal. The eyebrows and false eyelashes are very '50s. The lipstick I wear in the film is 'Cherries in the Snow,' an actual shade of red from the 1950s. Revlon still has it - not on the shelves, but make-up artists can get it."

Moore notes, "Sandy is tremendously talented and she always considers both character and the overall theme of the movie. We were in a fitting very early on, and she told me, 'I can't believe it - Todd and I actually had a meeting about color!' She, Todd, Ed Lachman, and Mark Friedberg had gone through the movie scene by scene and talked about the color palette in each of the scenes, because it plays a part in the style and emotion of the film. Various colors represent different characters, and the mood of the film changes through light and color."

"Those meetings, purely about color, were such a luxury," states Powell. "I've never had it happen before. We were clear about which colors were going to be in each scene. It gave us focal points."

Most of the lead actors' costumes were designed, and made, by Powell and her team. Powell explains, "We did hunt for vintage clothes. We went to shops and markets, and we rented. But on the whole, it's difficult to find something in perfect condition - because it's obviously quite a few years old by now."

The party scene at the Whitakers' with Cathy as hostess is, says Powell, "an important moment in the movie, one where she has to look a little bit more than the Miss Perfect housewife. It's one of the dressiest scenes overall, but Cathy has to look sexy in a way - it's when Frank notices other men noticing her. The dress isn't totally out-there sexy, but with the lace it's a bit more revealing than normal."

For other sequences focusing on Cathy, Powell reveals that "the shoes are made to match the dresses. As for the beautiful scarf that she wears and temporarily loses, it's silk chiffon - it had to be able to fly off easily…"

Having recreated outfits from the '70s (on Velvet Goldmine) and the '50s (on Far from Heaven) already for Todd Haynes - and from even older periods for other moviemakers - Powell finds that "each one is a learning experience. Every period you do - and I don't have a favorite - you learn things you didn't know before.

"One of the most interesting parts of the job is when you're working with the actors, developing their character. Rarely do you get an actress who says, 'I don't care what I wear.' That doesn't usually happen."

The Sirk Touch

Douglas Sirk (1900-1987) was, as Todd Haynes recounts, "a German-born intellectual who knew Brecht, and worked in European theater in the '20s and '30s. He was a progressive radical by the standards of Nazi Germany. His first wife, who he divorced, got very closely aligned to the Nazi party. His second wife was a Jewish woman, so they fled to America.

"In Hollywood, in the 1950s at Universal Studios, he was hired to make these screen versions of Ladies Home Journal sort of stories. The films he made have become well-known, cherished, and later studied in the 'auteur' traditions. They are mostly known for their vivid use of Technicolor, but their beautiful lighting also boldly infuses 'film noir' darks and shadows. The films were stories of women in domestic settings that were also about the repressive nature of American bourgeois culture."

Haynes admits, All That Heaven Allows is probably my favorite of his films. It was a follow-up to his first big hit, Magnificent Obsession. He put together the same three lead actors - Jane Wyman, Rock Hudson, Agnes Moorehead - for All That Heaven Allows, which is considerably more down-to-earth in its themes. It's about an older woman/younger man scandal in a small town.

"Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Ali - Fear Eats the Soul [1974] is a remake of that film. Fassbinder was moved by Sirk's empathy towards his films' characters. Fassbinder himself was known for being a difficult man. His treatment of his subjects in his films is often very cruel as well. I think Fassbinder envied the care and gentleness that he allowed his central female characters. He said, 'Until Sirk's films, I'd never seen movies where you see women thinking on screen.'

Haynes feels that Fassbinder's comment "is true. People might laugh at the brazen color and Rock Hudson. But the performances by Jane Wyman, and other actresses who played central female characters, ground the movies and start to affect you as you watch them, despite the melodramatic quality."

Julianne Moore adds, "What was so magnificent about his movies was that you'd be watching, with the camera at a remove, and you'd find yourself inadvertently caught up in the story and truly moved by it. That's what I'm hoping will happen with Far from Heaven."

Filmmaking Partnerships Past and Present

Douglas Sirk's Imitation of Life (1959) was the filmmaker's tenth collaboration with prolific studio producer Ross Hunter. With that film, the successful partnership reached its zenith and, as the director left the United States, its conclusion. It was preceded by their teamings on Interlude (1957); Battle Hymn (1957): There's Always Tomorrow (1956); All That Heaven Allows (1955); Captain Lightfoot (1955); Taza, Son Of Cochise (1954); Magnificent Obsession (1954); Take Me To Town (1953); and All I Desire (1953).

Some four decades later, the comparable team behind Far from Heaven is gaining ground, with almost as many projects completed: the new film marks the fourth feature collaboration between prolific independent producer Christine Vachon and filmmaker Todd Haynes. However, Vachon reminds that the pair "started working together in the mid-1980s, after I saw Todd's short film Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story. Later, we did a short film called Dottie Gets Spanked. It's been a very good relationship - creatively profitable, not so economically profitable yet, but…"

The producer notes that the new film has been a passion project for the pair: "Todd started talking a couple of years ago about doing a melodrama in the Douglas Sirk tradition, in Technicolor, what we traditionally think of as 'women's pictures': Imitation of Life, All That Heaven Allows, Written on the Wind…They were these incredible candy-boxed movies - yet they were able to deal with issues of race and class in ways that were incredibly subversive for the time and are in fact still somewhat subversive."

Vachon reveals, "My favorite thing about working with Todd is that there's very little tension between us. People who don't know better like to describe a producer/director relationship as one that's inherently combative. In my experience, a great producer/director relationship is about one enabling the other. We trust each other to such a degree that we don't need to have those arguments. Not that we don't disagree sometimes, but there's a shorthand in the way we're able to relate to each other that's quite fun."

Vachon also relished reteaming with Far from Heaven leading lady Julianne Moore: "When I worked with Julianne the first time, on Safe, she was at the beginning of what was clearly going to be a stellar film career, but wasn't yet. Now it is, and it's great to be able to work with her again."

The Far from Heaven Effect

Dennis Haysbert comments, "What I would hope for is that when people watch Far from Heaven, they'll look back over their lives and see opportunities they've missed and say, 'I'm never going to let this happen again. The next time I find love, no matter who it is, no matter what color or size or religion or whatever, I'm going to go for it.' If someone can walk out of the theater with that in mind, then we will have succeeded."

Dennis Quaid says, "I hope people see themselves when they see Far from Heaven, and can relate to it."

Patricia Clarkson adds, "People will recognize it as being like one of those great old beautiful '50s movies, but then will see what we all knew existed in private lives that Todd has brought to the surface. People will be drawn in and moved."

Julianne Moore concurs, stating, "I hope that audiences get caught up in Far from Heaven emotionally."

Christine Vachon says, "I think you'd be hard-pressed to find a Todd Haynes film that didn't make people argue and chat, and Far From Heaven will too. It's an incredibly moving story."

When asked how he hopes audiences will respond to the film, Todd Haynes answers, "With tears, tears of recognition - where the heightened stylistic experience only clarifies how much, in this all-too-human story, we recognize ourselves."