In Todd Haynes’ exquisite Carol, Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara play two women in 1952 New York, who fall in love and must face prejudice and societal conventions, but most importantly must face their own notions of what they’re allowed to desire. With its overpowering beauty, both dreamlike and earthly, the film presents us with a snapshot of a time and place that make a case for Haynes being one of the greatest anthropologists in all of cinema, a filmmaker whose attention to detail is surpassed only by his humanism.
At a press conference in New York, attended by Haynes, Blanchett, Mara, screenwriter Phyllis Nagy, and co-stars Kyle Chandler, Sarah Paulson and Jake Lacy, the director commented on one of the many qualities that attracted him to tell this love story, and how it reveals “a kind of expression of intimacy that is hard to find a parallel to among gay men, and certainly not among heterosexual couples.” Other highlights of the event involved the actors discussing their perspectives on the desires of their characters, Nagy’s revelation that author Patricia Highsmith, on whose book The Price of Salt, Carol is based on, was not a fan of film adaptations, and the influences that set the visual tone of the film.
Check out our highlights below and see much more coverage here.
Todd Haynes on Doing His First Love Story
“I really was taking it on, as if for the first time, I was looking at the love story” he explained, “something that I thought I had never really directly accomplished in my other films.” He added that Nagy’s screenplay, which had Cate attached, was just one of the many incentives that made him want to do the film. “Love stories, unlike war films which are about conquering the object, are about conquering the subject. It’s always the subject who is in a state of vulnerability and peril,” he added. “What I loved about the story is that what happens to the two women moves them through a series of events which change them both, and by the end of the film it shifts. All the elements of looking and who’s being looked at, were conducive to the cinematic feeling.”
The Look of the Film
“[Director of photography] Ed Lachman and I had worked in super 16 on Mildred Pierce, which was going ultimately to be broadcast on HDTV on HBO, so we sorta wanted to downgrade the sophistication of lenses and stocks today where the grain element continually goes away,” said Haynes. “The research for Carol kept revealing the city in a different way. It was the transition out of the war years, which were something quite different from the Eisenhower war years that we mostly attribute to that shiny, glossy decade. I was quite interested about how different that world looked, compared to the world of Far From Heaven.”
The Importance of Body Language
Cate Blanchett commented, “for me it felt less about the period and more about the gaze. If the cigarette was held in a certain way and perceived by the camera in a certain way, it was because it was viewed through the prism of someone’s desire, rather than the prism of the period.” Haynes explained how the work of photographer Ruth Orkin had influenced the look of the film, saying “[she] had this femininity that we don’t see anymore, you can see it in your grandma, but it’s something that is not produced anymore.”
Blanchett mentioned he had made the cast watch one of Orkin’s films called Lovers and Lollipops a movie she found revelatory because it subverted everything she’d seen about the 50s. “It felt like everything was happening right then and there in front of me. It was people in clothes, not in costumes, existing.” The costumes by Sandy Powell, also affected the way the actors moved, particularly the girdles. Blanchett revealed a secret of one of the film’s most breathtaking moments, “there was a scene where Rooney was playing the piano and I’d found this position on the floor and I had to be graceful, so I had to rehearse a lot so I would be able to get up in one movement.”
As with any period piece, smoking is essential for the look. Sharing from his own personal experience as a former smoker, Haynes expressed that “smoking is the perfect sort of conductor for desire, because it’s a way in which you seek desire but you never fulfill it. It’s a practiced cycle where you seek being satisfied, you crave that moment, but you’re always chasing an original moment that you’ll never get back to in that cigarette.”
Phyllis Nagy on Writing 1952 Without Using the Microscope of Modernity
As important as it was to get the look of the film right, Carol is unique in how it’s never tongue in cheek. It never looks at these characters through a modern filter. “One of the things I was intent on doing was not overlay on contemporary psychology on any of the characters,” said Nagy, “when you do that you’re judging the characters immediately, and it seemed very important for all the nuances among the relationships in the central quartet that you don’t do that.” Fortunately this served as a blissful escape for the screenwriter who commented that “it was a pleasure to forget that we were living right now, so we didn’t have to deal with any of the methods of communication that people might’ve had, or the attitudes or judgments of now. This is about instinct, not calculation.”
Cate Blanchett on Playing a Woman as Opposed to “a Mother”
One of the film’s central threads follows Carol’s divorce and the custody battle she engages in to be able to keep her daughter. “If a mother makes a choice based on her survival she risks losing the audience’s sympathy, and if it was a gay man, somehow I don’t think the question of sympathy would arise” said Blanchett, “but if a woman plays a mother onscreen there’s always a sense that there’s a right way to parent, and that you lose your identity and you become a mother first and foremost. What I love about Todd is that we never talked about sympathy, and personally as an actor, I find the idea of playing for an audience’s sympathy a kind of repulsive endeavor.”
Friendship and Non-Romantic Relationships
Carol shows a beautiful relationship between Blanchett’s character and Abby, a lifelong friend with whom she can discuss things she can’t bring herself to say with anyone else. Paulson explained how she approached this dynamic, saying, “I merely tried to think about friendship and unwavering loyalty. I wonder what I personally would do if someone I loved asked me to come rescue the person she currently loves. It was testament to her friendship and her love. She wants to be in Carol’s orbit, and to lose something like that, the consequences would be too enormous.”
The Talented, But Picky, Ms. Highsmith
In Anthony Minghella’s The Talented Mr. Ripley, based on a Patricia Highsmith novel, Blanchett played Meredith Logue, a textile heiress who falls in love with Matt Damon’s sociopathic title character. It was the first time she’d encountered Highsmith’s work and she read as much of it as she could. “It’s one thing reading a novel and then coming to play one of the characters” elaborated Blanchett, and she confessed to have found powerful insight on what other characters in the book think about Carol, “the novel has an internal monologue where Therese has some wonderful observations about Carol that I read the first time, and then to make that stuff manifest was really exciting” she concluded. Nagy, who met Highsmith near the end of her life, commented that “she didn’t like many of the film adaptations of her work, especially Strangers on a Train.” Blanchett gasped and interjected “oh, what does she know?”
Carol opens in theaters on November 20th.