Todd Haynes On Natalie Portman’s ‘May December’ Scene Everyone Will Be Talking About [Interview]

As a director, do you remember the last time from getting the script, and getting the money you had to turnaround a production this fast? And what was the hardest part about that for you? Or were you invigorated by it?

Oh no, I was totally invigorated by it. It was just like, “Go!, and some planned and some accidental new relationships that emerged. [Director of photography] Samuel Licenso being the first. And then April Napier as other costume designers I’d worked with weren’t available. Ed Lachman broke his femur bone like a couple of weeks before we were supposed to be pre-production in Chile, and I had to get a different DP.

Wait. So start with that. You get that news. Do you naturally panic or are you the sort of person who goes, “O.K., that’s life but we’ll find somebody else.”

No, we were in a mode of just problem-solving. And so the energy gets diverted right into the best possible solution that you can find. And in a way, there are almost too many choices. So it’s easy to just stick with the guy you know and have done great work with. I called up Kelly Reichardt and I was like, “Kelly, how would you feel if I went to Chris?” And she was like, “Oh my God, that would be amazing. I’ll call him up now.” And she tracked him down. He was in Chile exactly as Ed was in Chile. Chris was shooting a commercial there. And so we got Chris on board. And April had designed the last three Kelly Reichardt films.

Oh, right.

Kelly and Chris had a great relationship. So it all ricocheted in a nice way. Yeah.

You have a short amount of time. Are you a rehearsal sort of director? Did that worry you at all? Julianne made it sound like she just arrived on set didn’t have any time to do any rehearsals beforehand.

Julie is not a big rehearsals actor, to begin with, but way more problematic was another film that was in our way for a long time until the last second. It wasn’t going to land her in Savannah until two weeks into the shoot. And that would’ve just been so difficult because Natalie had to base her character’s transformation on what Julianne had created in the role of Gracie. So that, except for the director whose film didn’t happen when she hoped it, that was great for us. But there were still only a few days or just days to get the clothes together. The wigs were already underway. It was so meticulously planned. There was not a single question about things that we were waiting on because we just simply didn’t have the money to have unknowns in our way. And really I think the only way through this 23-day schedule was minimal coverage. And that’s what we did. And so it was a huge creative risk as anything that’s worth doing is. But it meant that there was no other way to cut the movie than how it was shot because there were scenes that are just one shot and that’s it.

You talked about earlier how you liked the shifting perspectives in the script. What was most important to you in terms of how their characters interacted in that respect?

I mean there are probably a lot of very detailed ways to answer a question like that. It’s hard to come up with bigger, simpler answers to it, except that we just knew that, and I think this is just built into, again, the design of the script that I really was honoring because I think it was compelling is that you start by thinking you can trust Elizabeth.

Yes.

She’s our way into this story, and she’s the neutral proxy. She’s the proxy that we can identify with as a new vantage point, learning about this tabloid past history and then of the events and how she maneuvers and how she makes use of the people around her. And discards that you have to start rethinking back the trust in her and the security in her as our protagonist. And so it’s this single to double to triple portrait ultimately, that you keep shifting your opinions and your faith in care from character to character.

I was going to say, watching the film, and I don’t know if this is just the script itself, you sort of are rooting for the kids the most. Is that something that you’re okay with audiences taking away?

Oh God, yes. My God.

Was that important?

I mean, you are totally rooting, because you’re rooting for Joe, but you just don’t know the potential that he has to really recognize himself and recognize the problems that were not allowed to be considered as problems at the time. But absolutely the kids are the beautiful product of this inexplicable relationship that maintained that commitment to itself for all those years.

Natalie has that incredible scene where she is reading Gracie’s letter. By the way, was there a real mirror there?

No. All those mirror scenes, except for the one in the dress shop, were shot with just the women looking into the lens of the camera.

Did you save that to the end? Did you ask her when she wanted to shoot it?

We had to shoot at a location. We couldn’t be more selective about how to organize the shoot than that. But within that, we tried as much as possible to organize the locations and hope that their availabilities would comply with as much of screen or story order as possible.

Yeah.

It meant that the letter came toward the end of the shoot. And if anything, If there was a single scene or a single thing I read in the script, it was that. And I knew I wanted it to be a direct address of lens and shot that way. I thought of [Ingmar] Bergman’s “Winter Light” with Ingrid [Bergman] full on reading the letter to the lens against the neutral background. And I was like, ‘Oh my God, we have to do that and I have to figure out how to use that motif and establish that motif throughout the film.’ So then the direct address into mirrors was built upon that as the first instinct.

Shooting that scene with Natalie, was it multiple takes?

She did eight takes.

Oh, Jesus.

And they were all, someday in the annals of great screen acting.

You’ll release them all.

It should be shared. Because as so many things among these two actresses could be, it’s just a truly astonishing example of each one being completely different, distinct, and having such total integrity under themselves.

Did it take you a long time in the editing room to decide which one to use?

Not really.

Did you know which one worked in the tone context?

No. I always wait to really decide later after the shoot. And watching them all again was just like, “Wow.”

Yeah. Yeah.

But the one that we picked was, it also had this background truck roar that was a piece of ambient score that came in right on the line. And I don’t know where the lines are crossing the line. I don’t even know who draws these lines.

And you kept it in?

Well, there was no way to remove it. It was built into the track.

Oh, right. Oh, sure.

And it could have been some horrible sound. It could have come way at the wrong soft time. It could have been some crazy thing from the street. Instead, it was like it scored the scene. It was just one of those, yeah, little miracles.

“May December” will be released in theaters and on Netflix sometime this fall.