This year’s Carrosse d’Or winner on his singularly uncompromising career.
This interview, part of our Cannes 2025 coverage, was originally published in the Notebook Special, a limited-edition print publication distributed at the Cannes Film Festival.
One could be forgiven for feeling a bit wistful celebrating Todd Haynes’s extraordinary career in 2025. The 64-year-old American director is about to receive the Carrosse d’Or at the Directors’ Fortnight, the festival’s version of a lifetime achievement award, and it’s a reflective moment to honor an artist whose films, from the start, so provocatively confronted the evils of the times in which they were made. With epochal experiments like Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story (1987), Poison (1991), and Safe (1995), Haynes broke out against a backdrop of extreme crisis—the AIDS epidemic and the political iniquity carried out in its wake—and any consideration of his filmography remains inseparable from these sociopolitical realities.
Upon release, Poison became a central pawn in the “culture wars” of the early 1990s, held up by grandstanding conservative congressmen as evidence of the gay agenda they believed was being partly funded by the NEA. Now that federal dollars are being squashed at every turn, and anything with a whiff of radicalism is being tagged as treasonous, we might look back with fondness at the bravery of Haynes’s filmography, which came to prominence at a time when daring independent filmmakers were rigorously subverting the social order, not only in subject matter but also through the aesthetics of film itself. In the face of a newly emboldened authoritarianism at home and abroad, in which the scapegoating of queer people for political gain has become de rigueur, contemporary artists have yet to figure out how to respond.
It’s safe to say that Haynes’s daring and continual deconstruction of film form has continued unabated throughout his career, in projects of all shapes and sizes. It appears that he is congenitally unable to make a movie that doesn’t function on multiple intellectual levels at once, while maintaining a thrilling narrative ingenuity (his gutting May December, 2023, being only the most recent example). That’s entertainment, folks. Even as Haynes juggles projects that flirt with the mainstream, he has never yielded his dedication to questioning power structures and the systems that define and constrict us. For Haynes, cinema has always been and always will be the shadow version of reality, where there is meaning beyond and behind our first perception.
Continue reading on the Notebook here.
