Portland director Todd Haynes discusses new movie starring Natalie Portman, Julianne Moore

Todd Haynes is arguably Portland’s most celebrated director. His films include “Safe,” “Velvet Goldmine,” “I’m Not Here” and “Far From Heaven.” His latest is “May December,” which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival and is now streaming on Netflix.

The film is a fictionalized version of a real-life scandal that unfolded near Seattle in the 1990s. In the film, a woman played by Julianne Moore is sent to prison for sexually abusing a middle school boy, whom she eventually married and raised their kids with. But instead of focusing the action in the tabloid-covered past, “May December” takes place 20 years later, when an actress played by Natalie Portman spends time with the ostensibly happy family as she prepares to portray Julianne Moore’s character in an upcoming movie.

Haynes recently joined OPB’s “Think Out Loud” for a conversation about the film. Below are excerpts:

On picking up the script:

“‘May December’ came to me from Natalie Portman at the height of COVID and I was reading a little bit more than normal because we were all not working and didn’t know when we would all be getting back to work. But it was a script that made a real impression on me … I read the script before talking to her about it. And I think if I recall correctly, people said, ‘Yeah, Natalie would be attached to play Elizabeth,’ and whether that was literally stated or not, it was impossible to not picture Natalie in this role as I read it. So it became fused completely in my imagination as I started to visualize the film, as I read it for the first time.”

On the film’s focus on the character of the actress Elizabeth, played by Natalie Portman:

“What’s so compelling about the script … is its structure and how it’s set 20-plus years after the tabloid event and how basically it’s about an excavation into the past. And so it’s through Natalie’s driven, at times selfish, often selfish or by the end quite cravenly so, attempt to get to her notion of the truth of the story, that we also learn more and more about Gracie [Julianne Moore’s character], because she’s being described by people and interviewed by people who knew her.

And ultimately, Elizabeth, Natalie’s character, starts to embody her and there’s a letter that is saved by Joe [Gracie’s husband], that was not supposed to be saved during the legal proceedings all those years ago, that ultimately he gives her. And it comes as sort of a climactic moment of the film where Elizabeth has sort of fully entered the role of Gracie. And we see that transformation in front of us. And in fact, you learn more about Gracie, you also learn quite a bit about Elizabeth herself in that recitation of that letter.”

On working with Julianne Moore for the fifth time:

“I’ve just been able to keep touching ground with her on film after film and role after role, and some, where she’s the center of the story like in ‘Far From Heaven,’ a script I actually wrote for Julianne, the first and only time I’ve ever really done that for an actor all the way through to this project.

And when I first started to talk to Natalie about Elizabeth and what interested her about this role, and the gray areas that the story unfolds and so navigates and puts it into the hands of the audience to negotiate and to sort of question their own expectations and presumptions about what these kinds of characters, who they might be, I was like, ‘Wow, this incredibly brilliant actor, Natalie Portman, reminds me of somebody I know very well.’ And here was this second role of a woman hovering around 60. And it’s rare for a director who loves to feature women and female characters in his films to be handed that kind of challenge and possibility and opportunity, to have two such incredibly strong and compelling women at the core of a script.”

On the adult relationship of the former teacher and student:

“I mean, in many ways, it’s sort of the object of the film that is trying to comprehend how this couple has subsisted over these years … how much he [Joe] has been there to sort of manage the cracks in the edifice and the sort of lurking panic. And it’s hard to necessarily know whether those cracks and that panic is due to a couple things. One is the entrance of this actress into their sort of walled-off edifice that they built up to protect this life. And/or due to the fact that the kids are about to graduate and leave an empty nest and force the couple to confront themselves for the first time in these 20-some years, and have to really take stock of who they are in ways that they haven’t had to – that raising children has been a relatively healthy way of evading all of these really trying and seismic questions.”

You can listen to the whole conversation with Todd Haynes on “Think Out Loud” by pressing the play arrow above.