Todd Haynes Quotes

When I was little, I had this old video camera, and I set it up, and I would pretend that I was on comedy shows and soap operas and things like that.

My mom had gotten a Super 8 camera to make home movies with, and my brother and me got our hands on it and ran with it.

I was making a lot of 8mm home movies, since I was twelve, making little dramas and comedies with the neighborhood kids.

I started when I was eight, doing super 8 films.

The lead of a film that wove around me, I played all the roles. I traveled the world; I loved life, pleasure. I adored to write, create.

One of my favourite games as a child was to dress up and improvise. Acting seemed obvious.

I feel, as an actor, you should be in a position to mould yourself into different characters and should have the ability to change.

Some of the joy in acting is switching it up: being able to do something that's different than what you've been doing.

I have a good time when I'm acting, and bottom line, I just want to enjoy myself and be a happy person, and acting makes me happy. I enjoy it, and it's a good way to escape yourself. You just become somebody else for a little bit, and it's a lot of fun.

My way into making movies - into making things is general - has been through performing.

I was always an actress, even as a little kid, and fantasy, horror, sci-fi stories are really all about playing make believe. I just never grew out of that.

I'm always playing characters with intellects profoundly superior to mine. That's great fun, even though it's as much a fantasy for me as for the people watching me.

I mean, the great thing about being an actor is you can investigate parts of your brain that might have otherwise gone dormant.

I'm not judging the films. People make these connections through a film, or because they know them. But the fact that they erase them and have to start from scratch, I think that's an important point. A lot of kids, when they have a camera, have tended to do remakes of existing films. You have a lot of kids that make Star Wars. And I think that's creativity, but not as much creativity as starting from scratch.

All I knew is that I loved movies and comedy and TV, and I wanted to perform. I made a bunch of shorts and movies in college, and that was always fun too. I directed some plays in college. It was taking it all in and trying to immerse myself in as much of it as possible.

I like Stallone, because he writes. He sits down with a blank page and comes up with another Rambo movie. That isn't very easy for anybody. He's made it successful on top of that.

Sometimes an actor performs a character, but sometimes an actor just performs. With writing, I don't think it's performing a character, really, if the character you're performing is yourself. I don't see that as playing a role. It's just appearing in public.

Sometimes actors come in, you record them, and they do their role.

It's good fun to create an unpredictable character. When he comes into the room, I don't know what he's going to do - I have to find my way.

There's no excuse not to make films on weekends with friends.

I like playing strange characters. Some people might say it has something to do with a hidden part of myself, but I think it's a lot simpler than that: normal people are just not very interesting.

Everything that goes into making a film, when it's the finished product, us as the actors look at the film and go: "Oh man, OK, on that day we were doing whatever the circumstances were on that day...." So much goes into it and it's all so incredibly calculated that the behind-the-scenes chemistry that exists between all of us is sometimes forgotten - you can't act that. We've all come together and held hands through each of the processes that I've been a part of.

I make home movies-therefore I live. I live - therefore I make home movies.

One of the things I love, more than anything, is jumping around and playing lots of different parts. I love the variety of playing different characters.

Going into editing when I got to New York was part of that. I guess I just kind of wanted to know as much as possible. But I have a real love of the whole process, from start to finish. So right now, I fit into the acting part of the process, but I wouldn't rule anything out. I'm enamored with how the whole thing works.