52 THENEWYORKER, NOVEMBER 11, 2019
PROFILES
THE DIRECTOR’S CUT
How Todd Haynes rewrites the Hollywood playbook.BYJOHN LAHR
A
t 7:30 a.m. on a frosty March
Saturday in downtown Cincin-
nati, the director Todd Haynes
was on the sixteenth floor of the cor-
porate law firm Taft Stettinius & Hol-
lister, and he was already, as he puts it,
“in the weeds, dealing with every little
piece in every shot in every scene.” The
firm’s lawyers and secretaries had been
banished for the weekend, and the maze
of cubicles and passageways was clut-
tered with cameras, cables, extras, and
a drowsy crew. Haynes, a trim, boyish
fifty-eight, with dishevelled brindle hair,
was standing at the epicenter of his new-
est drama: a small corner office, whose
west-facing windows looked out on sky-
scrapers and a sliver of the Ohio River.
It was from here, in 1999, that Robert
Bilott, a partner in the firm and a spe-
cialist in helping corporations negotiate
environmental regulations, switched sides
and sued DuPont, a chemical leviathan,
whose plant in Parkersburg, West Vir-
ginia, was thirty-five times larger than
the Pentagon. In what became a class-
action suit on behalf of seventy thousand
residents of West Virginia and Ohio, Bi-
lott pursued the company for having
knowingly dumped in those states more
than seven thousand tons of perfluorooc-
tanoic acid, or PFOA, a toxic, nonbio-
degradable chemical used in making
Teflon—thereby poisoning hundreds of
acres of land, deforming and killing hun-
dreds of animals, contaminating the water
supply, and doing long-term, irreversible
damage to the health of the community.
Bilott’s fight pitted him not just against
DuPont but against his own firm; he was
the legal insider turned outsider, a poacher
turned gamekeeper. A herculean, eigh-
teen-year legal struggle followed. In 2017,
Bilott won a six-hundred-and-seventy-
million-dollar settlement for thirty-five
hundred of the people who had filed
claims relating to illnesses linked to the
PFOA in their drinking water. (Addi-
tional personal-injury claims against
the company are still in progress.) For
Haynes’s eighth feature film, “Dark Wa-
ters,” Bilott’s battle had been broken down
into a two-hundred-and-forty-six-scene
jigsaw puzzle that the director was now
painstakingly piecing together.
Haynes, in T-shirt, jeans, and sneak-
ers, sat down on the office sofa to dis-
cuss the morning’s scene with his stars:
the towering Tim Robbins, who plays
Bilott’s boss, Tom Terp, the head of the
firm’s environmental group, and the short-
ish, stocky Mark Ruffalo, as Bilott, the
saga’s unlikely hero. Ruffalo was not only
the film’s marquee attraction; he was
its lead producer, and he had initially
sought out Haynes to direct and deepen
the screenplay, by Mario Correa and Mat-
thew Michael Carnahan, which was in-
spired by Nathaniel Rich’s 2016 exposé
on the subject in the New York Times
Magazine, and which Ruffalo felt had
been written too strictly as a procedural
thriller. “You’re trying to find the balance
between character and story,” Ruffalo
told me. “If you go heavy on the plot,
you lose character.” He added, “I love the
inner space of Todd’s work with actors
and characters. I always feel he’s inter-
ested equally, if not more, in what’s hap-
pening below the lines.” Haynes, who is
a gifted screenwriter—he was nominated
for an Academy Award for the screen-
play for his movie “Far from Heaven”
(2002)—made sure that Bilott’s wife and
his family relationships were given a real
presence in the shooting script.
As a student at Brown University, in
the mid-eighties, Haynes studied paint-
ing and semiotics in a program that, he
said, “kind of combined Freud, Marx,
and feminism.” He emerged, as he wrote
in the introduction to an edition of three
of his screenplays, with “a strong inter-
est in popular form, combined with astrong desire to invert it.” In earlier films,
he played on the bio-pic (“Superstar: The
Karen Carpenter Story,” 1988), the hor-
ror movie and the tabloid documentary
(“Poison,” 1991), the “disease of the week”
film (“Safe,” 1995), the melodrama (“Far
from Heaven” and “Carol,” 2015), and
even the silent film (“Wonderstruck,”
2017). “Dark Waters” subverts by taking
the legal thriller—a form that tradition-
ally concludes with the triumph of good
over evil—into areas of psychological
complexity and ambiguity. All investi-
gative stories, he told me, when we met
in Los Angeles in June, have the bur-
den of revealing a truth. “What I love
so much about the genre,” he explained,
“is the cost of revealing the truth. The
drama of that, and what it does to peo-
ple. That is the part that kills you.”
On the set, the camera perched on
the threshold of Bilott’s office, and a
scrum of technicians outside formed a
second barricade, so I watched the film-
ing from a conference room, where a
large monitor had been installed for the
production staff. “I have no actual time
beyond the shoot itself—every day is a
mortal trial,” Haynes had warned me
before I flew in to watch him work, but
I had no idea then just how fiercely he
inhabited his imagined worlds. “He’s
got himself in a bubble,” one of the film’s
producers, Christine Vachon, said of the
laser-like focus that he exhibited on the
monitor. A co-founder, in 1995, of Killer
Films, Vachon is the doyenne of indepen-
dent producers; she and Haynes met at
Brown, where she, too, studied semiot-
ics, and she has produced all his feature
films. She sat across from me, working
the phone, in her customary getup—
black T-shirt, pants, hoodie, and com-
bat boots (which gained some notori-
ety when she wore them on the red
carpet at Cannes for the première of
“Carol”). “He’s always very passionate,”Haynes, at the Metrograph, New York. His films ask us to contend with ambiguity, which is part of their sly subversiveness.