60 THENEWYORKER, NOVEMBER 11, 2019
of shifting identities into what Haynes
calls “a glorious life’s work.” A sort of
patchwork of Dylan’s transformations,
the movie has six actors playing differ-
ent personae, including an extraordinary
Academy Award-nominated perfor-
mance by Cate Blanchett of Dylan’s tou-
sled-hair sixties folk “ramblin’ man.”
H
aynes hit upon the subject of
Dylan’s shape-shifting as he him-
self was facing an identity crisis. “Vel-
vet Goldmine” had been a critical and
commercial disappointment. He had
also been unmoored by the collapse of
his long-term relationship with Jim
Lyons and by other romantic tribula-
tions. He was, he said, “bummed out
and exhausted”: “I tried to take a break
and paint and travel. I went to Hawaii
alone and finished Proust. But I wasn’t
very inspired.” Haynes’s Brooklyn apart-
ment, on the outskirts of Williamsburg,
was so seedy and messy that, in thir-
teen years, he never invited his parents
to visit. By his own admission, he lived
those years “mostly out of boxes,” in a
room that he’d turned into a workspace,
dominated by a flatbed editing machine.
“By the end, there were rats,” he said.
In January, 2000, Haynes took a road
trip to visit his sister in Portland, Ore-
gon, where he planned to work on a
script. As he drove west, he found him-
self craving Dylan’s music, which he
hadn’t listened to seriously since he was
a teen-ager. He was looking, he said, for
“a great physical, emotional, and psy-
chological change.” By the time he
reached Portland, he was filled with the
kind of excitement “that makes me want
to make something,” he said. “I wrote
‘Far from Heaven’ in two weeks, started
work on the Dylan movie, and by sum-
mer the landlord had taken over my
apartment in Williamsburg.” Portland
gave Haynes “a kick in the pants in every
possible way,” and he began to envision
a different life.
“I think Todd arrived in Portland at
a good moment both for himself and for
the town,” the novelist and screenwriter
Jon Raymond, who worked with Haynes
on the screenplay for “Mildred Pierce,”
told me. “Portland was still a relatively
undiscovered enclave, with a lot of good,
bohemian energy.” In this laid-back
world, where, according to Wendy, “ev-
erybody gets to let their freak fly”—signs
and bumper stickers proclaim “Keep
Portland Weird”—Haynes blossomed.
Although, for a long time, a portrait of
him hung in Portland’s city hall, the low-
key rhythm of the place allowed him
some respite from the burden of acclaim.
When Haynes arrived late to a huge
Halloween party in 2002, he was refused
entrance. “He was so delighted to be
turned away,” Raymond said. “That would
never have happened in New York.”
An old friend, the director Kelly Rei-
chardt, was also living in Portland, and
she and Raymond formed the collegial
core of Haynes’s new creative life. “Just
being friends with Todd is like being in
a seminar sometimes,” Raymond said.
(The two nicknamed him El Creador
Seminal.) In 2002, when Haynes threw
an Oscar party, he met his current part-
ner, Bryan O’Keefe, then an aspiring
writer. (He is now an archival producer
on one of Haynes’s projects, a documen-
tary about the Velvet Underground.)
Portland’s other great gift to Haynes
was to put him back in touch with na-
ture and his own lightheartedness. Ray-
mond remembers him “romping around
the woods in a Bigfoot costume,” during
a photo shoot on Mt. Hood, and “slath-
ering himself with mud to scare his
friends by some creek.” During the sum-
mer, Haynes swims in the Washougal
River almost every day. He and Wendy
often hike to Wahclella Falls, in the Co-
lumbia River Gorge. “You see the intel-
lect fall away,” she said. “You see the cre-
ativity fall away. You see a peace come
across him. He’s a very innocent human
being on a lot of levels.”
Eventually, Haynes settled into a 1907
gray-blue Arts and Crafts cottage with
boxed beams and dark-wood panelling;
his furniture was salvaged from the set
of “Far from Heaven,” which gives the
place a cozy mid-century flavor. On the
wall of his study, he keeps a gallimau-
fry of images—among them Dylan,
Freud, David Bowie, his mother, and
Brian Eno. Since 2005, he has shared
the house with O’Keefe.
In 2010, Haynes’s mother, Sherry,
choked on a cheese sandwich and couldn’t
be revived. Within half an hour of her
death, in Los Angeles, Haynes, who was
in New York, had a stroke. “The whole
thing was inexplicable. I had no real
symptoms,” he said. (He later discov-
ered that he had antiphospholipid syn-
drome, a hypercoagulable condition.)
“The event was uncanny and frighten-
ing, but the loss of my mother is what
survives,” he said. “He doesn’t like to talk
about his losses,” O’Keefe said. “It’s not
easy to know what’s going on with Todd
emotionally a lot of the time. He is very
careful about public display.”
At work, however, Haynes’s emo-
tional radiance—what Raymond calls
“the golden thing inside him that is un-
touchable and unvanquishable”—is
palpable. There is no grandstanding:
Ruffalo refers to him as “the consum-
mate collaborator.” Fairness and equal-
ity are core values; in his mind, as Ray-
mond put it, “we are all children together,
we need to play fair, everyone deserves
their turn.” On the set, Raymond added,
“he creates environments where people
don’t feel harmed. He’s very strict in his
gentleness.”
Kate Winslet remembered that, while
shooting “Mildred Pierce,” “his energy
would never fail.” At one point, she
added, “he had salmonella, and he just
carried on working. We would do a take
and he’d throw up. We would do an-
other take, and he’d throw up again. He
would sit in his chair, sweat for a bit,
stand up, throw up again, and do an-
other take. This lasted for four or five
days. He was very, very unwell.” Wins-
let went on, “Then there was another
day—oh, my fucking God. He had to
have a dental surgeon come to the set
and pull a tooth out. ‘Thank God, that’s
out. O.K., let’s go!’”
O
n a stifling New York morning in
mid-July, Haynes was sequestered
in an editing room at a postproduction
facility in Chelsea with his burly, bearded
Brazilian film editor, Affonso Gonçalves,
whom he affectionately calls Fonzi. They
were down to the wire editing “Dark
Waters” for an early test screening for
the studio, Focus Features, and they
worked away with the kind of steady in-
tuitive understanding that’s usually re-
served for a quarterback and his wide
receiver. This was their fourth collabo-
ration. Fonzi was hunched over the Avid
console; Haynes sat on a sofa eight feet
behind him, his production notes at his
side, staring at a large monitor as they
applied a fine filigree of rhythm and clar-
ity to the scenes. The dizzying speed of
the production schedule and the fact that
