HAYNES: Well, I definitely had the bug in me from my youngest age to want to make things, and film was an instigating mania in that drive; for me it happened to be Mary Poppins [1964], but that was my first film, and it just made me nuts in the best possible way. I was probably already drawing and painting as a three-year-old or whatever before I even saw it, but now I had a subject to keep turning over. I probably would have applied it in other ways, but you don’t choose the time you’re born into, you don't choose the era you come of age into. Those were all accidents of history and my own age, and also, where I grew up it was much easier to be exposed to art and culture than it would have been for other people my age. I took what I could from what was around me.
NOTEBOOK: They’re a bit different from Mary Poppins, but many of your films have women at the center, including Safe, which is about HIV/AIDS, but not explicitly. How did you come upon Carol White, Julianne Moore’s character, as the vessel for those ideas, as this passive “victim” of the twentieth century?
HAYNES: I was interested in exploring a film about how HIV/AIDS was entering into a recovery industry phase, and how recovery language and interpretation of illness was being internalized by people, most pointedly characterized in writings by people like Louise Hay. I had this desire to place the battleground in the least likely location, so I went back to the sort of nouveau-riche world of suburban Los Angeles that I knew; it was what my parents were sort of moving up the economic ladder to achieve as I grew up. But “environmental illness” was such an open book for metaphor and interpretation, and interpretation of cause and culpability was at the core of it, because science hadn't figured it out yet. In this case it was almost exclusively affecting suburban housewives in domestic settings, women surrounded by chemicals in their kitchens. And I was interested in having a main character who was so hard to invest in, for whom the process of identification was going to be in a parallel with the whole question of identity itself and what illness does to identity. And those two engines bolster each other in the more traditional idea of what a movie does, where we feel our own identities bolstered by our own identification with the heroic character who succeeds and can articulate better than we do. Carol White was the antithesis of that. So, for all those reasons, it just felt like an interesting complex of issues and narrative challenges, and they excited me.