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Alison Stewart: This is All Of It. I'm Alison Stewart, live from the WNYC studios in Soho. Thank you for spending part of your day with us. Whether you're listening on the radio, live streaming or on demand, I'm really grateful you're here. On today's show, Tariq Trotter, AKA, Black Thought, the co-founder and front man of The Roots. He'll join us to discuss his memoir, The Upcycled Self: A Memoir on the Art of Becoming Who We Are. Plus, we'll speak to author Michael Cunningham about his new novel, Day.

Plus, there are a pair of photographers who are on a mission to erect historical markers all through the Catskills in honor of the history of the Borsch Belt. We'll speak with them. That's the plan. Let's get this started with director Todd Haynes.

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The new movie, May December explores what happens when we forget that the lies we tell ourselves are lies. The film stars Natalie Portman as Elizabeth, an actress preparing for the role of a woman whose story is ripped from the headlines. Gracie Atherton-Yoo played by Julianne Moore believes that her relationship is like a Romeo and Juliet story. Two true love separated by society. The thing that separated them was the law. She was jailed for the rape of a 13-year-old boy she met while in her 30s working in a pet store.

We meet them now 20 years later. That woman and now man, Joe, played by Charles Melton, are married with children living a normalish existence outside Savannah, Georgia, until the actress, Elizabeth, shows up to study her as part of her preparation, and her presence stirs up a lot. As unspoken traumas come bubbling up and Elizabeth's motivations become murkier. Here's a clip from the trailer.

Participant 3: Do you remember when you first met.

Gracie Atherton-Yoo: He came to the pet store looking for a job.

Participant 3: It was summer after sixth grade?

Gracie Atherton-Yoo: Seventh.

Joe Yoo: Seventh.

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Gracie Atherton-Yoo: Why do you want to play me?

Participant 3: When they sent me the script, I thought, "Here is a woman with a lot more to her than I remember from the tabloids."

Participant 6: What would make a 36-year-old woman have an affair with a seventh grader?

Joe Yoo: People, they see me as a victim. I wanted it.

Alison Stewart: May December was inspired by the real story of the late Mary Kay Letourneau, a teacher who had sex with her student in the late 1990s and was jailed for rape, and later had a family with him. She died in 2020 at the age of 58. The film May December is directed by Todd Haynes, whose film of course include Carol and the Velvet Underground documentary. May December arrives in select theaters on November 17th. It'll stream on Netflix starting December 1st. Todd Haynes is in the studio with us. So nice to see you.

Todd Haynes: Hey, Allison. Great to be here.

Alison Stewart: Natalie Portman, who also produced the film, she sent you this script.

Todd Haynes: She did.

Alison Stewart: What Hooked you?

Todd Haynes: I'm sorry?

Alison Stewart: What hooked you?

Todd Haynes: Oh, what hooked me? She sent me the script right at the height of COVID. There was a lot of script circulating, a lot of stuff being read, a lot of speculation about when we were going to all get back to work and what we were going to do next. I was reading more stuff than usual. This script by Sammy Birch, an emerging writer with an incredibly distinctive and confident voice, really impressed me in so many ways. I think it was this sense of discomfort that she conducts with such confidence in the course of the storytelling.

I think the initial stroke of genius I think in the way she structured it, is that it's all set 20 plus years after the fact, after the tabloid event, after the arrest, after the incarceration. What you're really seeing is the way people survive these kinds of crises or try to. In that way, to me it was like, of course, it's this exotic, disturbing, extreme example of a story, of a marriage, of a love relationship that crosses all these boundaries, but the way we all survive our lives, our marriages, our commitments is a universal thing that I felt simmered through this script with such an interesting understatement throughout, and tension.

You're really observing what happens when this act, as you described in your setup, with the actress coming to town played by Natalie Portman, begins to crack away at the very strong fortification that has surrounded this family all these years and kept them going.

Alison Stewart: They've all put things, and we've all done this, put things in little boxes and pushed into the side so you can go forward. Here comes Elizabeth tipping open the boxes and saying, "What's in there? What's in there?"

Todd Haynes: Exactly.

Alison Stewart: "What's in there?"

Todd Haynes: Exactly. You initially think, "Oh, okay, she's going to be our way in. She'll be the reliable narrator. She'll be the person that we can identify with as the outsider. As the story starts to unfold, it almost begins as a investigative journalism process where she's interviewing people. She's interviewing Gracie and Joe, and the kids, and people in Gracie's life. We set the film ultimately in Savannah, Georgia, in the Tybee Island beach community. It's about 20 minutes outside downtown Savannah.

You begin to question really her motivations. How far she's going to go, how many boundaries she herself will cross in the process of seeking the "truth of this story" and serving her needs as an actor in representing this character, depicting this character that Julianne plays. You're left with this shifting sense of fidelity between the two characters and trust that never really ever resolves. What the film ultimately becomes, I think in the third act, is Joe's story. The man in the middle of all this, who has been locked up in decisions made for him when he was way too young, but that he has also been a dutiful father in his life and he's raised these kids, and the family life has taken the focus of their energies and their time.

Another thing that is looming over the story which only spans about three weeks in Savannah, is the imminent graduation of the last two kids, the twins who are about to leave the house. All of a sudden, even before Elizabeth enters the scene, you feel that this couple is about to have to confront each other in ways they haven't all these years.

Alison Stewart: This was originally set in New England, and so for practical reasons, it's too hard to shoot for three weeks in New England. I'm wondering if relocating it to outside of Savannah, which has got its own energy around it, how could you use this new location and the southern island community, and island community ethos to tell this story?

Todd Haynes: There were really interesting things about Camden, Maine and the original concept. Camden, Maine is almost the phantom city for Peyton Place. I don't think Sammy herself-- I think I may have visited Camden years and years ago. I don't think she had, but she used it for all those evocative, mythical reasons. It was practical purposes. When we finally realized when we might be able to make this movie, it was the only schedule that opened up for me, Julianne and Natalie, was the fall of last year. There was no way to shoot in May. It had to be May.

Alison Stewart: Graduation.

Todd Haynes: Graduation month in the northeast anywhere in Maine. Sam Lisenco is the production designer in this film. He and I had just been working on another project that got way laid. I had just been to Savannah for the Savannah Film Festival not too long before. I'd been there a few times before for the festival. We thought, "Wow, what about this place? This really could play for the spring in the fall." It's laden with such disturbing layers of American history. It's also preserved in ways that is unusual for American cities architecturally. It's why people visit Savannah.

We thought, "Didn't make sense that the Gracie character would be in historic downtown Savannah." Too exposed, too claustrophobic, too visible, but that would be a place you could imagine this actress coming and staying in a little fancy inn. We looked on the map and saw this island community. It's only 20 minutes away from downtown Savannah of Tybee. We went and visited. It was just last August at the height of the summer in Georgia, and found our instincts confirmed by what we saw and what we encountered.

We even went off the beaten path of the Savannah Film Commission that was giving us suggestions of houses to look at for locations and found that house that becomes a real centerpiece for the film found that street with the Spanish moss dripping off the oak trees on your drive toward these houses built in the late '70s, '80s, put a note on the door of our favorite one, and heard back from that guy while in town. It doesn't always happen.

A series of circuitous things and unexpected things, and the surprises of filmmaking, and the pressure of having very little time and very little money to get this thing made actually ended up producing all of these interesting outcomes. When we saw that house and we were in that humid, soaked-in, marshland-

Alison Stewart: Thick.

Todd Haynes: -thick, with the precipitation lodge between the sliding glass doors in the living room and in the window, and the way it smudged your visibility out onto the marshland that it sits on in the dock in the backyard, it was like, yes, this seems even more fitting of a place that's secluded, that's isolated, that's enjoyed its distance from the rest of the world, but you're also trapped in it and you can't venture freely within it. It's beautiful, but it's also contained and stifled.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Todd Haynes. We're discussing his film, May December. Elizabeth shows up, this actress, and she's there to watch, to learn Gracie's mannerisms. She says to understand Gracie's point of view. When they first meet, they are sizing each other up and they're eye to eye, and Gracie notes that they're the same size. What did you want to capture when these two women are eye to eye for the first time?

Todd Haynes: I think initially, you want to look at their differences. They do remark on their similar heights. I think the suspense of the film is in the ways that slowly we watch the transformation of Elizabeth and her process of trying to pick up on the cadences and the styling, and the makeup that Gracie wears, and the colors that she wears. That you watch this slow transformation of one actor becoming this character, trying very hard to embody who this woman is physically.

You realize along the way that it's more than physically, that there are things about each of these women that remind you of each other in ways that one suspects they're not entirely prepared to see in themselves. Those ways of seeing and not seeing, those ways of being able to look at things around you, but not at yourself, I think create this whole dynamic, the subtext that's going on through the film. It's played out in these sequences that, at an early stage of the preparation process, I thought would be best served in shots that hold and frames that feel discomfortingly long and static, and unyielding.

Look, I could not read this script and not think of films like Bergman's Persona write-off, the process of these two women who are merging with each other and starting to blur. One of whom, in fact, in that film is an actress and the other is a caretaker who comes to serve her when she has an event with stage fright and stops speaking. There are those frames that were ever emblazoned in my memory as a filmgoer of Liv Ullmann and Bibi Andersson circling each other, comparing hands in the backyard, wearing those matching white straw hats in the beautiful Sven Nykvist's cinematography, and then ultimately looking toward the lens of the camera together as if it's a mirror. In our film, we have all these scenes in mirrors.

Alison Stewart: Yes, there's a lot of mirrors. Some of them I imagine were quite difficult. There's a scene in a dressing room where we see all different sides of these two women and we get an inkling. Not only do we see the way they're reacting to the young daughter trying on clothes, we get an inkling of Gracie's meanness towards her daughter and the sense that she is not the sweet demure possibly victimized person. She's got a mean streak.

Todd Haynes: She's got a mean streak and that you also realize this is an inheritance that you feel like this is something that is not just originated in Gracie, but it's most likely something that she learned from her mother. I think that scene that starts to talk about her daughter's body as she's trying on different dresses for her graduation, I think there are very few women in the world who don't watch that scene and recognize that conversation.

The lack of consciousness about what's being said. It's just that it's being said with a stranger with incredible power and influence who's witnessing it and it puts it into another frame, a heightened frame that makes us, the viewer, even more uncomfortable watching it. It's not necessarily something that we haven't seen played out between mothers and daughters for generations.

Alison Stewart: The two women, as you said, were looking to see how much alike they are and how different they are. There's lots of little really great details and I'm sure obviously you worked with your costume designers. I'm thinking about Natalie Portman's character, Elizabeth shows up and she's trying to dress down. She's got the hat and the sunglasses on, but she's wearing a Cartier bracelet and watch. She's got about $6,000 on her wrist and that wouldn't even come to her mind to take that off.

Todd Haynes: No, no. Yet the rest is the black or the maroon shifty, the dress, the little straw hat that's trying to deal with the climate, and so forth. No, there's an unconsciousness about her, obviously, that you mark at the very beginning and yet you accept and you go, "Oh, yes, of course, she's from Hollywood and she's an actress, and how nice is she going to be to these local folks in the South and how mean is she, whatever." These are the questions you begin asking until you really start to see major shutter vision on the part of this character and how the lengths to which she really is going to go to serve her own needs, and how disposable the people around her really are.

Alison Stewart: We're discussing the film May December with its director, Todd Haynes. We'll talk a little bit more about the character, Joe, as well as the use of music in the film after a quick break. This is All Of It.

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You're listening to all of it on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. My guest is Todd Haynes. His new film May December will be in select theaters on November 17th and hitting Netflix on December 1st. We've talked about these two actresses, Julianne Moore and Natalie Portman, playing an actress and a woman who's been through the scandal, and the actress is trying to get to know the woman. We haven't talked about Joe, the husband, the young boy at the time, the young man in this case. Charles Melton really holds his own with these two Academy Awarding actresses.

Todd Haynes: We're just saying something that--

Alison Stewart: How did you know he was the right actor?

Todd Haynes: Well, it was a process that I went through with my long-time casting director, Laura Rosenthal, New York-based. We have a wonderful, long, and rich relationship. There are certain films that require the discovery of certain actors who may not be very well-known, but who have a disproportionate impact on how the film really works, and this was certainly the case with Joe. Joe is a half Korean kid raised in this community who we learn from the stories of the past as it filled in. Got a job at a pet shop working part-time when he was a young teen, and that's how he met Gracie, and where the sexual and romantic relationship began.

We did our job. We put out a breakdown for the character and got tapes of actors reading for the role, and some really fine and interesting Korean actors and half-Korean actors. Charles is an actor who some people know from the show Riverdale. He began, I think, in the second season of Riverdale, which is very well-loved for followers of that show. I saw a couple of episodes at the very beginning when it premiered, but I did not see Charles on that show, so I didn't know his work. What Charles did on that audition tape was absolutely distinct from what other actors were doing. I think it was the other actor's interpretation of Joe that felt a little closer to what I had imagined him to be. This is again, in hindsight, what you realize is the incredible part of the creative process. Is that the serendipitous ways that you find and meet people in the way you're introduced to this actor or that location, or this setting, or this creative partner deepens what you're doing and makes it more specific, and teaches me, the director, more about what the story is.

Charles was more pent-up and more tentative, and more almost pre-verbal. You really saw somebody who had been so completely physically shut down and was dutiful, and was supportive of Gracie and her private panics in the bedroom that we witness, and he was a loving father to these kids. I all of a sudden saw not only the present of story of Joe, but I saw the past as well in ways that I think I was almost holding off from being able to fully confront.

Alison Stewart: I want to say this is funny. There are some very funny moments there and it's about pacing. It's about you use music and you use visuals to bring some humor into it. Was that in the script or was that something that you and your screenwriter discussed?

Todd Haynes: No, it was in the script. The humor is situational and character-based, and so it's not like gags or jokes, or things. They don't sit on top of the content of the storytelling in the writing. You don't know how you feel about them as you read them. That's the thing, is you're interrogating yourself.

That's how I felt when I first read the script and that was what I so loved about it, and wanted to find a way in the film that that would be available to the audience if they were almost compelled to be interpreting what they're watching, but that it should be a pleasurable process, even with the discomfort that it stirs up and the way it keeps asking you to shift your expectations and stuff that you bring to a story like this.

I think it was in the editing room where my editor, Alfonso Gonzalez, and I would be watching these scenes unfold and go-- Because we weren't laughing out loud while shooting it. We also were just racing through. We shot this movie in 23 days in Savannah under a very tight schedule. We were having a fantastic time. It was a real synergy among the creative partners and the actors on this film. It was a very positive experience despite those challenges. I made some strong choices about how to frame it and shoot it that didn't really have alternative options.

Alison Stewart: You get what you get, you don't get upset. [chuckles]

Todd Haynes: There was one way to do it, and if it didn't work, I don't know what we would've done. It's a very restrained austere kind of visual language. This is true for any movie; however you shoot it and however much time you have. You're getting to know what it is as you're cutting it. You don't have time to really assess what it is while you're shooting it. You're just trying to get all the pieces and then you start to live through it, and breathe through it, and watch it play out, and find its whole body and its whole shape in the editing room.

It's a mysterious part of the process. You also have to leave all your expectations behind all the projections that you had and the visuals, and the planning. It's all finished. Whatever stage you're in, in the present is all you have and you have to make it work.

Alison Stewart: Let's talk about the music. It's really important in the film and its placement in the film. I want to talk about two composers. The first, is it Michel Legrand?

Todd Haynes: Yes.

Alison Stewart: Score from 1971, The Go-Between. This involves a young boy who has a crush on an older woman. How did that music become a part of the film?

Todd Haynes: I suspected that part of the way you could have that fun sense of interpretation while watching this movie is through various kinds of framing elements. I thought music could be one of those. While I was putting together my image book and looking at movies, and getting ideas and inspiration, and trying to put it all on the page to share with my creative partners, which is the way I like to work, I watched The Go-Between on Turner Classic Movies one day.

It's a Joseph Lowy film from 1971, very well-regarded, Julie Christie, Allen Bates. Beautiful film. It's a film that's fallen out of circulation in the United States. It doesn't show up much. I think I saw it when I was a teenager when it came out, a young teen, and haven't seen it since. I watched this film and I was astonished by this Michel Legrand score that plays so boldly and ominously right up front, and is basically ahead of the story that starts to unfold as you watch the film.

I was like, "Wow. That is so interesting." The subject matter of the film has maybe some vague parallels, but they're quite different from-- It's a very different kind of movie than it's set in the turn of the century in England and it's a coming-of-age story of a 12-year-old boy. Then the music arguably sits as far outside, if not more so of that film and your experience watching it as it does at times in May December, or at least as upfront and in your face.

I started to just add the score when I finished my image book and send it around to my partners, I was like, "Play this score while you turn the pages of the image book."

Alison Stewart: Let me play a little bit.

Todd Haynes: Yes.

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Alison Stewart: We get the drama. We understand, to your point, it's a little bit ahead of the story. Then how does the second composer come in?

Todd Haynes: Well, Marcelo was always going to be my composer for the film.

Alison Stewart: Marcelo Zarvos.

Todd Haynes: Marcelo Zarvos. I've worked with Marcelo on one other project prior to this, Dark Waters. It was a wonderful experience and he's a brilliant composer. When I found this music, just for the sake of putting us all in the same place in method while making the movie, I literally dropped cues into the script and we would play those cues while we shot the movie for all the actors and the crew.

I initially did that for Marcelo. I said, "Marcelo, this score is crazy. It's gorgeous, it's wild. It breaks every rule of what film scores do." He was like, "Oh my God, this is amazing." I was thinking he's a very busy in-demand composer and I thought if he had time, he could send us little sketches of ideas while we were shooting and we would throw those in. What it did is it just became more and more affixed to what the film was becoming and we cut the film to the score, and this is usually where temp scores come into play when you're cutting, not when you're shooting a movie.

Finally, I came to Marcelo with my tail between my legs and I was like, "Marcelo, I think we need to incorporate this remarkable Michel Legrand score, and have you make it your own and rerecord it, and rearrange it, and bring in these tonal and other elements that we'd thrown into the temp." He did just that and the result is something really pretty extraordinary.

Alison Stewart: The name of the film is May December, it's in select theaters November 17th, on Netflix, December 1st. It is excellent, I will say. Todd Haynes is its director. He is been our guest. Thank you so much for being here.

Todd Haynes: Thanks, Alison. It was such a pleasure. Thank you.

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Alison Stewart: Tomorrow is Pub Day for Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, Michael Cunningham. His new novel, Day, tackles the story of one Brooklyn-based family on the same day in 2019, 2020 and 2021. He joins me in studio next to discuss.

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