By being enlisted to conceal his indiscretions from public view, she ultimately gives him room to explore his desires to a degree that she never gets. She awards him the freedom that is withheld from her.”After a few minutes of discussing Todd Haynes movies with Todd Haynes, an unusual transformation occurs. He is so energised by film as a medium that he is able magically to remove himself from his own involvement, and see instead his movies through an audience’s eyes. Occasionally it becomes less an interview and more like two Todd Haynes fans gabbing about their favourite bits “That scene in the psychiatrist’s office!” he raves “It’s so cruel, but so real. People are like that, aren’t they?” It would not be out of place to hear him ask: This Haynes guy – what else has he done?He is, I think, a fan before he is a film-maker. It does not take much prodding to return him to that pre-artistic state, when the pleasure was in the gorging.

“I remember wishing as a kid that I could go to a room that had all the movies I wanted to see, and say ‘Today I want to watch this movie…’ ” He almost trills at the memory. “But now I guess we have it,” he sighs sadly, the desire diminished now that satisfaction is within reach.Chief among his abiding obsessions is Julianne Moore, who dominated his 1995 masterpiece Safe as a housewife falling apart hair by hair in an antiseptic, sinisterly sci-fi Los Angeles, and in Far From Heaven offers a different slant on a woman whose clothes and possessions and domestic rituals are all that separate her from hysteria “We’d kept in touch. There wasn’t that awkward phone-call, you know: ‘Yes, it’s H-A-Y-N-E-S. We did a little film together a while back…’” We weigh up Moore’s best non-Todd Haynes performance, and settle on The Big Lebowski, largely for the way she chews on the word “vagina”.I had assumed that the casting of Moore would make Far From Heaven an easy sell, and something of a relief after the cash-strapped production of Velvet Goldmine Haynes quickly relieves me of that misconception. “There’s only one female star today who will relax financiers: Julia Roberts. Just to do a film about a woman that doesn’t star her is considered an enormous financial risk. The money people, the pen-pushers, exerted a scrutiny over our every move that was unfair and inappropriate.

And they never even said, ‘The dailies look beautiful.’ At least say that.”Part of him might relish the struggle against disbelievers – backers, critics, whoever. Or he could be comfortable with the pain of making movies; it may be an ingrowing toenail, but it’s his ingrowing toenail, that kind of thing. Among all but his family and the staff of The Village Voice, he has experienced opposition and philistinism from the start. His 1989 featurette, Superstar, The Karen Carpenter Story, performed by a cast of Barbie dolls, had its distribution blocked by the Carpenter estate. In 1991, Poison attracted right-wing opprobrium with its scenes of homoeroticism, including the most bitching mass-expectorating scene in movie history.Safe, in turn, was misunderstood by those audiences who didn’t ignore it outright; only now is it cropping up near the top of many “Films of the 1990s” polls. Christine Vachon, Haynes’s regular producer, and queen bee of US independent cinema, recalls the first screening of Safe.