As we get closer to Carol and, naturally, your anticipation grows all the more strong, feed your desire for Todd Haynes‘ new film with a preview of Carter Burwell‘s score. The helmer and composer reunited after the former’s best film, Velvet Goldmine, and what resulted has been lauded as career-best work on the latter’s part. Although some of you will wish to enter the film completely blind, these samples are, at about 50 seconds each, are too brief to concede much of anything — as far as I can tell, and I’m one who’s avoided the available footage with an absolute force — and rather beautiful to boot.
Along with that, one can (and should) listen to interviews both Haynes and Carol lead Rooney Mara conducted with KPCC at this year’s Telluride Film Festival. Both fall in line with the roles they’re assigned on the film, neither is less insightful into why they do what they do, and making these all the more pleasurable is how eloquently they can speak about the individual processes. At the end of Haynes’ discussion is an interesting tidbit: it’s expected that his next film will be Wonderstruck, an adaptation of the graphic novel by Hugo author Brian Selznick. (The Reese Witherspoon-led Peggy Lee biopic is still developing.) Its vision of a troubled childhood is not foreign territory for the writer-director — look no closer than the horrifying short The Suicide (available on Criterion’s Safe release), or the origins of Ewan McGregor’s Curt Wild in Velvet Goldmine — though the source material leads one to expect that this story, which oscillates between a boy in Minnesota circa 1977 and a girl in New Jersey circa 1927, will be a bit more family-friendly. Either way, we can’t wait.
Listen to them below: