Yahoo Movies: 'Safe' Director Todd Haynes Talks About Julianne Moore's Early Greatness
It’s been a great year for Julianne Moore. In May, the actress picked up a Best Actress prize at Cannes for her role in David Cronenberg’s Hollywood satire, Maps to the Stars. And there’s been lots of Oscar talk surrounding her performance in the new drama Still Alice. So it’s only appropriate that the Criterion Collection picked this moment to release one of Moore’s earliest — and best — movies on Blu-ray. Arriving in theaters in 1995, the Todd Haynes-directed Safe unnerved audiences at the time with its chilling depiction of a woman so allergic to the contemporary urban world that she retreats to an isolated desert community where residents live in plastic bubbles. Speaking with Yahoo Movies about the long-overdue Blu-ray release of Safe, Haynes says he’s excited that Moore seems to be the current awards season frontrunner. “If this is her year, man, I couldn’t be more thrilled. I’m her first fan.”
Among the bonus features on the Criterion disc is a recent interview between you and Julianne Moore that includes footage of her first audition for Safe. What do you remember about meeting her that day?
I don’t know if I’ve ever had a more singular kind of shock of discovery in another creative person. And in this particular case, the character, Carol White, was created without all of the expected ways audiences can latch onto the protagonist of a movie. She’s someone who is so passive and just barely fits in to the codes of her world, because I wanted to see how someone with that fragile sense of self would play in the viewers’ minds. All that’s fine when you’re thinking of it abstractly, but suddenly I needed her to also be real!
And what I didn’t realize is how much an actor needed to respect that distance and mystery and not try to fill in the gaps and make Carol this sensible person right away. That was the most amazing thing about Julianne: her understanding that the actor doesn’t have to do all the work to reach out and pull the viewer into the story. That’s a way of describing what some of the movie stars in the Golden Age of Hollywood did — whether it was Greta Garbo or Marilyn Monroe, there was always something about them that was just out of reach. And Julianne somehow has maintained that in a culture where everything has become more accessible and familiar.
Great interview
It's Russian, mess.
Potato quality
I guess they couldn't afford Rihanna. And is that poor Rebecca Black in the background? 
