Veteran counterculture filmmaker Todd Haynes, whose hits include Velvet Goldmine, Carol and Dark Waters, will receive the prestigious Carrosse d'Or prize during the opening ceremony of the Directors' Fortnight at the Cannes film festival in May.
Since 2002, the Carrosse d'Or ("the Golden Coach") has rewarded pioneering directors, recognising innovation, with past recipients including David Cronenberg, Jim Jarmusch, Agnès Varda, Jane Campion, Werner Herzog and Martin Scorsese.
The French Directors' Guild (SRF) praised Haynes for pushing the "experimental and narrative possibilities" of cinema during his career, which will be honoured at the ceremony.
"Your genius is that of knowing how to move and dazzle us in a single gesture, combining formal virtuosity with an infinite capacity for empathy and tenderness," the agency said in a statement on Tuesday.
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Born on 2 January, 1961 in Los Angeles, Haynes has directed 10 feature films, five short films and several television episodes. He has also been the executive director on a number of films by fellow American Kelly Reichardt, who won the Carrosse d'Or award in 2022.
Known for his keen observations of postmodern America, Haynes likes to explore ideas of identity and sexuality, and his protagonists are often outsiders at odds with the norms of society.
In 1987, while a student at Bard College, Haynes made Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story, a short documentary that used Barbie dolls to tell the story of the iconic singer. It faced legal hurdles over copyright issues and was banned as soon as it was released.
His 1991 feature film debut, Poison, also garnered both acclaim and controversy. Inspired by the work of gay French writer Jean Genet, it went on to win the 1991 Sundance Film Festival's Grand Jury Prize, establishing Haynes as an emerging talent.
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Safe (1995), his second feature film, starred Julianne Moore in the role of Carol White, a San Fernando Valley housewife who develops violent allergies to her middle-class suburban existence and goes to a retreat in the desert to be cured. Moore went on to work on several films with Haynes, including his most recent feature May December, released in 2023.
Music has been a focus over the years for Haynes. His 1998 film Velvet Goldmine, a tribute to the 1970s glam rock era inspired by David Bowie's song of the same name, starred Christian Bale, Ewan McGregor, Jonathan Rhys-Meyers and Toni Collette. It received the Special Jury Prize for Best Artistic Contribution at the 1998 Cannes Film Festival.
Haynes returned to music in 2007 with I'm Not There, an experimental film inspired by the life and work of Bob Dylan in which six different actors depicted various facets of Dylan's public persona. His first documentary feature about the 1960s band, The Velvet Underground, premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 2021.
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The SFR also pointed to Haynes' ability to speak out for those sidelined by mainstream media and films, writing in their statement: "Constantly and relentlessly, you have challenged the norms and structures of cinematic representation to better question our social, racial and gender representations. It's as if all the love and violence in the world converge in your cinema to sweep us away in a torrent of emotions."
His 2015 film Carol, starring Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara, won the Queer Palm at the Cannes festival. Adapted from the Patricia Highsmith novel The Price of Salt, it tells the story of two women who fall in love in 1950s New York.
The Carrosse d'Or will be presented to Haynes at the opening ceremony of the Directors' Fortnight on 14 May.
