Portland-based director Todd Haynes’s latest film, May December, stars Julianne Moore as Gracie, an Alabama homemaker on the brink of 60, in a May-December relationship—a term for a substantial age gap—with her 36-year-old husband Joe, the son of the only Korean family in town, played by Charles Melton. He was 13 when they met. (The film is loosely inspired by the story of Mary Kay Letourneau, a teacher who had an affair with her student in 1997.)

Natalie Portman plays a visiting actress named Elizabeth who’s preparing for her role playing Gracie in a forthcoming movie. “It’s a very complex and human story,” she tells a friend of the family, affecting an empty empathy. People mail Joe and Gracie boxes of feces regularly enough that Gracie “has a sixth sense about these things.”

Haynes previously cast Moore in roles of tragic domesticity: In 1995’s Safe, she played a well-to-do housewife overtaken by “environmental illness”; in 2002’s Far from Heaven, she was an iconic mid-century housewife married to a closeted gay man. This film, however, turns on a very different power dynamic.   

Last weeks, Haynes called over Zoom from New York to tell us about the making of the new film, how he wound up moving here more than 20 years ago, and how he spends the stretches of time he gets at home in Portland.

Our conversation has been edited and condensed.

Portland Monthly: So there’s some confusion around whether or not you live in Portland.
Todd Haynes: I live in Portland. [laughs] I’m just not there that much. I don’t have any other residences. Mostly, this movie has kept me away a lot since last fall.

How often are you in town?
I was just there for August. May was all Cannes [Film Festival] and this retrospective I had in Paris [at the Centre Pompidou]. And then we’ve been promoting the movie since September, on the festival circuit.

You bought your house here in 2000, right? 
Yes. My sister said “Oh, a friend of ours has an empty house in Northwest Portland. You can stay there for free and just write your script.” I definitely didn’t know how profound, or how long-lasting the change would be, or how much it really moved me from my life in New York.

I met amazing people and fell in love with the city and the climate and everything—I really dug it. Gus Van Sant was still living there, and he was an old friend. I met [the novelist and screenwriter] Jon Raymond; I met all these people who have become so central to my subsequent creative life. [The director] Kelly Reichardt came and visited me that first season I was there and met all these friends of mine, and developed life-long, amazing, creative partnerships with them and would go on to set all of her films in the Pacific Northwest.

We have you to thank for all of the films that Kelly and Jon have made together (most recently, Showing Up). 
Yes.

You also have some family in town, right?
My sister lives in Portland. It’s funny, my grandfather—who was a very, very central part of my childhood—was born in Portland. Do you know the Semler building? There’s a building downtown that says—it’s kind of ugly block writing—The Semler Building. Semler was my mom’s maiden name. Apparently I came to Portland when I was six months old and went to Jake’s Famous Crawfish and danced the twist on the table.

What do you like to do around town?
Kelly and I got to go to the river more times in August than I think we ever have. And it was just like, ahhh; just, yeah. Having downtime together and talking about our work projects and our friends and our families and our lives…. There are things that happen there that are some of the most nourishing for me.

What does it mean to be a filmmaker that lives in Portland and not LA or New York? 
Um, peace of mind. [laughs] I loved the years that I lived in New York. I can’t imagine my creative life, and my film life, without them. In many ways I still identify with that culture that I was formed in as a filmmaker. But I really admired something about Portland: people lived there because they wanted to live there, not because it was a city that was going to give them careers and opportunities and get them places. There was really something singular and specific about this place, and a creative community that I found to be so autonomous and so original, and not based on models that we see play out in bigger, competitive-first cities like LA or New York.

Are you able to have a foot in both communities?
I just had a screening of May December at the Hollywood [Theater]. We invited about 100 people that were just my buddies for the first screening. It was super fun.

In the new movie, Natalie Portman’s character Elizabeth has such a drive for the project she’s working on in the film, and I heard that she initially brought you the script. I wondered if that was mirrored at all by her energy on set. 
Well, it was. But once she was there, she was playing her part. I mean, she set this all in motion, she and her production team. But then it was really my regular producers who sort of knew how to make it all manifest.

Did you feel like you were returning to something in working with Julianne Moore in a domestic setting? 
In terms of working together, it was part of the continuum of our practice together as actor-director. But I felt that the two central female characters were completely contrary to most of the depictions of women and domestic stories that I’ve told in my other films. A sense of female willfulness and desire is driving the events that both precede this story and that we also see occurring within Elizabeth’s entree into this world.

The closest of my films that it reminded me of is [the HBO limited series starring Kate Winslet]  Mildred Pierce: women who are really running the economic story. Their drives are motivating the narrative of the film, and the men are passive and yield to women.

A series you wrote with Jon Raymond. I hear the two of you are working on a new film together starring Joaquin Phoenix.
It’s a project that originated from ideas that Joaquin brought me—stirrings and musings and dreams and questions and fantasies [laughs] that he shared with me and that found their setting in 1930s Los Angeles. It’s a detective story but it becomes something quite different, a love story between his character and a very unlikely object of desire.

I imagine that takes you out of town again?
We’re setting it up for the summer, to shoot in Mexico.

May December hits theaters November 17 and Netflix December 1.