Todd Haynes

English-language films about oppression fared well at the 59th Venice Film Festival, with Peter Mullan's powerful drama, "The Magdalene Sisters," an expose of the order's cruel regime in 1960s Ireland, winning the Venice Film Festival's top laurel, the Golden Lion. Julianne Moore's bravura performance as a 1950s housewife (modeled vocally on Doris Day), trapped in a racist and homophobic society in Todd Haynes' melodrama, "Far From Heaven," garnered best actress.

It happened when he was 8, a boy in Encino, but Todd Haynes, sitting on a hotel rooftop as the "dizzying experience" of the Cannes Film Festival unfolds below him, still can feel its power. "I went to see '2001' with my dad and it was like we took a drug trip together," the writer-director remembers. "It was like 'We're going somewhere, we don't know where, but the more mysterious the better.' I wanted to make a movie like that, that fuels the imagination with ideas.

"Oh! You Pretty Things Don't you know you're driving your Mamas and Papas insane." --David Bowie, 1971 * This is a film set with a whole lot of ch-ch-changes going on. Actor Jonathan Rhys Meyers looks as if he stepped from the pages of a 25-year-old British music magazine, dressed as he is in platform heels and a figure-hugging sweater, with a leopard-skin scarf trailing from his neck. He wears a reddish-brown wig of spiky, layered hair, with an ultrashort fringe exposing his entire forehead.

At 11 a.m. in a West Village cafe, filmmaker Todd Haynes is a time-warped eyeful at a too-small bistro table, looking like David Bowie, circa 1972. A polyester shirt pulled taut across his chest under a faded Wrangler denim jacket, stovepipe jeans with mega-cuffs over Doc Marten stompers, he's working a glam rock look that's so dead-on it's jarring, even in this been-there-done-that environ.

You could call Todd Haynes, 30, a quintessential Valley Boy. He grew up in Encino, learning to read and write at Lanai Road School, and later attending Gaspar De Portola Junior High--both as Valley as can be. Eventually, Haynes got his diploma from the alternative private Oakwood School in North Hollywood.

In an abrupt shift of tactics, the beleaguered chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts on Friday fervently endorsed the controversial NEA-funded film "Poison" as the "work of a serious artist dealing with the serious issue" of family violence. John E. Frohnmayer, trying to head off swelling criticism of the film from conservative groups, told a press conference that though the avant-garde movie includes depictions of homosexual sex, it is "neither prurient nor obscene."