Carol
Some people change your life forever.
Carol (2015)
Production
Budget
$11 800 000
Revenue
$40 272 135
Director
Scenario
Patricia Highsmith
Author
Composer
Producer
Actors
Cate Blanchett
Carol Aird
Rooney Mara
Therese Belivet
Kyle Chandler
Harge Aird
Jake Lacy
Richard Semco
Sarah Paulson
Abby Gerhard
John Magaro
Dannie McElroy
Cory Michael Smith
Tommy Tucker
Kevin Crowley
Fred Haymes
Short description
Carol is a 2015 romantic drama set in New York in the early 1950s. Therese Belivet is a young woman working in a Manhattan department store while hoping for something more from her life, including a career as a photographer. She meets Carol Aird, an elegant, married customer caught in an unhappy marriage, and the two begin spending time together. What starts as a chance encounter grows into a deep mutual attachment, putting them at odds with the conventions of their time. Carol's husband, Harge, opposes the relationship and threatens her custody of their daughter, while Therese's boyfriend, Richard, expects a future she does not want. The screenplay by Phyllis Nagy adapts Patricia Highsmith's novel The Price of Salt.
Todd Haynes directed the film, the sixth of the ten features listed for him, arriving between I'm Not There (2007) and Wonderstruck (2017). Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara lead the cast as Carol and Therese, with Kyle Chandler as Harge, Jake Lacy as Richard, Sarah Paulson as Abby Gerhard and John Magaro as Dannie McElroy. Tessa Ross, Christine Vachon and Stephen Woolley produced.
Made for a modest 12 million USD, the film took about 40 million USD worldwide, a strong return for a period drama of its scale. On TMDB it holds 7.5/10 from 4,041 votes.
What's left behind the scenes
- The film is an adaptation of Patricia Highsmith's 1953 novel 'The Price of Salt'.
- Mia Wasikowska was considered for the role of Therese.
- It was decided to nominate Rooney Mara for Best Supporting Actress and Cate Blanchett for Best Actress, despite the fact that Mara is on screen for 71 minutes, or 60% of the film's duration, while Blanchett is on screen for 65 minutes, or 54%.
- Neither Cate Blanchett nor Rooney Mara were required to be by the phone during scenes where their characters speak to each other, yet they decided to stay on the line for moral support. Consequently, in all scenes where Carol and Therese speak by phone, the actresses are actually talking to one another.
- The film 'Carol' (2015) was shot on Super 16mm to more closely resemble films made in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Cinematographer Edward Lachman drew inspiration from the works of photographers Vivian Maier, Ruth Orkin, Helen Levitt, Esther Bubley, and Saul Leiter (who sometimes took photos through windows or captured reflections).
- As Patricia Highsmith recounted, she was inspired to write the novel 'The Price of Salt' (1952) by a woman in a fur coat she happened to see shopping at a New York department store shortly before Christmas in 1948. At the time, Patricia was temporarily working as a salesclerk in the toy department. She recalled sketching out the novel's main plot in just a couple of hours that evening—quite possibly under the influence of chickenpox, which she discovered the next day she already had ("Fever really stimulates the imagination"). The novel was completed by 1951.
- Tessa Ross of Film4 Productions stated that the preparation and filming of the movie took 11 years.
- Rooney Mara was offered the role of Therese after she finished filming David Fincher's 'The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo' (2011), but she initially declined, citing exhaustion. The role went to Mia Wasikowska, who later left the project to star in Guillermo del Toro's gothic horror film 'Crimson Peak' (2015). Mara agreed to play Therese in 2013, by which time Todd Haynes had already become the director.
- This is the second adaptation of Patricia Highsmith's novels featuring Cate Blanchett. In 1999, she starred in Anthony Minghella's psychological thriller 'The Talented Mr. Ripley'.
- Phyllis Nagy wrote the first draft of the screenplay in 1996.
- At its premiere at the 2015 Cannes Film Festival, the film received a 10-minute standing ovation.
- Rooney Mara has been a fan of Cate Blanchett since she was 13 years old. She described the opportunity to work with her idol as 'simply a dream come true'.
- Carol's fur coat was made from pieces of fur from old coats of that era. Costume designer Sandy Powell mentioned in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter ("How Cate Blanchett's Fur Coat Was Made, and How It Was Lost," January 26, 2016) that "...it [the coat] was falling apart in pieces every day, before every shoot."
- To recreate the atmosphere of the 1950s on screen, Todd Haynes drew inspiration from the works of Morris Engel and Ruth Orkin, particularly their film "Small Time Wonder" (1956).
- Screenwriter Phyllis Nagy was friends with the novel's author, Patricia Highsmith.
- Filming took place in the spring of 2014. Scenes depicting 1950s New York and New Jersey were filmed in Cincinnati, Ohio, and its surroundings. Locations included downtown Cincinnati, Eden Park, Hyde Park, the Over-the-Rhine neighborhood, as well as the towns of Cheviot, Hamilton, Lebanon, and Wyoming. Some scenes were filmed in Alexandria, Kentucky.
- The second collaboration between Todd Haynes and Cate Blanchett, and the third between Haynes and costume designer Sandy Powell.
- Carol's car: a 1949 Packard Super Deluxe 8 with a Straight 8 Flathead engine (327 cubic inches) and a column shifter. The car features a very rare Egyptian-style hood ornament. The hood could be opened from both the left and right sides. The car was borrowed from an owner who responded to a call from the Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky Film Commission for loans of 1950s cars, buses, and trucks for the filming. Harge's car: a 1952 Cadillac Series 75 Fleetwood Limousine. Abby's car: a 1950 Packard Custom Eight convertible. The red-and-yellow taxis in some episodes are a 1950 Chevrolet and a 1949 Dodge.
- The boys who run away from the model railroad in the department store's toy section when Carol exits are named Dashiel, Roman, and Ignatius Upton. They are the children of Cate Blanchett and her husband Andrew Upton.
- In the scene where Carol and Therese first drive to Carol's home, they pass through the Lincoln Tunnel connecting New York and New Jersey. Since filming took place in Cincinnati, the local Little Tunnel, which is only 335 meters long, served as a stand-in. Because of this, the drive had to be repeated—the actresses in the car would drive through the tunnel, make a loop, and enter it again several times.
- When the upcoming filming of the movie was announced in 2012, the director was John Crowley.
- The novel 'The Price of Salt/Carol' is written in the third person from Therese's point of view.
- The film 'Carol' was created in collaboration with 'Dirty Films Ltd.', a London-based production company owned by Cate Blanchett and her husband, Andrew Upton.
- Phyllis Nagy has written screenplays for only two films. Both titles consist of female names.
- In an interview with Terry Gross, host of the radio program 'Fresh Air', actress Sarah Paulson stated that in the original script, her role (Abby) was more 'complete,' but many of her scenes were unfortunately cut.
- Carol smokes in 9 scenes. This takes up 6 minutes and 23 seconds.
- Starting with the drama 'Safe' (1995), director Todd Haynes has created so-called 'lookbooks' to help better immerse himself in the atmosphere of the film in progress. Intended primarily for the cinematographer, they include photographs, stills, paintings, periodicals, and other sources from which ideas regarding the style of the future film are born. (These visual aids should not be confused with storyboards or illustrated scripts, which he has used since his very first film, 'Poison', in 1990.) As the director himself put it, 'lookbooks' are a way of conveying without words the mood, passion, and stylistic features of the film. As for the film 'Carol' (2015), the 'lookbook' served as a 'reference guide for clothing, hairstyles, makeup, how women in general carried themselves in public during that period, and the influence the surrounding world had on the development of women.' The 'lookbook' for 'Carol' contained references to 'Brief Encounter' (1945) and 'Vertigo' (1958) by David Lean and Alfred Hitchcock respectively (Haynes liked how convincingly they portrayed the time period), Steven Spielberg's 'The Sugarland Express' (1974) (the innovative work of cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond), 'Lovers and Lollipops' (1956) by Morris Engel and Ruth Orkin (filming locations), and Jack Clayton's 'The Pumpkin Eater' (1964) (interior filming). It also included photographs by Ernst Haas, Helen Levitt, and Vivian Maier. Haynes compiles his 'lookbooks' like visual mixtapes (a mix of fragments gathered into a composition, in other words, musical collections or compilations), arranging photographs and elements from other films he admires into a series of collages. For 'Carol', he created over 80 such collages and referred to them constantly during production. It took two months to compile this 'lookbook'. ('Todd Haynes collects images to better convey the atmosphere of his films,' The New York Times, January 28, 2016.)
- The film won 4 New York Film Critics Circle awards: for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Screenplay, and Best Cinematography.
- Carol smokes cigarettes not only because it was common practice during the era in which the film is set, but also because the act of smoking should be viewed as symbolic, as a form of body language. Carol smokes constantly—when she is confident or flirting, when something troubles her, and in moments of tension. However, while traveling with Therese, she does not smoke—not in the car, nor in restaurants, nor in motels. This is an indication that Carol is happy. Carol is shown with a cigarette again only upon her return, when she is trying to secure joint custody of her daughter (the episode with Abby) and when she meets Therese at the Ritz Tower Hotel restaurant.
- The plot unfolds between Christmas 1952 and the beginning of 1953. A wall calendar in the New York Times office shows that it is April 1953. The note in which Carol asks Therese if they can see each other today is dated April 17. Thus, it becomes clear that 3.5 months have passed since Carol and Therese's last meeting.
Auditions in India
Casting calls in USA
Castingi w Polsce
Кастинги в Україні
