More than most, Todd Haynes must consider the turn of the millennium as a momentous occasion.
Desperate to get away from the film industry after a difficult time on Velvet Goldmine, his 1998 tribute to glam rock, he left New York, where he had cultivated his reputation as one of American independent cinema's most innovative talents, and headed for Portland, Oregon.
'I relaxed there in a way I hadn't for so long,' he recalls, when we meet in London's Soho Hotel. 'I met all these amazing people and fell in love with the city, and ended up buying a house there. Everything changed. I don't think I'd been happier in my life. It helped keep the filmmaking in perspective - you've got to have other things in your life.'
Kick-starting what Haynes, 47, now dubs 'an amazing year of discoveries', it was during this time he devised the strategy for his latest (and most ambitious) film, I'm Not There - with the idea of casting multiple actors to play different aspects of the elusive singer-songwriter Bob Dylan. Then writing Far From Heaven, his 2002 Douglas Sirk-inspired melodrama that saw him nominated for a best original screenplay Oscar, Dylan had become his 'soundtrack' at the time. 'I guess I started getting this weird Dylan interest at the end of '99, and it took me to Portland at the beginning of 2000,' he says. It was the first time he'd listened to Dylan's work since he was a teenager in California 20 years earlier.
'The last record I remember buying and being aware of its release was the first of the Christian records, Slow Train Coming, and that's when I first saw Dylan perform, in '79,' says Haynes. 'And then I really stopped listening to Dylan for 20 years. I listened to a lot of different kinds of music.
'My sister was somebody who knew what he was doing at the time and I thought that was cool. I always wanted her to make me mix tapes - but I never really listened to them as much I should. But it all came back at the end of my thirties, when I found myself all of a sudden really wanting to listen to him again. And that meant listening to the stuff that I'd had a lot of associations with, listening to his classic records.'
