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Todd Haynes talks to Nick James about the fascination of UK glam rock
from Sight And Sound magazine, September 1998, vol. 8, issue 9

Nick James: Glam rock was primarily a British phenomenon. How did you become aware of it?

Todd Haynes: I was ten in 1971 and I remember traces of it - the first inklings of something new defying the previous generation's sensibility. But in the States the 60s sensibility was still fully in place because it encompassed things Americans love, like authenticity, naturalism and a direct emotional experience between audience and performer - the tenets of 60s music which remained the dominant mode into the 70s through the singer-songwriter. I got to know Roxy Music and Bowie stuff much better later, in college, along with Velvet Underground and Iggy Pop. It wasn't until then that I saw how mutually influential these artists were.

NJ: Velvet Goldmine is very good at reproducing the spirit of that time. Who did you talk to?

TH: It wasn't meeting people or tracking people down as much as following a trail of written material. I went to the sources that inspired those artists. I was reading Richard Ellmann's Oscar Wilde biography, and there were so many fascinating intersections. I was interested in glam rock's flag-waving of artificiality - and there's no more articulate spokesperson for artifice than Oscar Wilde. It's that incongruous relationship you also find in Roxy Music's work between a strong anti-naturalist statement - a pose, a stance, and ironic wit - and an ability to be poetic and beautiful and moving. My goal as a film-maker was to incorporate this duality into a narrative context.

NJ: Velvet Goldmine illustrates powerful social forces that are specific to Britain, especially through journalist Arthur.

TH: Initially I didn't have an angle on glam rock and class. But as I was comparing it with 60s rock - and the Stones' middle-class interest in American R&B and their need to slum it in this more authentic culture for inspiration - I kept realising how working class many of the architects of glam were, mainly the art-school set, and how it was a fantasy of an aristocratic persona, with Bryan Ferry maybe the most extreme. It's the period when Ferry was becoming Noel Coward that's the most resonant in his work. But these class angles wouldn't be apparent to an American voyeur of his period.

NJ: One of the great things claimed for glam rock was a liberation of attitudes towards homosexuality and bisexuality. Isn't this close to New Queer Cinema?

TH: New Queer Cinema came out of the AIDS era, a time when bisexuality wasn't the issue. But I wonder to what degree that glam attitude was from the heart. Things have changed now: there's a boredom setting in with the conformity of gay life, and it's healthy to question that conformity instead of just replication the structures we've been trying to free ourselves from. The courage of the glam rock era still blows me away - it was so much about blurring boundaries between gay and straight, between men and women.

NJ: What was your structural approach to the film?

TH: The only way to approach a film about rock stars is from a great distance, with barriers between the viewer and the stars. It could never have been a behind-closed-doors, what-Iggy-said-to-Bowie kind of movie. So Citizen Kane's classic structure of the search for the missing truth to find out what defines a character seemed the best thing to quote from.
It had to be about a lost time from the start, about something repressed - and great fears had risen up around whatever this was, which had changed it completely and buried it. That's why for Arthur it's an ambivalent search back. When you listen again to Roxy, the music is already mournful of a lost moment -it's full of melancholy.

NJ: The narrative interweaves three or four strands, which may make it difficult for some audiences to follow.

TH: Having a dreamlike, trippy feel from the start does that. And that's also what defines Performance for me. The equivalent in America was Warhol: the emergence into the mainstream of a combination of underground strands - from experimental film and art to crime - that were so close to each other at that time. That combination creates unusual, one-of-a-kind works. It made possible the kind of film-making that moved me the most when I was young. You go to 2001 and you come out at the other end with a whole new discovery. I wanted that feeling. But it's probably the most affirmative film I've ever made, and I have trouble with that. I don't believe in films that give you the answer.

NJ: Did you intend the film to be longer than it is now?

TH: The script was such a jigsaw puzzle it wasn't possible to deviate much. I was trying to get it as tight as it could be and it was hard - any way you look at it, it's a full meal. There were also economic factors: how we ended up having to do the film for a great deal less than the lowest budget we could conceive of. This made the shooting difficult, to say the least.

NJ: Who did you want to reach with this film?

TH: I hoped it would be like those trippy movies you'd go to and then analyse with your friends; buy the record and play it over and over again and ponder its meaning. That's how Arthur gets to be opened up by this period in the film, and through him you see it all from the fan's point of view. It's rare that pop culture can do that.

NJ: When you were shooting the music, how conscious were you of trying to make it not look like MTV?

TH: This is sad. The way so many people refer to the stylised mini-scene in the film as "the video scene" marks such a change in perception about experimental film. I don't watch MTV, I get bored by it, but it steals from such a rich, diverse history of experimental film and Hollywood musicals that people now call almost anything that deals with style, artifice and fakeness "MTV". It's a reduction of an entire tradition, a rich and buried history of film in which images lead and dominate and tell stories without words.

NJ: Did you look at D.A. Pennebaker's Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars from 1982?

TH: Meticulously. And The Last Waltz by Scorsese from 1978 and classic 60s documentaries. I tried to mirror the simplicity of them. We wanted some camera moves, but they shouldn't dominate or over-determine where your eyes go. The best thing about live performance is that it has to be spontaneous - so if Ewan fell down over there, we had to follow him. But the camera was static for a lot of it. What I was looking at mostly for the 'Ballad of Maxwell Demon' number against the white sets with the lizard character were promo films from that period. I'm sure our editing is more flamboyant at times, but for the most part I was trying to keep it crude, amateurish and hokey.

NJ: The visual style is so different from Safe which was very tightly controlled.

TH: I forced my camera department to zoom, rack and switch constantly rather than to track. It was early 70s-style film-making: Altman, Scorsese, Coppola and Performance. It was about framing, exploring the surface of the grain, and not entering the space physically so much as zooming in and finding your subject matter. Those amazing searching zooms in Altman's McCabe and Mrs. Miller, for instance. And we spent a lot of time trying to restore grain in the stock, the lenses and in the final lab process. Today's stocks are all founded on minimum grain, and grain can be so beautiful.

NJ: When 70s revival began in UK clubs in the late 80s, people going to thrift stores to buy clothes discovered that 70s bodies were much less nourished.

TH: My first film was about anorexia and I seem to turn my actors into anorexics. It's horrible. Julianne Moore had to lose so much weight for Safe and Toni Collette had a complete transformation for Velvet Goldmine. Ewan wasn't even allowed to drink beer!

NJ: The orgy scene is particulary effective.

TH: It had to have a decadence and an ugliness to it - it couldn't be glamorous. Unfortunately actors and extras who are willing to appear nude often have a stripper's body, and there's a bit of that in there. People just didn't look like that in the 70s - they were scrawny teenagers. But there are others where you can't tell if they're boys or girls, which is what I wanted.
It didn't look so good at first. But we kept darkening it and making it greener, so people have a lurid pallor to their skin, and it also made little bits of cosmetics pop out against the green. Like where Emily Woolf is being kissed by Eddie Izzard and her face is all red and raw. It needed that slightly ugly quality.

NJ: What happened with the songs?

TH: The two featured songs are by a New York-based band, Shudder To Think. I didn't know their music at all until they sent me a demo tape. There were a bunch of Bowie songs that we wanted, and I needed to produce all those tracks before we could shoot. It was taking Bowie a long time to get back to us - and he decided in the end not to let us use the songs. It was crushing at the time, but I think it gives you a slight chance not to read Brian Slade exclusively as Bowie. And it was a nice opportunity to feature songs that had been forgotten.

NJ: How has making Velvet Goldmine left you?

TH: I don't want to touch another film for a few years. I was miserable, and it was largely due to how little money we had and how much I was demanding of myself. I didn't have much fun making the film, and that's sad. It's made me think about the way I work, and what I might want to do differently. Having a real budget would be the first step.
I don't have a lot of good ways of releasing the enormous tension all directors feel. Often they get rid of it in cruel ways that aren't fair to the people around them - I don't like hearing that about directors whose work I love, but I have a feeling they have more fun. When you're a little more sadistic, you get it off your chest.

NJ: Do you enjoy talking about it now?

TH: It was never pure misery. It always seemed there were four amazing things happening at once, and also seven huge crises that had to be dealt with. And what do you deal with first? The crises, obviously, and the good stuff is just, "OK, great, great, that's set." Then there was always so much to look ahead to - "What about this, what are we going to do about that?" - and running behind. It was stressful. But I knew the actors were having an amazing time and most of the crew were having an amazing time, and there was a great spirit on the set which was captured on film. So I was vicariously having a good time.

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