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Stardust Memories:
Todd Haynes Recreates the Velvet Revolution
by Aaron Krach
from The Independent Film & Video Monthly, December 1998

Todd Haynes deserves one of those fancy MacArthur genius grants. You know, the $200,000 they give starving artists to live on so they can continue making their work. In spite of the fact that he's completed five critically-acclaimed films -- Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story (1988), Poison (1991), Dottie Gets Spanked (1993), Safe (1995), and now Velvet Goldmine, which premiered at Cannes, screened at The New York Film Festival, and is currently being released by Miramax -- he needs the money.

When I first met Haynes, he had just returned from a grueling, nine-week shoot in England for Velvet Goldmine. He was exhausted, and his apartment was infested with rats. It's now a year later and he has eliminated the vermin, but Haynes is still working himself ragged. He arrived for our appointment out-of-breath, his hands filled with freshly faxed pages of the script; one month before its New York Film Festival screening, he is still making minor adjustments. During the past year, which Haynes spent largely in the editing room, Velvet Goldmine was transformed from a movie about music into the Gospel of Glam Rock according to Todd Haynes.

The film follows two glam artists, one British and the other American, on a spiritual quest through sex, drugs, and rock'n'roll. Mythical glam-star Brian Slade (Jonathan Rhys-Meyers) disappears after a staged assassination in 1974. Ten years later, a reporter named Arthur Stewart [sic] (Christian Bale) investigates the fabled disappearance. Velvet Goldmine follows Slade's developing career and explosive relationships with his wife (Toni Collette) and an American rock star named Curt Wild (Ewan McGregor).

The narrative is draped on a complex visual structure. Director of photography Maryse Alberti and production designer Christopher Hobbs create a world that is one part seventies' reconstruction and part avant-garde original. Editor James Lyons, another veteran of Haynes' previous films, weaves a glam rock soundscape to match the glittering visuals.

In Velvet Goldmine, Haynes continues to excavate popular culture and transform it. He digs through the cinema of his youth, from animation to trippy rock musicals, compressing it all into a film that is bold, sexual, and epic. Watching Velvet Goldmine is like driving a convertible through history with the top down and the stereo turned up loud. Because it is so mind-bogglingly beautiful, you may at first neglect the layers of meaning and just enjoy the ride. But, as Haynes here explains, there's more to Velvet Goldmine than meets the eye.

Aaron Krach: Velvet Goldmine combines so many different elements: Oscar Wilde, Glam Rock, queerness, drugs, youth-culture, London, even an Orwellian version of New York in 1984. What element did you begin with?

Todd Haynes: It started with the music, the truly amorous relationship I have with the music, which started in high school. There was something about David Bowie. I knew I would be getting into him in the future, but I couldn't handle him at the time. When I first encountered him, it was too much, too dangerous. Yet when things are haunting or slightly disturbing, you know they have touched you somewhere. It's funny how sometimes the mind can defer, almost out of a protective mechanism, to let you get through what you're going through now. Then there was Roxy Music, but I didn't start listening to it until college. I was also getting into [director Jean] Genet for the first time, and I was obviously banking off all of these various things in Velvet Goldmine.

AK: How did you turn an adolescent relationship with Glam Rock into a film?

TH: Before I could think about a story or even a trajectory, I tried to mimic the process that I understood David Bowie and Bryan Ferry were exploring -- drawing from these various references, looking for pertinent or recurring themes, connections, overlaps, intersections. My search included their work, their lives, their autobiographies, as well as Oscar Wilde, his work, his biography. [I was] trying to follow that line -- the walk of the Dandy to Seventies Glitter.

AK: Your tracing the roots of Glitter Rock to Oscar Wilde was a particular surprise.

TH: It was pretty clear from the beginning that I needed to start reading my Wilde. I saw all these really interesting parallels with the way Wilde evolved very self-consciously as a celebrity in his period: from the outside in, completely striking the pose and adopting the party persona that he became known for in Gilbert and Sullivan plays, way before he had published a single poem, piece of prose, or play. So he was known as this type, this figure, before he ever had anything to back it up.

AK: It's a bold act to not only rewrite history in your head, but turn those ideas into a two-hour, $7 million spectacle. Where do you get the confidence to represent history so clearly in your own voice?

TH: My boldness really does come from the very bold way that Glam artists opposed history, opposed traditional sex roles. I'm copying them, and they were copying other people. It's a long, brilliant tradition of theft, basically.
I think the only really truthful way to deal with history is as a fiction. It's the only way you can be honest about it and acknowledge the fact that history is partial, selective, usually in the hands of people in power who choose what gets written down for posterity and what falls through the cracks. With that attitude, you're liberated -- allowed to embellish and make it as subjective as you like. That is where I'm very much in line with Oliver Stone. I really admire the fact that he deals with history as flagrantly as he does. I loved Nixon. I think it's a brilliant opera of history.

AK: Making a film about the 1970s that begins in 1850 and runs up to the 1980s must have involved a rather unwieldy script. How did you convince people to get behind it?

TH: Because there was this youth-culture element, rock'n'roll, beautiful actors and actresses, make-up, and spectacle -- people could probably go with it a little more. Anyone who actually committed to reading the script would encounter some experimental elements. And that's still what they encounter when they see the film.
Miramax is absolutely behind the film. We didn't really resolve a deal with them until pretty late into preproduction. We never wanted to give up any rights beyond just distribution. We didn't want them involved in any decision-making about the film or about the cut. But to his credit, Harvey Weinstein has been only hands-off, very respectful, extremely enthusiastic. I think he's really making an effort to have a different relationship with directors.

AK: Looking back, you are a filmmaker of histories rather than of stories. Poison was about sex, Safe was about Los Angeles, and Velvet Goldmine is about music and youth-culture. Do you think of yourself in this way?

TH: That's a really nice way of putting it. Definitely all the films are reactions to and interpretation of famous lives, situations, or events. From the youngest age and the very first film I saw (which was Mary Poppins), certain films would have a huge, obsessive effect on me. They would be inspiring and make me want to create in some way in conversation with the film.
In some way, all my work is a response to cultural material that affects me emotionally. It's an ambivalent relationship, too. It's not just out of idolatry. There is something about its mechanisms manipulating me that both fascinates and appalls me. My work is on some level an intervening in that process. It's why I like films that engage traditional narrative mechanisms and machinery, like Douglas Sirk or Fassbinder films. You identify with the characters. It's not like Brecht, where all of that stops, or very theoretical films like Godard's middle period. It is film that manipulates and still works with Hollywood modes, but at some level forces you to look at those mechanisms and think about them. It works in a dual fashion.

AK: Memory is a critical element in Velvet Goldmine. Christian Bale, playing the journalist investigating the story of Glam Rocker Brian Slade, relives painful memories of coming out, and Toni Collette recounts her experiences when interviewed about her romance with Slade. Is there a contradiction between Glam Rock trying to do something new and relying on memories of the past?

TH: Yes, and yet what they were drawing from was the past. They were interested in blending old, nostalgic, Hollywood notions of glamour with Kubrick notions of space-age futurism. You had to keep digging this period out from under the earth. Christian Bale's task is to excavate the past of Glam Rock, but also his own past in the process. The music of Glitter Rock, particularly early Roxy Music records, is also very much in the past. Its tense is past tense. It's all very melancholic and retrospective. It's almost like it was over before it began. They had all these projections of this doomful future that was about to happen, that was going to squash all of this wild stuff.
What's funny is that in a way this film is very affirmative. More than anything I've ever made, it almost suggests, "Here, look at this. This is a good example of something." As opposed to most of my films, which have looked at culture from a critical perspective and not really given you an answer or an alternative. In a way that makes me uncomfortable, Velvet Goldmine offers up what I truly believe is a radical sensibility that marked that era. But that period was completely repressed afterwards -- buried and retreated from with embarrassment, regret, fear, or just denial. Because of all that, I don't know if I would have been able to approach the film in any other way.

AK: Are you saying you're uncomfortable as an artist offering the audience something they can feel good about?

TH: I feel completely uncomfortable. In the most basic way, that's what all Hollywood films do: affirm identity in their neat resolutions of whatever conflicts the films are about. They tie it all up in the end and make you feel good.
Fassbinder said it best when he said you can't give them the revolution. You have to show them the conditions that make the revolution necessary. It's up to every individual to take from that what they will and construct their own solution. To give you the answer is to deprive people of their own potential to think, to imagine something different, to see what's wrong with the world and find their own answer to it.

AK: Velvet Goldmine marks a return to experimental techniques after the fairly straightforward narrative of Safe -- Barbie-doll animation, elliptical editing, jarring jump-cuts, music video interludes. What do these techniques allow you to say that you couldn't in a traditional narrative?

TH: For this film, the style was everything. It was a chance to get back to those experience kind of films of the early sixties/late seventies [sic] drug culture that offered a kind of trip for the viewer -- to take them somewhere they had never been before. Films like that meant so much to me when I was a teenager and made me want to become a filmmaker. They made you want to analyze the film and buy the record, play it over and over again with your friends, really immerse yourself in the film. The style was a concerted nod to that kind of filmmaking.

AK: From the Carpenters' songs in Superstar to the hollow sounds of Safe, the soundtrack has always been a crucial element in your films. How do you approach sound?

TH: I like it to be like fingers that sometimes tap you, sometimes massage you, sometimes punch you, sometimes stroke you in subtle ways. The music is psychological or internal. Some of my favorite parts of the film are dead silence. It's absolutely dead silence when Ewan [McGregor] and Johnny [Rhys-Meyers] kiss. For a film that's so loud and so much about sound, the only thing you can do that is more arresting is absolute silence.

AK: In addition to its inordinate quantity of music, Velvet Goldmine stands out in how it uses music in as many different ways possible, adding layers onto the film.

TH: You are talking about a definite decision on my part to see all the different ways music can work in films and incorporate them into one film -- from the feeling of live music, a la a rock documentary, to the much more abstract, stylized, out-of-time stuff like music videos and the musical tradition where music is moving the story forward and working as a narrator towards the evolution of character and story.
For instance the song "Bittersweet," which narrates a whole series of scenes, is very densely constructed. Brian [Rhys-Meyers] and Curt [McGregor] begin to break up. Brian says he's going to quit the Maxwell Demon show. You see Arthur [Bale] come to London as you see Curt going to Berlin. Arthur meets the Flaming Creatures and all of a sudden they sing a refrain of the song you've been hearing all the way through, in different voices.
It was tightly conceived. We had to time scenes so that they would fit within the meter of that particular piece of music. But it took such planning from the very beginning. The band would go in and cut the song, and I would say, "Can you double the intro, 'cause we're going to need more time for the Ewan and Johnny good-bye scene. And can we cut this second verse and go right to the third, 'cause there is nothing I want to cover for this section." It was like constructing the songs around the script, shooting the scenes to the music, and then cutting the scenes back to the music. Even then we still had to make changes in the end. But without that much planning, I don't know how we would have come as close as we did to fitting it all in.

AK: The actors have made extraordinary comments about how enjoyable the shoot was. Jonathan Rhys-Meyers said he was so tired every night but would "have a smile on my face knowing I was coming back to work the next day." How did you keep your actors so happy?

TH: I was happy they were having a good time, so I could live vicariously through them. I was having a very hard, grueling time. This was the hardest shoot and most demanding script ever. It was 220 scenes and a nine-week shoot. With that many scenes all over the place, that's what really kills production, moving from place to place.
As a director, I'm a nice guy. But it got to the point on the set where I thought if I had a bit more of a sadistic edge to me, I would have more fun. I would be able to relieve myself of all that amazing tension and scream at some poor person next to me. I could get it off my chest then be, "Okay, let's rock." Instead I internalize it all and am really nice, and I go home and I want to kill myself. It really was at times so torturous. We had four to five scenes, separate locations, to shoot a day. A day! It's like shooting an entire scene in three hours. It was such a
nightmare. But it's so stupid to complain, because I'm lucky to be a director and have all these problems.

AK: What kind of preparations did you have with the cast to get them so deeply inside the Glam scene?

TH: We hung out a lot. I thought that was really important -- to feel a real kind of comfort and ease and trust with each other before we got on set. And it paid off in spades, with the way they continued to hang out together throughout the shoot, fell in love with each other, had sex with each other, did drugs with each other. It was a good healthy Glam Rock experience all the way around.

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