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An Interview With Director Todd Haynes
Todd Haynes and fellow gay miners Christine Vachon and Michael Stipe dig into the glitter-rock riches of the Velvet Goldmine
by Blase DiStefano
November 1998
OutSmartMagazine.com

Todd Haynes, wearing blue jeans and a blue-jean jacket, walks down the long staircase to the lobby of the Houstonian Hotel. My first impression is of a young, attractive, light-haired man; as he approaches me with his wide smile, my impression changes to a young, attractive, light-haired man who needs the care of a hairdresser. OK, so he's doing one interview after another and he's a little stressed, and maybe he just washed his hair and didn't have time to dry it.

He's conducting these ongoing interviews for his new film Velvet Goldmine, starring Trainspotting's Ewan McGregor. Goldmine is a tribute to the glam-rock era of the early '70s in London—to David Bowie, Lou Reed, Iggy Pop, Brian Ferry and "the extraordinary inversions they imposed," says Haynes, "on our notions of the performance, sexuality, and identity."

Haynes' last film, Safe, starring Julianne Moore, did not have as safe a subject matter—environmental illness—but it was a critical success. In fact, it is because of Safe that Haynes was able to attract, among others, actor McGregor ("I love Safe. I thought it was an amazing movie.") and writer/lead singer of REM and executive producer of Goldmine, Michael Stipe ("Todd is my favorite American director, ever since Safe, which was a near-perfect film.").

We sit on one of the plush sofas in the lobby of the hotel. "Can we smoke here?" Haynes politely asks. Not seeing ashtrays, he eyes the other side of the room. "I see ashtrays there."

It's my turn to be polite: "We can move." He apologizes and helps me move my recording and camera equipment.

As we settle in on another one of those plush sofas, the 37-year-old director pulls out a pouch of tobacco and begins to roll his own. "I have a little chest cold and this is really the best remedy. I think it's the best thing you can do for your cold," he jokes as he rolls. "It's a new method."

"I hadn't heard that," I counter. "I'll let all my friends know."

His chest cold started with this publicity tour, "with all this flying," he says. "It's stressful, but it's nothing compared to what it was like making [Velvet Goldmine]. It's the most stressful thing I've ever done."

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Blase DiStefano: Compared to Safe, this film was like an epic—the music, the costumes, the whole production. How long did it take?
Todd Haynes: It was back in 1990 that I first started to talk about it with Jim Lyons, who is my co-story writer on the film and the editor. But I knew I wanted to make my film Safe. I didn't know it was going to take two years to get Safe financed.

Blase DiStefano: Why did it take so long?
Todd Haynes: Safe is an unusual case, because it's such a dark, sad, difficult movie, particularly in today's market. There isn't really a precedent for it today. Velvet Goldmine wasn't nearly as hard. We had our hurdles, but for the most part—the youth culture element, the music, the fact that it's sexy, it's more up, faster-paced—all those things made people relaxed.

Blase DiStefano: So the idea for Goldmine started back in 1990.
Todd Haynes: Yeah, and then the research went on for several years in and around other projects or whenever I was in England.

Blase DiStefano: Research entails what exactly?
Todd Haynes: In this case research meant starting with whatever materials were published, whatever was out there, books on key artists from the time. Always the most useful and exciting part of the research process is looking through magazines and newspapers that were coming out at the time, seeing the way these artists and this music were being described by these journalists.

Glam-rock was so unlike any other rock moment I can think of and is already such a hodgepodge of references—literary references, cinematic references, references to nostalgia and futurism and Warhol. What I really tried to do was retrace the steps of people like Brian Ferry and David Bowie and Brian Eno and their evolution, to go back to the sources they started from.

Blase DiStefano: So you read up on them also.
Todd Haynes: Oh yeah. I was obsessive and meticulous. I ended up with an opus musicology archive of 10 hundred-minute tapes spanning the entire era from mid-'60s to 1975, month by month, literally on a monthly examination of the charts and then albums that weren't charting.

Blase DiStefano: When you're doing this kind of research for a film, it obviously takes up a tremendous amount of time.
Todd Haynes: I just sort of squeeze it into whatever else I'm doing. I like it. To me it was about finding the curious intersections of events—things in Oscar Wilde's biography that paralleled David Bowie's biography, trying to find common moments that everyone sort of played at in this tradition.

Blase DiStefano: Speaking of Oscar Wilde, when the movie started [Goldmine commemorates Oscar Wilde as the original glam rocker], I'm sitting there watching this and thinking "Oh my God, they're screening the wrong film."
Todd Haynes: [Laughter.]

Blase DiStefano: In the beginning I was confused about exactly what was going on. But that was part of the fun.
Todd Haynes: Yeah it is. You kinda just got to relax. And the best thing journalists who are into the movie can say to people is, "Let your expectations go. You're not going to see a biopic. You're not going to see any objective story of the rock/glam era or David Bowie. And don't worry too much. Let yourself travel."

Blase DiStefano: It was fun, and it was beautiful to watch. Wasn't Sandy Powell [Goldmine's costume designer] nominated for Orlando?
Todd Haynes: Yeah, and she did Interview With a Vampire. [Powell's credits also include The Crying Game and Rob Roy, and she was also Oscar-nominated for The Wings of the Dove.] She worked with Derek Jarman, she worked with Lindsay ... do you know who Lindsay Kemp is?

Blase DiStefano: No.
Todd Haynes: Lindsay Kemp, who has a cameo in Velvet Goldmine as the singer at the music hall who goes down on the weird uncle, is a very important figure to the whole glam era in that he's a mime artist. He has a very well-known troupe, and one of his most famous plays is Flowers, which is an adaptation of Genet's Our Lady of the Flowers in a very dark, sordid, more dance-oriented kind of pantomime. Really out of the European tradition and fantastic and really sexy and really twisted and beautiful. Amazing images.

Bowie loved Lindsay Kemp and went to study with him even before Space Oddity, like in '68, '69. They had an affair—there's all these lurid stories of Lindsay. But Lindsay was this really influential gay underground theatrical visionary from London, and when Sandy Powell was a teenager she went to see Lindsay Kemp's stuff ... blew her mind. He was the first person she made costumes for, and so it was just sort of a great circle.

Blase DiStefano: How were you able to round up such a great group of artists?
Todd Haynes: I have to say most of the people who were in the film really did know my work. A lot of them really respected Safe. If it wasn't for that, then it was the period itself and its meaning for them, its pertinence for them as designers.

Like Peter King who was our hair/makeup guy—he is just an amazing part of the project, a real force in the film in the way the makeup/hair artists never are allowed to be. He worked very closely with Sandy Powell's department which is rare in film. There's often rivalries between hair/makeup and costumes. Sandy, Peter, and I sat down together and conceived every look, every change in Brian [Slade, one of the main characters]. He was amazing. And I don't think he did know my films. He was a wild glam boy in Bath where he grew up, terrorizing all of Bath in his outrageous costumes and carryings on.

Blase DiStefano: The great thing about glitter rock is that it sort of suggested we all play roles.
Todd Haynes: We play roles as who we are every day. And if that's true, we can change them—we can try this and we can try that. 'Cause in a way the bisexuality of the period is what's even more radical in some ways and disquieting to gay people and to straight people. It really pushes all those boundaries.

Blase DiStefano: When did you actually start filming?
Todd Haynes: We filmed it in the spring of '97 in London. It was grueling. For myself and Christine [Vachon, the film's producer] it was not an enjoyable experience, unfortunately. I kept sort of beating myself up saying, "This should be fun. This should be the funnest thing I've ever done, damn it." But it was so demanding and so ambitious. Then we lost our financing right before we started and had to find alternate money, and it made the budget go down a million dollars, and the budget was already so bare bones. That lost million sort of did us in.

Blase DiStefano: Were any of the people willing to work for less?
Todd Haynes: All the actors worked for the same amount. For Ewan that was very, very little, whereas for some of the actors that was good. But we thought it was the best way for a sense of us all doing this together. No one got paid fairly for the amount of work they had to put into it, but fees were completely standard.

Blase DiStefano: What was the average number of hours put in per day?
Todd Haynes: Well, the drag is that the crews in England do not work the way American crews work. They are extremely rigid—lunch and travel is included in a 12-hour day which is killing, really eats up your day. What we would do is push them to 14, but that still meant 12. And because this film has 220 scenes, that means each scene has a separate location, a separate costume, a separate everything, and if you're moving a crew within a day, you just lose the day.

Blase DiStefano: Why didn't you go crazy?
Todd Haynes: [Laughter] I pretty much went crazy. It was tough. Christine has a book out now called Shooting to Kill, which is a really amazing, very practical guide to independent producing. It's a very generous book that goes through every aspect of what a producer does. It includes a lot of her Velvet Goldmine journals—onset and production journals which I can barely read, because they bring it all back. But they really are fascinating for people who want to know more about how independent films are put together.

But I have to say she and I had a tough time, but in a way, a lot of our angst absorbed a lot of tensions and anxieties for the sake of the actors and crew who ended up having, for the most part, an amazing experience. All these friendships—and sometimes more than friendships—were formed on the set that haven't gone away. Actors and crew, they all still hang out all the time. There's this amazing love that was generated on set. It was really pretty special. I loved all the people I was working with, and that's what got me through.

Blase DiStefano: It sounded like a lot of people were actually working together to make something they believed in.
Todd Haynes: Very much so. Everyone realized this is a unique experience at some point and really embraced it.

Blase DiStefano: So how did you get Ewan McGregor?
Todd Haynes: I saw him in Trainspotting and thought he was extraordinary, amazing, and when I saw him I couldn't imagine an American actor. No one came to mind that was more suited for that role than Ewan. Early on, that was the only actor I knew from the outside that I wanted for a role.

So I went to visit him while he was shooting a film in Ireland. We started to talk about the project. He hadn't read it yet. We got along really well, and he seemed really excited by the ideas of the film, and then when he finally read it, he just loved the script. He didn't care what he played, he just wanted to be in it. He's a great guy.

Blase DiStefano: Had he been singing before, or was this his first time?
Todd Haynes: Pretty much. He sings a little bit in Emma. He has a little teeny bit where he sings with Gwyneth Paltrow, a very different kind of singing obviously. So I knew he could carry a tune. He had never been able to fulfill his rock-and-roll dreams the way he could in Velvet Goldmine, and I kind of had a feeling he'd be up for it and he'd be good, but I had no idea that he'd be that good. He was really amazing. He really seized command.

Blase DiStefano: And had Jonathan Rhys-Meyers sung before?
Todd Haynes: Yes. It was his voice on four of the songs Brian [Slade] sings. And I wasn't looking for an actor who could sing for Jon for that role. There was enough on his plate.

Blase DiStefano: He was good.
Todd Haynes: Yeah, he was a real find. He was incredible. He was 19 years old when we shot this film. Unbelievably talented kid, and I felt he had plenty to do, and to pull off that singing was something he didn't have to necessarily do—actors can lip-synch.

Blase DiStefano: But he seemed to handle that well too.
Todd Haynes: He did. He was amazing. He produced a demo tape for me just so he could prove to me that he could sing, 'cause he really wanted to, and I heard it and was like OK, you got it baby.

Blase DiStefano: Christine Vachon produced . . .
Todd Haynes: Safe, Poison, Velvet Goldmine. She's my main woman.

Blase DiStefano: I interviewed her some time ago, and she said she was going to take a vacation; then when I interviewed you, I mentioned that to you, and you said, "Yeah right, there's no way." Does she still work too hard?
Todd Haynes: She's gotten better. She's busier than she's ever been, but she also has made her life more important than she ever has in the past, and that's great to see. I love that side of her. She has been taking some time.

Blase DiStefano: And what about you?
Todd Haynes: I have no plans for another film right now. I'm keeping it completely open.

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