Prior to directing and producing one of Apple TV's newest documentaries in The Velvet Underground, Todd Haynes had bountifully amassed a repertoire that seemed almost inexorable the filmmaker would be tied to the seminal band's chronicles.
While his 1998 Bowie biopic was somewhat bogged by tape, in 2007's I'm Not There, that unsettling Karen Carpenter short, and almost every other body of his work, the American's dizzying filmography and love affair for a glitz-defining era, as well as a hot siren for provocative cultural explorations meant this was always on the cards. And as so many after them are beholden to the Velvet's, Haynes' documentary debut made for the legacy rock band is a mesmerising matrimony and a visual feast that unearths more of the brilliance from the former and latter.
Led by a lavish supply of archival footage from the likes of Andy Warhol's filmed collections, cascading experimental artistry, and comprehensive interviews with chief characters around the group themselves, the director opens up on the piecing-it-all-together process, the Velvet's resplendent company that allowed for the film's sheen, what their influence means to him, and an insight into the aesthetics employed.
How personal was this a film for you to make, and how much of it did you find manageable, or unmanageable for you to film?
This is my first documentary, and not knowing we would be hitting Covid in the middle of the making of the film; we had fortuitously already shot our interviews in 2018. I went off to do my last feature film Dark Waters, and took Affonso Gonçalves, one of my two editors, to cut that film and that pretty much occupied all of 2019. But by this time we had assembled all of the archives and the avant-garde films and started to put The Velvet Underground into the database that editor Adam Kurnitz was working on, so he had everything that he needed to start building the foundation of the film.
After we saw the first rough cut, the first act of the film, I knew this was all I wanted to do so Fonzi (Affonso), Adam, and I all hunkered down. Fonzi and I were in Los Angeles when Covid hit so we were basically in quarantine together. So I said I think all three of us should be cutting (and editing) - and we just entered this world. And this world got us through the world we were trying to survive through Covid, and the end of the Trump era, and became a creative resource and nourishment that I couldn't have expected. But really the three of us would say to each other we wish we could keep cutting this forever, because it was so gratifying.
We see so many documentaries these days. With your movie and Edgar Wright's film about The Sparks, it felt there was a real authorial and artistic voice. It was a completely immersive experience and something we don't often get with all the documentaries we're bombarded with. In taking this collage-esque approach to telling this origin story, how much of this version was hindered or dictated by the fact that you couldn't speak to Lou Reed?
It's a question and that comes up a lot because he's so central to the band and the story. He was the structuring absence around which my creative decisions had to be made and had to contend with. Although, having John Cale's perspective is also in some ways, the perspective that we know less than we might presume to know Lou reed's, given Lou's strenuous and amazing, original solo career that followed the Velveteers. Although John Cale had, and still has an amazing solo career and has produced so many extraordinary records, it was very important to have Lou's voice, I would say. Because I didn't wanna see hodge-podge clips from all the different videos.
It was sort of out of the aesthetic, and the immersiveness is partly due to us sticking to our aesthetic and really honouring it. So we used his voice, and he's so present in the photo archives and central in the films that exist from Andy Warhol, of the band. So kind of you can't take your eye off him. I would say his absence in some ways maintains this incredible desire for Lou, because he's just a little out of reach. So when you find him at the end of the movie in that interview from 73', with Warhol right there, and then again in the bodycon footage from Paris in 72' performing live with John Cale and Nico - those clips land with a real poignance and heartbreak because he is absent.
This would have been a different film if Lou were alive and I don't know how different a film it would have been. But I know that we did the best and tried to make the most emotionally out of what we had with him not here.
How did you choose to cut what you wanted to cut, and is there something that is not in the movie that you are aware would be much better if it was?
You have to deal with what you have and don't have. And in a way, the editors of a documentary are the writers of that film. So you're basically writing the film based on what you have and what you don't have. You learn from what you have, and maybe you learn from what you don't have as well. What we did have is what no rock documentary that I can think of has - which is this cache of films.
The avant-garde cinema of this era in New York city that this band was so uniquely bound up in. It's impossible to say that about any band I can think of, that they were so closely involved with these image makers. We had all of these images that were absolutely relevant to the story, to use as a way of visualising and drawing the viewer into this very specific time and place. And it had a lot of Andy Warhol in it but had so many other filmmakers whose aesthetics and whose styles were very different from Warhol's. So there's a rich diversity of visual languages and styles that are all part of this film culture - that was an amazing opportunity and a privilege to be able to work with.
How did you first find out about Velvet Underground, what part did it play in your growing up, what are your favourite songs from them - and why?
I first heard the Velvets not until college, although it felt almost instantaneous, like all the forces around me were converging to tell me "Now. This is your time to discover this music." I had already been listening to David Bowie, and Roxy Music, and Punk Rock, and Patty Smith, but I didn't quite realise that at the root of all this music that I loved was this missing single band, with four records to their name. And that really none of those other artists' works would be conceivable without the VU - and they would be the first to agree. The generations of music that would follow the Velvets, and sort of trying to bring them into the visibility and the recognition that they had deserved but they had missed - wouldn't have existed without them. That's punk rock, grunge, and indie rock, and so many vernaculars of music.
But that first record was really the one I listened to. It invited me into a very special world that felt fully formed, but a world that invited me to be creative in return. I think a lot of people feel that way for some reason about the VU, that there was some way in which they make you feel like new possibilities open for you as an artist, and as a musician.
We knew that much of the material comes from the Warhol museum - but the archival research must have been a massive task. Were there any archive feature interviews, or any interesting things that made you surprised or impressed when you found them?
The research process into the archives was one of the first and most important steps we took while we were planning the interviews with the subjects in the movie. Bryan O'Keefe, who was one of my two archive producers, was really the one who took the deep dive into the culture of 60s' cinema - and I know and love that culture as well - but Bryan really did the curating of the lists of titles that we wanted to start to go after. Motto Pictures, who we partnered with who are documentary producers, and Carolyn Hepburn, who is one of the three founders of Motto, dedicated herself to basically locating all the material, getting it in temp versions that we could bring it in our system. I probably knew the Warhol films the best.
Danny Williams is someone who was briefly in the Warhol factory world, and he shot many of the films that are part of the Warhol archive. He was I think even involved with Warhol romantically for a brief moment, but Williams killed himself when he was very young so he didn't survive this intense era. His visual language is very different from Warhol, which is usually the locked-off, single-frame composition. When you see the aperture shifting, and you see the focus shifting, and the playing with different speeds - that is almost always Danny's work. Again, it's yet another texture and vocabulary within the Warhol world.
Then there're things like the Boston Tea Party movie which is in the Warhol archive, which we get into quite a lot when the band is in Boston, and Jonathan Richmond narrates. That's also (in) colour, and it's revelatory cause it really puts you in the place of being in a Velvets show, watching the dancers, which you forget are like dance shows, the strobing lights; and you see the band members through these flashing strobes up on stage, but its really from the house's point of view from down below where the dancers are. It was one thing after the next - it was such a treasure trove of films.
The Velvet Underground streams globally on October 15th on Apple TV+.
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