![]() (“I considered almost everything that Todd made the work of a ‘safe pair of hands,’ ” he says via email, adding that Haynes’ participation was the difference “between carnivorous attention and the unconscious pursuit of beauty.”) Bassist-organist-vocalist Doug Yule, who joined the band for its third album, declined to participate - “He’s an environmentalist, and I think he felt there were other urgent matters that needed his attention,” Haynes says - but Modern Lovers singer and press-shy superfan Jonathan Richman sat for a rare on-camera conversation. The filmmaker quickly set down a rule: For interviews, Haynes only wanted people who were there, or who personally knew Reed, the German model/chanteuse Christa Päffgen - better known by her stage name, Nico - and late guitarist Sterling Morrison. Despite the fact he’d never made a doc, he was immediately interested. When producers subsequently approached her about a portrait of the Velvets, she suggested Haynes. Public Library her late-husband Reed’s archives. ![]() The two hit it off as it turns out, she had just given the L.A. But in 2017, Haynes found himself honored at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, alongside musician Laurie Anderson. The notion of diving into a portrait of doing a group, much less doing a music documentary, had never really occurred to the filmmaker. From the moment the film sets up Cale and Lou Reed coming together via split screen, a perfect homage to Warhol’s film Chelsea Girls, you get that this is a singular, experimental look at a singular, experimental band. The first documentary from the director of the glam-rock time capsule Velvet Goldmine (1998) and the many-sides-of-Bob-Dylan biopic I’m Not There (2007), it includes archival footage, behind-the-scenes anecdotes, and interviews with Velvets co-founder John Cale, drummer Maureen Tucker, and many surviving collaborators.īut Haynes also borrows from the same sources that inspired the transgressive group - avant-garde cinema, pop art, various Sixties’ subterranean subcultures, rock & roll rebelliousness - in telling the story of the Velvets’ brief career, from their time as Andy Warhol’s house band at the Factory (he was also briefly the band’s manager) to their eventual flameout a few years later. In a perfect world, everyone who sees The Velvet Underground (which opens at New York’s Film Forum on October 13th, and premieres on Apple TV+ October 15th), Haynes’ extraordinary look back at the seminal New York band, would not only start their own group but also pick up a camera. It’s said that everyone who saw the Velvet Underground went out and started their own band. “You know, that joy you get when discover the common denominator. “I’d already been immersed in punk and glam and New Wave, and it was the sense that, ‘Oh, this is all this music I’ve been listening to for years in one band,‘” he says. The only thing he distinctly remembers upon hearing the Velvet Underground’s music for first time was the sense that he’d stumbled across the Rosetta stone for everything that had spurred his creativity and the culture that inspired him. He was sure he saw posters for the “banana album” around, and had probably heard their name once or twice he knows he’d heard singer Lou Reed’s solo stuff before he got to college. Haynes couldn’t tell you exactly when the music of another band came across his radar, the group that would bridge the gap between the Brill building, Baudelaire, and downtown New York bohemianism. “But a part of me was like, ‘ This is my future.’ It’s that feeling you get when you come across something that you somehow know will eventually change your life, right at the moment before you’re ready to receive it.” He recalls having that same feeling upon discovering Roxy Music, and hearing punk rock, and watching experimental short movies from the Sixties, all of which similarly scrambled his DNA. ![]() it would have been some time around 1974, when he was about 13 years old - and seeing the cover for David Bowie’s “Diamond Dogs.” The image of the future Thin White Duke staring out at him “completely scared me, freaked me out,” says the Portland, Oregon-based filmmaker. ![]() Todd Haynes remembers walking into a record store in L.A.
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