Mining the Velvet

Todd Haynes does the time warp

When Todd Haynes began work on Velvet Goldmine, four years ago, he couldn't have predicted that its release would coincide with the massive success of Marilyn Manson's Mechanical Animals (Nothing/Interscope), an album that, like the film, draws its inspiration from David Bowie's Ziggy Stardust. Back in '94, grunge was king and any thought that a glam revival might be just beyond the horizon in America would have been fanciful at best. But Velvet Goldmine has arrived just in time to feed on and into what could be the beginning of a new era of glam.

"What's funny about that," Haynes comments over coffee at the Four Seasons, "is that in a way this film feels a little late to me. I was doing most of the research for it in England, and there glam rock came back into discussion as early as 1992, when the first albums by Suede were coming out. And really, it has followed through into Brit-pop, which has been a return to more melodic rock and roll, music that's more unabashedly orchestrated and theatrical. So I was feeling like, `Oh man, people are going to be yawning by the time my film comes out.' "

Timeliness aside, Haynes was drawn to the project mainly out of interest in the unexploited filmic potential of a period that was as colorful as the glam era. "It was such a visual period," he points out. "And for a visual medium like film it just seemed perfect. Glam was so much about the presentational aspects of performance. I mean, it was really surprising to me that someone hadn't already made a film about the period."

As it happens, Haynes wasn't the only one with that idea. David Bowie had his own plans for a Ziggy Stardust film -- which precluded Haynes from using any of Bowie's music in Velvet Goldmine. "We approached Bowie early on and he put a great deal of thought into it before turning us down. I was disappointed at the time, but I always wanted the film to be a dream of glam rock, not a bio-pic or an official history where you're going to get the dirt on what happened to David Bowie behind closed doors. And I think it might have been harder in the end to approach the film that way if Brian Slade had been singing Bowie songs."

Indeed, Haynes latched on to Citizen Kane as a blueprint for Velvet Goldmine because he wanted to keep the film from seeming too real. "Citizen Kane is the classic example of a film that sets out to tell you who this guy -- Charles Foster Kane -- is and fails brilliantly. What you're left with instead are all the contradictory reactions to him from all the people he touched or destroyed. That was the way I felt comfortable approaching this subject, because I just don't believe in films giving you the right answer. They can ask the right questions, but the answer is your job."
-- M.A.

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