Todd Haynes’ prismatic documentary about the Velvet Underground begins with a black screen and the nagging, atonal scrape of John Cale’s viola. It pulls the band from the safety of history; sure, they were feared and misunderstood in their day (“to experience it is to be brutalized and helpless,” one Chicago Daily News critic wrote in 1966), Haynes warns us, but even now, after decades of noisome alternative rock bands inspired by the Velvets, their music remains lacerating.
Music and attendant issues about personae have long occupied Haynes’ mind, starting with his 1987 short film Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story, which used Barbie dolls to dramatize the 1970s singer’s neuroses and anorexia, and continuing through Velvet Goldmine, his surreal 1998 musical feature about androgyny and ecstasy in glam-rock England, and 2007’s I’m Not There, an elliptical allegory about the unknowability of Bob Dylan (and maybe everyone).
Creating a documentary about the Velvet Underground is a technical and conceptual challenge, partly because the band was so poorly documented in its day, especially on film, and because so many of the principals – singers Lou Reed and Nico, guitarist Sterling Morrison, patron Andy Warhol – are dead. So for his film, simply titled The Velvet Underground, Haynes loads up on people who were part of the band’s milieu: Reed’s college friends (“He was like a three year old, in many ways,” one says) and girlfriends, music peers like La Monte Young1 and Tony Conrad2, Warhol associates Billy Name and the hilarious Mary Woronov (“We hated hippies”), young acolytes Jackson Browne and Jonathan Richman, and an unassuming aesthetic linchpin of the New York avant-garde, filmmaker Jonas Mekas, as well as two surviving band members, drummer Maureen Tucker and bassist/violist John Cale. (Conrad, Name, and Mekas all died not long after their interviews were filmed.)
Haynes also integrates experimental films by Mekas, Jack Smith, Marie Menken, Harry Smith, Storm de Hirsch, Maya Deren, Barbara Rubin, Warhol, Stan Brakhage, Ron Nameth, Oskar Fischinger, and Piero Heliczer, among others, to establish the dominant aesthetic of the day in downtown New York. The documentary is a love letter not only to the Velvets, but to a generation of filmmakers.
The Velvet Underground & Nico came out in 1967, with little commercial success3. Because the album was “produced” by Andy Warhol4, the band attracted mostly negative attention that focused on Reed’s songs about drug abuse, sadomasochism, and degradation. (“It will replace nothing, except suicide,” Cher reportedly said.) Then Nico left, and the band recorded an even less commercial second album, White Light/White Heat, after which Reed forced his Welsh bandmate Cale out of the group.
Reed added multi-instrumentalist Doug Yule to the lineup in time for the beautifully melancholic third album The Velvet Underground, and when Maureen Tucker became pregnant during the recording of a fourth album, Loaded, Yule’s brother Billy replaced her spare, relentless drumming with a dose of normalized rhythm, which boosted the enduring FM rock tracks “Sweet Jane” and “Rock & Roll.” Then Reed left for a solo career. The Velvets had released four bountiful albums in less than four years to little acceptance, and having foreshadowed the future of rock music, their job was done. “There was always a standard that was set, for how to be elegant and how to be brutal,” Cale says in the film.
During an interview in a hotel suite near Central Park, Haynes, an amiable and curious 60 year old dressed in muted architectural colors, reflected on industrialism, Ken Burns, the temporal factors that create culture, and the instability of the term “documentary.”
GQ: In the past few years, there’s a quote you’ve mentioned a few times that seems to have been a kind of epiphany for how you view film. The academic Beverle Houston said, “Film is not reality.” How does that apply to this film? Is a documentary real?
Haynes: No. Documentary is a highly subjective form of storytelling that we have examples of in very different styles and approaches. The director of a documentary is always making decisions about what to include and not to include. There’s nothing that you could call objective about that.
What’s thrilling about cinema is that the audience is real and the thing on the screen is not real. The challenge is to give them things that make real responses, emotions, connections, or revelations. Then it’s as real as it gets. I think that’s true for fiction, and I think that’s true for documentary.
In this film, the amazing privilege I had was to have at our disposal, as a means of not just visualizing this music, but describing the culture that was happening at the time, all of these avant-garde filmmakers’ films. And most of these avant-garde films were trying to work in more abstract or poetic language, and not telling narrative stories in their work, right?
Everything, I think, is narrative. You read clouds and you read narratives into that. Again, that’s what we do; the clouds are just there. We project stories onto things that we see. So all of these beautiful and diverse films gave us the opportunity to let the audience draw connections, immerse themselves into the music and the evolution of the band. But it mostly just felt like, “Wow, this was a really vital, cool, explosive time in cultural history, that happened to be in New York.”
In that sense, is it fair to say this isn’t a documentary about the Velvet Underground, but a documentary about a Velvet Underground—your Velvet Underground?
That reverts back to the imperfection of the term documentary, or the instability of the term. But exactly as you’re saying, it’s why I phrase it a little off in the credits. “The Velvet Underground, a documentary film by Todd Haynes,” rather than, “a documentary by Todd Haynes.” It’s like, “Oh, what’s a documentary film? What does that mean?” It makes you think you might be seeing something that doesn’t satisfy all the titular expectations of a documentary.
People say, “Oh, it’s not going to be a Ken Burns documentary,” as if Ken Burns does something really boring. He doesn’t, because his documentaries are full of incredible archives. They are absolute triumphs of archival research. And the archives put you in the time and place of the subjects that he describes. I can watch Ken Burns docs on various subjects over and over again, as I’m doing right now for research on another movie.
I think people sometimes expect a documentary to be like reading a biography of a person: there might be pictures that show the house they grew up in, and shit like that. That really isn’t what I set out to do. For some people, it won’t make you feel like you have the whole story told to you, not in a way you can walk away with and tell somebody else. It’s more internal and abstract and emotional, maybe, and not so objective and literal.
One of the key decisions you made was to interview only eyewitnesses, people who were there at the time. No Bono or Springsteen to explain why the Velvet Underground was great, no historian or cultural critic to put them in modern context. Why did you make that choice?
Any number of amazing people could tell you how much this band meant to them and you’d be interested in what they had to say, but that could go on forever. I thought, “God, where do I stop?” So I was like, “I’m not going to start.” (laughs) That solves that problem.
That greatly narrows the pool of interviewees, because so many of the eyewitnesses are dead.
Yeah. But it also meant, like, “Let’s really jump on it. Let’s get Jonas Mekas on film first.” He’d just turned 96. These are incredibly precious time travelers who’ve survived since then. And everyone we have in the film is so vibrant about their memories, even though some of them have told these stories many times before.
As somebody who’d never done [a documentary] before, I felt like, “Okay, that makes sense. Let’s start with that.” Especially because some of them are quite elderly. Although Jonas was about as lucid and present as anybody I’ve ever talked to in my life.
And from that, we started to build the structure based on the [interview] narratives, but we always had the visual archives, first in a massive database, and then in the Avid, organized by visual topic, so that we could access them more intuitively, not coldly and academically.
We talk about certain great bands or works of art as “timeless.” And as much as any other 1960s band, the Velvet Underground’s songs still make sense today. Does the film also argue that culture is a product of specific, ephemeral conditions: sexuality, geography, cultural ideas you define yourself in opposition to?
Totally. I don’t know that any band we might call timeless today, that that’s what they set out to do. There’s no real menu for how to be timeless. There are moments, and we can all point to them, when a lot of different people are crammed together in one city, over a short span of years. New Orleans in the turn of the century, or Paris in the ’20s, or Chicago in the ’20s, or New York in the 1960s. Where the sheer combustion of ideas and people doing similar kinds of things creatively forces new modes of art and ideas to come out rapidly in that compression of energies.
That’s when you see things that endure and become identifiable new forms of art. And that happened to be true for New York at this particular time. You go to the place that seems fun, and the place that feels permissive and encouraging of your desire to do something.
And that’s economically feasible.
And economically feasible. Also a little bit out of the commercial spotlight. New York was this weird underground place. Certainly, there was big business and industry here, and a lot of money being spent in the art world. And Warhol made the most of it, and knew how to create a safe place for artists to come together. But as John Cale says, Warhol was an Industrialist — he wanted them to create stuff, to work. There was a drive to make things and, as in other musical eras, to be constantly making music. You didn’t want to stop doing what you were doing, ever.
Lou Reed seems to have had Andy Warhol’s voice in the back of his head for the rest of his life: “How many songs did you write today? Why didn’t you write more?”
Yeah, and in a way, for Lou, that was also going to ultimately leave him feeling like, “I got to get out of this. I got to move somewhere else, where more people are hearing my songs. I don’t want to be ghettoized by this productive little world that’s very happy to stay in the margins.”
So Warhol both inspired and doomed the Velvet Underground. The movie does a wonderful job of humanizing the band members, but the enigma in the group is always Lou Reed. Do you feel like you understand him now?
No. (laughs) Even if he were alive for interviews5—and I would have loved to have had that challenge to interview him and try to make us both feel comfortable with each other — I suspect you would still not feel like you could possess him in your sense of knowing him. And that’s good. What you want, ultimately, is the mystique and the mystery of the music to preserve your desire for it.
Lou’s absence in the film was just something that we inherited in the time when we made it. I think it keeps you hungry for him in a poignant way, but also in a way that makes some sense to who he is, and keeps you fascinated by him, and uncertain, a bit wary of him, and threatened by him. I think that’s always how he’s operated as an artist. As some people say, like Shelley Albin6, those are defenses. But whatever they are, they create shields and weaponry that he directs back out to the people around him.
When you talk about “Lou’s absence” in the film, it reminds me of your Bob Dylan film, I’m Not There.
Yes. We realize what power there is in exempting yourself from places, and keeping your fans a little frustrated all the time, which is what Dylan did. I don’t think Dylan did that necessarily by design. He was moving from one phase to the next, and rejecting what he did yesterday was a way of maintaining creative fresh air amid such expectation and fame, and investment in who he was, which is suffocating to an artist.
One aspect of Lou that I’ve always found touching was his relationship with Maureen Tucker. He was an absolute dick to everyone, except Moe. He was sweet and tender to her.
He really was. He loved Moe Tucker. I mean, there are a couple unfortunate little things that raised their ugly heads. It’s always about money and title and ownership and paying people. That definitely happened between Lou and John. Moe just never was a threat to Lou in any of those ways — or in any way. Moe was the equalizer. And I think you understand it when you hear her talk on screen. You don’t necessarily get it by hearing her music, because it’s fierce, but you get it in her down-to-earth manner, that’s just really no-frills. Moe proved to be a shock absorber for those tensions.
You had a team of Velvet Underground collectors helping you with research. There’s very little video of the band performing — were you able to find anything new?
Only the Yule stuff that you see, grainy black and white video of them live on stage, which I had never seen before. And the stuff in color, performing outdoors with Moe playing drums. That’s all the absolutely new stuff. And maybe it’s appeared online, but I don’t think it’s been in a film before.
It’s not a lot. We closely combed things that have been around, like The Velvet Underground in Boston film by Andy Warhol in color — I don’t know if it’s Danny Williams who shot it, but it’s not Warhol. We show it quite a lot. You see the band performing, and you see everybody dancing to the Velvet Underground. It’s beautiful footage, experimental footage, but it’s also documentary footage, where you really see the players. And you get a sense of the room, and a sense of the dancers and the scene on the dance floor. So stuff like that, we just really excavated and really got in deep to every bit of it, in ways that I had never seen before. But it’s not new, it’s not newly discovered.
Do you think people will be surprised that this notorious avant-garde rock band was also a dance band?
The Dom shows were about people dancing, and getting poked every now and then by Brigid Polk’s amphetamine needle7, as she whisked through the crowd. But no, they were dance shows. And Jonathan Richman8 so beautifully describes the dancing part of it, and then the astonished, silent part of the crowd’s reaction. Ron Nameth’s9 footage at Poor Richard’s10, a beautiful film11 that he’s worked on over years, happened to be a show where Lou was sick, and John was singing the lead. And that’s why we have John singing “Heroin” in a very rough audio track. We use it to describe the Dom, even though the film – the best film of that period – was from Chicago.
Jonathan Richman is so important in this film, because-
So important.
He wasn’t a New York insider, he was a fan. So many of the people in the film are cynics, but Jonathan has a true believer’s unsullied adoration of this band.
Yes. When I made that rule to only interview people who were there, I was excluding fans, rock critics, and musicians whose careers would be indebted to the Velvets. Jonathan fulfilled all of those criteria. I didn’t realize he’d seen 60 or 70 shows. He speaks about the music from an artist’s and critic’s perspective so beautifully. And he had his guitar in his lap to demonstrate that. He was so enthusiastic, and loving, and articulate. It was the interview that left me in tears.
I would watch the hell out of a director’s cut DVD that included the entire Jonathan interview.
There almost isn’t an interview I would be so proud to share in its entirety. I’ve been talking to Apple folks about it, just telling them like, “We have additional elements. People with deeper interests will love it.” And the Jonathan [interview] is a complete experience. It’s a narrative with three acts.
One way to solve the Lou enigma would have been to include an interview with his wife, Laurie Anderson. But she wasn’t an eyewitness. What was her level of participation in the film?
It all started with Laurie handing over the Lou Reed archives to the New York City Public Library. David Blackman12 talked to Laurie and said, “Would this be a time, do you think, to create something of depth, a real documentary that hasn’t happened before? And if so, who might be some people you’d feel comfortable with us going to?” Then David contacted Christine Vachon13 on my behalf, and asked if I’d be interested in doing the project. So Laurie, who’s a rights holder of all of the publishing and the life rights with Merrill [Reed Weiner], Lou’s sister, had to sign off on everything.
Laurie’s part in Lou’s life is so late in his long trajectory. I felt like it would be forced to ask her thirdhand questions about the Velvet Underground, because she wasn’t there. Sylvia Reed, who lived with Lou for 20 years, is somebody who knew him closer to the time of the Velvets, but even that would have been after the fact.
So I stuck to my rule. Look, Laurie Anderson is such a brilliant artist and she made him so happy. Their relationship was a beautiful, final chapter in Lou Reed’s life. But it seemed like it didn’t belong in this film. (laughs)
Let’s end with a what-if question. If you were going to make another music documentary, who would it be about?
I don’t have an answer for that right now. Sorry to leave you with a [sad trombone noise]. This was an experience with a unique set of conditions attached to it, that made it necessary to access this avant-garde filmmaking, and to penetrate the visual culture of New York filmmakers, in order to tell this story. Andy Warhol films are the only real films that have the Velvets in them. There were so many conditions that made it about art. It’s hard to think of other… I’d have to shake my head, shake the Etch A Sketch, first. And I’m not ready to clean the slate.