Lou Reed is the man in Velvet Underground film
CANNES, France: They were an “unlikely pack of beautiful loners” who changed both art and music history, even as they were torn apart by anger and self-destructiveness.
Or so claims Todd Haynes, who has become one of the great chroniclers of rock n roll lore, in his new documentary about The Velvet Underground at the Cannes film festival.
Haynes has tackled difficult artists before, with an Oscarnominated semi-fictional film about Bob Dylan (“I’m Not There”) and a movie based on David Bowie (“Velvet Goldmine”).
Now he turns to Lou Reed and his quintessential arty New York band, once managed by Andy Warhol, that helped revolutionise not just rock, but the way we look at gender and sexuality.
Haynes makes no bones about how hard it was to be around Reed, and how the Long Island suburbanite – who was still living with his parents throughout the period – stuck the knife in the back of his closest collaborator, the brilliant Welsh composer
John Cale.
“These white guys were dealing with their demons and their anger and their selfdestructiveness [in their music] and that’s really true of Lou Reed,” Haynes told AFP.
“It was really important to be honest about how challenging he could be,” he added.
“You appreciate the artist but you recognise that their vulnerabilities and insecurities made them very difficult people to work with.”
There is no shortage of drugs and sex with the Velvets, particularly when it comes to the mercurial pan-sexual frontman.
But Haynes said, the film was “not a sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll gossip movie”, even if he admitted that “someone could make a super-fun and interesting film like that about The Velvet Underground.”
Instead Haynes wanted to show how the accidental coming together of “these five very different people” under the benevolent gaze of Warhol and his multimedia Factory “superstars” created “an absolutely unique moment in music history and in New York life.”
For him, the Velvets opened the way for Bowie and glam rock and its antithesis punk as well as New Wave that drew from the same art school well.
“It inverted the power dynamic,” Haynes insisted, a gender bending “which continues into Bowie and Iggy Pop.