The following is an interview with Todd Haynes, conducted only days after his first viewing of Velvet Goldmine as a complete film on the big screen.

OREN MOVERMAN: The ambitiousness of the screenplay and the enormity of the film suggest more than just a casual interest in glam rock on your part. What is your relationship with the period and the music?

TODD HAYNES: In 1971, the year Marc Bolan's "ride a White Swan" came out and began that whole glitter period n the UK, I was only ten. So I was just a little bit too young to take a real interet in glam rock. There weren't too many major glam hits that had commercial success in the states. I remember T-Rex's "Bang a Gong" (retitled from "Get It On"), and a trickling of Bowie that made it's way to US consciousness, but not much more thatn that. I rememberit mostly as being someting forbidden, dangerous; something I associated with the tougher girls in school - the "smoker girls" who were very in the know. They started dressing differently and making themselves up differently. It was really off-putting. America was well entrenched in the aesthetics of post-sixties naturalism at that time; kids emulated hippie culture more than anything. So, all of a sudden, this very dressed-up, shiny, cosmeticized look - along with the sexual ambivalence and ambiguity of the music - appeared and it was a little bit threatening to me.

I was also really into Elton John's "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road", which was basically mainstream glam. And there was this song on the album called "All the Young Girls Love Alice" about a girl who spends afternoons with lonely housewives and pleases them. This whole idea of lesbianism, which I found even more foreign than male homosexuality, was deeply fascinating and disturbing to me. And I remember seeing these two girls wrapped around each other, under a bunch of tarps back-stage at some event, and freaking out. The Elton Jihn song and theat image came together in my mind and I sensed there was something going on in me. That whole season, late 1974, was full of elements of glam rock that seeped into my suburban American life and intersected with my own questions about sexuality - it became a potent combination.

Yet it wasn't until college that I really started to get to know and understandd Bowie, Eno and Roxy Music, the Velvet Underground and the Stooges, and some of the American bands that were influenced by glam. That's when I began to see that glam was a cultural moment that incorporated a lot of different elements - including visual aesthetics - to create a very particular sound and style.

OM: The story for Velvet Goldmine is credited to you and James Lyons, your long-time editor. How was the idea for a glam movie born?

TH: Jim and I were on vacation in Hawaii - we were lovers at the time - and he told me about an idea for a three-part film that combined three tales about rituals of masculinity as they are incorporated into society. The stories were about ways homosexuality is uppresed and then utilized in places like the church or the military where male bonding is used to serve a social purpose. The glitter rock scene was the third setting for the film, and I felt it was a great idea for a whole movie. The topic has never been dealt with cinematically, and it's so visual! We both earmarked the idea for each other and set it aside. Jim began to develop the film without the glam element, and we kept talking about it over several years, but our schedules never allowed us to write it together. A lot of the basic elements for Velvet Goldmine came out of the first disscussions we had. I kept researching the subject and making trips to England, buying books and records and diving into the lesser-known aspects of the subject.

OM: What was the process like?

TH: It was very long because up to 1998 there were no books about glam rock as a coherent movement, so I just read every kind of related book or publication I could find. I read all the biographies of the key artist - like Bowie, Marc Bolan, Iggy Pop etc. I read everything about poop culture at the time. And it quickly became clear to me that glam came out of the English tradition of camp and applied counter-philosophies about art and culture, which I saw originating from Oscar Wilde. To me Wilde became the perfect manifestation of the glam era, so I read tons of Wilde - the biographies, his work, everything. I ended up writing the script with a great deal of notes and document upon document of material. There were times when just a simple, tiny phrase would make me go, "Curt! That goes in the Curt Wild category." It could be an Oscar Wilde poem that describes some flame-like quality that seemed appropriate for that character and I would incoporate that inot a scene.

I also kept trying to broaden the specificity of the glam era to other things which I saw were related to it. I wanted to keep my mind open to other modes of writing narrative elements, including poetry - to keep forcing myself to challenge linearity and traditional way of constructing a script. I wanted to keep pushing those narrative boundaries beyond all visual expectations. It took a certain force; it didn't really come naturally to me to challenge myself that much.

OM: Does that challenge explain having the Wilde tradition came from beyond all boundaries - from outer space - in the beginning of the film.

TH: I think glam rock was the first overt alignment of the notion of the alien with the notion of the homosexual - both of which became this fantastical, galvanizing potential for musical expression, a potential freedom for kids trapped in their dreary lives. The space ship definitely brings in the outsider elements of the period, which I attribute to Wilde and dandyism, but it also refers to feelings of "otherness" confronted at the time of adolescence. I wanted to shape that idea into a very clear metaphor.

OM: It seems to me the doll scene in Velvet Goldmine, albeit brief, is the most telling of your process in writing this script. You took the icons of a certain era, much like in Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story, and created your own completely fictionalized narrative based on actual events.

TH: What I really think I was trying to achieve - and at a certain level it became a conscious strategy - was a mirroring of what glam rock itself was doing from the historical vantage point of the early seventies. The artists of that era were both looking backward into history - into Hollywood references, nostalgia, Valentino, etc. - and looking forward into Kubrickesque futurism. That's what David Bowie did at the time - he was becoming a human Xerox machine, pulling constant references and recompiling them, condensing them, distilling them down into his own narrative diagram which became Ziggy Stardust. Everything related to the period of glam came from somewhere else. Obviously, in this process of recombining and reconstructing the notion of truth authenticity gets lost. So I was literally blending the work of the glam artists with the accounts of their real life experiences and intercutting them all, putting them into some kind of new, fictional order that has nothing to do with "reality".

OM: As in the doll scene, the heart of the script lies in the love story between Brian Slade and Curt Wild, who can be read as fictional manifetations of David Bowie and Iggy Pop.

TH: To me glam was a romance between a British tradition that was extremely theatrical, self-conscious and intellectual, ironic and influenced by gay culture, and an American element that was raw, visceral, sexually potent and also influenced by gay culture. The way those two elements really fell in love with earch other to create glam is personified by Curt Wild and Brian Slade. And there are plenty more American hardcore elements in the Curt character than simply Iggy Pop, and likewise the Brian character goes beyond Bowie-ism. The love story is between London and New York, between contrasting traditions in music and style.

OM: The narrative you constructed for that music and style is quite fractured and multi-layered. You present the "official story" of the rise and fall of Brian Slade in the first ten minutes. Then you move with Arthur, the journalist, into a Citizen Kane-like, jigsaw puzzle search for the facts which, of couurse, is a joke since there are none. Why did you decide to structure the film this way?

TH: From the start I wanted to set up various barriers between the viewer and the Brian Slade/pop-star subject of the film, much in the way Citizen Kane gives you a fractured perspective on Charles Foster Kane. It makes you feel like this person is larger than life, that he is the subject and object of other people's projections, needs, agendas and rejections over the years. I wanted the film to carry a notion of objective truth or ultimate psychological meaning. The Kane structure really allowed me to play with these elements.

I also took a closer look at Roxy Music for examples of radical stylistic approaches to subject matter, and found a tremendous sense of mourning, longing and a general retrospective point of view in all their music. It gives it an implicit melodrama where the emotionality is not lost, despite the excessive statement or gesture. I new I wanted something like that in the structure of the film, so the narrative could become all about the past and it's lost moments. Ulitimately, I think that approach enabled me to be more affirmative as a film-maker, and to valorize this period. But the most important goal of the non-linear struture was to create one of those youth-experience films - like 2001, Clockwork Orange, and Nicolas Roeg's Performance- that I remember seeing in the late sixties/early seventies. At that time you would go to a movie - wheather it was with your dad because you were seven, or with your friends at fifteen - to have an experience you've never had before. You went to a movie like you would try acid; you were going to take a trip and you didn't know where it was going to lead you. That's why the slogan for 2001 was "the ultimate trip". It's that feeling I really miss - the discovery, the mystery that was available in cinema then, the personal way a viewer could respond to film. I was not like today's "Will they like this movie the way they like that movie?" There was an element of excitement to cinema back then that I wanted Velvet Goldmine to have. I wanted you to go there and trip out. I wanted teenages to go home and play the CD and "analyze it, man". I felt that quality of discovery could be achieved with some level of obscurity and that the strucure would feed into that sense of mystery.

Om: Why did you fictionalize 1984 as a contrast to the glam era?

TH: 1984 was already a focus of future doom fantasies within glam rock itself. Bowie's "Diamond Dogs" was the result of a botched attempt to do a musical based on the book 1984. There was an apocalyptic self-awareness of the results of glam's decadent pushing of the envelope that was par for the course during the early seventies. That became manifest in the apocalypitic fantasies that were circulating in the London scene and I felt that they should be in the film. To some extent those projections were proven ture, at least to the degree that the climate of political and cultural experimentatiion and social questioning that defined the late sixties and early seventies was brutally reversed in the eighties. And so it really was already a very different politial scene, both in the States and the UK. It wasn't Orwellian - there was somehting mcuh more garish and excessive about the period, but it was very much abou tpower and reinstated notions of hierarchies, sexual roles, and clearly defined demographics. In many ways glam's vision of 1984 wasn't a fiction at all, it became neo-conservatism.

OM: Where did the title for Velvet Goldmine come from?

TH: Velvet Goldmine is the name of a David Bowie song that was written in 1971. It wasn't officially released, except as a B-side of a multiple rerelease of "Space Oddity" in 1975. For a while it was one of the Bowiephiles' favorite lost gems. Now it's more widely heard because it was issued as a bonus track on the Ziggy Stardust CD. Originally I wanted the song, along with other Bowie tracks, in the film, but Bowie didn't feel he wanted to let his music be used in Velvet Goldmine. I think he had some other plan for the songs from the Ziggy era. It was very disappointing to me, but he remained firm about his decision. I really respect his choice and I think it ultimately serves the film not to have Bowie's music - of course, it's easy to say that now - because, while they are fantastic songs that can never be matched, I think their absence makes it easier to make Brian Slade his own character; there are new levels of interpretation. And although "Velevet Goldmine" is not in the film, the title was too beautiful to let go of, connoting a lot of images and qualities that defined that era in my mind. I really hope Bowie can see in the film the affection and respect I have for him. He was the most articulate spokenperson of that period; he brought the most resonant images to the glam era. Even though Marc Bolan started the whole movement, Bowie brought it to an amazing level of sophistication, both musically and visually. Similarly, Iggy Pop, who is one of many sources to inform the Curt character, is probably the most dramatic and most visual manifestation of the hardcore New York underground rock scene of the time - more of a contrast to a Brian Slade than a Lou Reed-type character would have been.

OM: While the tory focuses on Brian and Curt, and subsequently Arthur, you chose to start and end the film with Jack Fariy. He's the patron saint of the whole shebang, but he's not a true component of the narrative. How does he function in the movie?

TH: In a strange way, Fairy is meant to be the Little Richard of glam rock. He didn't form himself like the human Xerox machine by frantically calling from everything around him and assembling himself in a self-conscious way. He represents a kind of instinctive need to camp it up, something that came to him as a young child. In the film, this instinct is represented by the enigmatic force of a pin that seems to circulate throught British culture generationally. Little Richard, against all the odds of the period he grew up in - the conservatism and segregation around him - erupted spontaneously as a shrill spectacle that you could not ignore. Of course he spun right into the mainstream of soiety, and forced the mainstream to adapt to his new excesses. Jack Fairy remains the kind of lost originator of the whole glam thing. I think he's ther eto contrast the consumerist drive to be famous, which often is more effective with the very driven, self-conscious stealer of ideas than it is with the organic originator of the same ideas. he doesn't get the same kind of attention as Brian, but he becomes a source of inspiration. He's the "real" thing, of which, of course, isn't real.

OM: I think you would agree that the character who most personalizes the film and makes it so emotional is Arthur. He's not just the guy who walks around asking what Rosebud is.

TH: Arthur is me. He's you. He's the fan who becomes part of the story, the silhoutte who has the light turned onto him. I still have a crush on him, the character, and it's largely due to Christian's performance - there's just something so heartbreaking about it. I still can't be completly objective about Arthur. It is a very difficult part to play, and much less inviting than the more colorful roles in the film. But the weight on that character/actor to carry the film and ground you emotionally, and give you a consistent point of entry into the story - through all of these flashbacks and dizzying whirlwind of memories - was enormous. I thing Christian rose to the occasion and presented us with a consistent point of ourselves as the public who buys the music. The film had to have a really strong fan point of view, not just as a framework for letting Mandy and the rest tell the story. He is there for us as a reminder of our place in th ecycle of pop and consumer culture, that we're really central to it. Something about that cycle - where the kiss between Brian and Curt is photographed, the photograph gets printed, it goes through the press, it gets sold at the newsstand, some little kid in Manchester buys it, he takes it home, he opens it up, and it gives him and erection - is very real. There's something palpable about intercutting the public sexuality of the rock stars with the very private, unknown sexuality of the consumer, and how one directly affects the other. I think it all has to do with the tremendous joy that rock performers get from performing their musi, the sexual connection to the audience, which film-makers cannot experience. To have lived a live moment with an audience, where some kind of charge is being let out on one end andtake in on the other, is pretty amazing. It's also why rock speaks to adolescents. They are most in need and most open to all kinds of charges like that, because it's not yet codified, or genderized or labelled.

OM: Why did you decide to let Ewan McGregor and Jonathan Rhys-Meyers sing their characters songs?

TH: I'm glad you asked about that, becasuse we have to talk about these amazing actors. I am so in awe of every one of them. In Ewan's case, I knew he'd be singing Iggy songs, and that kind of music - which is more about raw, emotive performance on stage than vocal virtuosity - needed to be performed and communicated by the actor. I've heard Ewan sing in Emma, so I was confident he could carry a tune, and I knew he could command a physical performance that would be very exciting. But I didn't know that he could bring the performance to such a seductive, charged level by actually singing the songs himself, getting into them, living them out on stage. He worked a little bit with a voice coach so he'd feel comfortable breaking so many rules of singing by doing the Iggy thing, but since the voice is his own, so is the character.

With Jonathan, who had to sing numerous songs in a much more controlled , theatrical style with a great deal of flourish and technical ability, I didn't plan on having him sing. I cas him for all the other reasons, but he said "I can sing and I'd really love to make a demo." And not knowing what he sounded like, I had to be very guarded about that decicion. I was also worried about too many voices singing too many Brian Slade songs, that would be something that is difficult to pull off without distracting the audience. In the end people accept the many voices pretty readily; all you have to do is listen to someone like David Bowie over a span of four years and you hear the change in voice and style according to what's required by the different songs.

So Johnny made a demo over Christmans '96, at a studio in Cork, Ireland - that included him and his brothers singing three Bowie songs and one Velvet Underground song, and it was amazing. We were all blown away by it. He has a beautiful voice and and incredible command of the songs, so that ultimately he wasn't just singing the songs, he was performing them with his character's image. He sings "Sebastian", "Tumbling Down", "Baby's On Fire", and "The Ballad Of Maxwell Demon" - all so beautifully.

OM: How did you come to cast Toni Collette as Mandy? She doesn't strike me as an obvious choice for the role as it is written; her most famous part was in Muriel's Wedding where she played the podgy, Abba-obsessed ultra-hero outcast.

TH: Mandy was the hardest part to cast in the film. It's a particularly demanding role due to the range Mandy has to display as she changes from the seventies to the eighties. This type of camp female haracter has basically vanished form our cultural landscape, as far as I can tell. The closest equivalent today is probably a Parker Posey-type character, but she's still quite different from the Liza Minnelli of Cabaret or the Angela Bowie of the glam era. Mandy has a theatrical, campy party girl persona that can be turned on and off at will, and owes a great deal to the gay male sensibility of the time. I think women around the world were liberated from all kinds of highly codifies notions of femininity when people like Patti Smith entered the pop cultural arena. It had such a profound effect on women but girls today have no memory of that kind of camp femininity.

I saw so many strong actresses for Mandy, both in the US and the UK, and it was really tough to find the right one. We came close a few times, but it wasn't until I met Toni that in all clicked. I had no doubt about her acting ability, but the question was how to transform Toni Collett psyhically, both for the camera and in her own self-regard into this very different, very confident, overly sexual creature. She really had to go off the cliff; I'm sure it was terrifying. And what you see in th efilm is such a transformation, such a complete commitment to the role that she almost becomes unrecognizable as Muriel in Muriel's Wedding. After a certain point, nothing was too scary for Toni. What you get with the character is what you get with the actress playing her - this range of changes and the effets of various cultures and various experiences on one extraordinary woman.

OM: Although the script informs you of Mandy being an American bisexual who reinvented herself, you get the sense of invention fully in the scene where she presents Brian with the divorce papers. She breaks down and you see the facade in a seventies context. It's a very moving moment and it's contrasted with Brian's coked-up emptiness. What did you discover in your research about the "back-stage" women of the glam era?

TH: I guess Mandy's basic expression of real need is made more vivid by that scene, but the beaten-down, hard-boiled Mandy of the eighties gives you the framework for that. She was definitely one of those people who was feeling and hurting and acting out at the same time. Often the casualties were the women of the male rock world. I really feel the film builds and develops complex sympathies for Mandy that you won't necessarily feel going in. The characer is loosely inspired by aspects of Angela Bowie, and it's very easy to make fun of that kind of pop creature after the fact. But in all the books I read there was no argument on how fundamentally essential Angela Bowie was to the invention of Ziggy Stardust and to glam rock in general. She inspired risk-taking and flamboyance to a degree no one eles can claim credit for. It wouldn't have happened without her.

OM: In writing the script, were you afraid that the strong visual style of the film would overwhelm th echaracters to the point of pushing them to the background and having the film be about it's film-making?

TH: I think the film succeeds in exploring the way stylistic tropes and conventions of expression can be taken to an extreme point of self-conscious, ironic, highly theatrical, highly worked presentation without losing emotion - but I'm still not really sure how it works. And yet it's been the thing that I've been drawn to in all my films; Superstar is the best, cleanest example of that. And I completely agree with you that the doll scene in Velvet Goldmine - which is definitely a homage to myself (somebody's got to do it) - does represent the film as a whole, and maybe in the most complete way. Alot of it has to do with the game of laughing and feeling aware of the construct - in a fun way, not in a Brechtian, didactic way. There's humor in glam rock, there's irony and wit, and it's often about it's own point of address; it's often about the presentation, the inherent artificiality of our so-called natural world. And yet it ends up being very moving with it's rhythm, it's meter, it's color. And that's something I was going to try to do with this film. What is so hard about narrative, and our current traditions - which don't even include the musical and longer - or the codified, highly sylized pop culture of the past, is how to avoid the Hollywood gloss - which only gets glosier as budgets soar - as well as the indie gritty "realism" we accept today. So directing this film was all about taking it to a new stylized, self-consious, artificial extreme, without losing the good old-fashioned emotional connection to the characters. It was the hardest thing about the project, but it ws the one thing I demanded from myself throughout the process.

What I really found dangerous about the many aesthetic styles and stylistic choices was the risk of alienating the characters by removing a naturalistic definition from scenes. And yet I find the "Press Soiree" - the scene where everyone's in the gold costumes, which culminates in some strange circus/opera house - is rooted in a more "real" space. And the irony is that this artifice, this scene, comes from something that really happened, that was puhed about as far into the surreal as you could possibly imagine. The scene came from the time when the MainMan management company assembled itself in London, flying over a handful of US critics to introduce the Ziggy Stardust tour. I think it was at the Dorchester Hotel in London where Bowie, Lou Reed and Iggy Pop posed all day long. Bowie changed costumes maybe four times, they served champagne and caviar and fresh strawberries, and everyone literally performed themselves: Iggy played the junky on the floor; Lou Reed played the snide American who is smitten with Bowie; and Bowie played the duchess of the entire event. It was a completely constructed theatrical performance that took place in real life, and so it didn't take that much more imagination on my part to push it to the extremes I did in the film. I kept defining the characters all the time so they wouldn't get lost in the grandeur of it all.

OM: That grandeur, the visual language of the film, is incredibly rich and textured. You use what seems to be a huge arsenal of visual tools. Your cinematic vocabulary (zoom-ins and outs, swish pans, fades, dissolves, superimposition, rack focus, etc.), you use of color (saturated, glittering, bleached, faded, etc.), the use of different genre conventions (the biopic, promo film, documentary, melodrama, musical, period piece, mystery, etc.), and your many choices of lighting styles and camera angles, among other things, create a wonderful sense of serious fun.

TH: A lot of those stylistic decisions cam out of a focus on the way film-making styles have changed over the last thirty years. I looked at how so many of the visual motifs in those youth experience movies I mentioned before, as well as in some of the best movies of the early seventies - Robert Altman's work, Coppola's and others - have disappeared from our canvases. At that time there was a climate of experimentation with lenses and zooms: they preferred long lenses as opposed to wide lenses. It literally led to an appreciation of the grain of cinema - what isn't completely clear and completely available to an objective assessment. So I wanted to get back to that. I also had a nasty desire to break rules that were deemed tacky, to reintroduce all the potentially hockey devices that have gone out of style. I wanted all that fun stuff to become commonplace in the overall style of the film and then for it to be highly sutured with music, voice-over, and fractions of narrative.

OM: I know you put together a big scrapbook to define the look of Safe. Did you do the same with Velvet Goldmine?

TH: Yes. Three scrapbooks, actually. Big ones. It really is part of my way of working as a film-maker. Because glam was such a visual application of rock, the clothes, the hair, the make-up - both on and off stage - were going to be an essential part of how to imagine the collage of looks for this film. The scrapbooks helped inform me how the film would be shot, how it would be designed, costumed, color-coded, etc. I put together pure images of the bands and album covers, from the most throw-away backstage snap shots to the most theatrical Roxy Music cover. I wanted to have it all in one place, to have a great source of information for everybody. We pulled out those books at every stage, from casting to costume design to make-up and hair. The were really an essential part of the process from the script stage on.

OM: Do you realize a screenwriting teacher would have a heart attack reading the script?

TH: I'm sure. It does break every rule in the book.

OM: Each scene is very specific, and I remember when you came back from London the first thing you told me was that you shot the script, which is quite an acomplishment.

TH: It's funny because I never write the script just for myself, even though it may read like it sometimes. I try to explain with the script as meticulously as possible - and it does sometimes verge on the insanely meticulous - exactly what I am seeing in my head and hearing in my ears - which includes every minute decription of the score in the very first draft of the script, and all the fades and optical effects. To me, film is about all of it's elements together; it's not about some piece of truth that I'm immortalizing on celluloid and which later I can finesse with clever little tools. It's all constructed! It's all working together to present to you, the reader, something that is an experience as well as a blueprint. That's where my scripts go overboard. And they often require more technical descussion than other scripts because I am paying attention to such specific details at an early stage. I don't really know how to write a screenplay without acknowledging all the elements of film-making I want to use. For example, the script would often say "prelap", which means the dialogue from the incoming scene preceds the cut, and you hear the beginning of the dialogue in the outgoing scene. I don't really know how to state it less technically than "prelap". It may not make for the most reader-friendly screenplay, but it's the only way for me to be absolutely specific about what i'm seeing. In a way it's impractical; I admire the simplicity of directors who can say, "At this stage, we just need to know the dialogue and the location." In most films that's enough; it gives you enough sense of the rhythm, pace, the overall body of it. But my scripts are always loaded with excessive descriptions of music and subtleties that you may never even perceive when you're watching the film but that I choose to put in the writing. I have to go completely sensory in my decriptions, as if I'm describing, in semi-technical language, a film I am watching.

OM: It probably has something to do with your need to control the medium when you direct. You also storyboard every film you make from beginning to end, which is completely unusual. Why do you insist on sketching every shot?

TH: What can I tell you? I'm a control freak. But I have my reasons. I think most people who work in film - technicians and directors alike - agree that the clearest way to describe what you're seeing in your head is to have a sketch of it. There are so many smaller questions beyond "Are we shooting a medium close-up next?" that describe so many different elements of shots. If you have something very specific in mind, which I usually do, you have to be able to show it. I'm sure that there are plenty of cinematographers who prefer more freedom to design things. I'm sure there are those who prefer directors who rely on them for framing and camera choices. But Maryse Alberti, who shot Velvet Goldmine and Poison, adn Alex Nepomniaschy, who shot Safe, both liked having specific information on set. I think storyboards make the director of photography feel grounded; they show that the director does have a firm idea of what he or she wants, which goes against the biggest worry on every set: Does the director have a clue? And there are times where every director is faking it - I've had plenty of those moments myself - but the way I feel I am faking it least is to prepare as much as possible. And if I don't feel I see the scene, I feel like it hasn't been written. And if I do see the scene in my head - which ultimately I must in order to direct it - I'm going to show it on the storyboard. I have to make it visual.

Velvet Goldmine has so many scenes that are indescribable in terms of visual reality. Take the scene where the character of Devine is introduced, with that line of exectutives sitting at a long table. Both Maryse, the DP, and Christopher Hobbes, the designer, were very patient with me as I got closer and closer to being able to make this imaginary space soncrete. It was supposed to be an empty, strange space - possibly a big studio room - but, for the most part, I wanted it to be defined by the lighting and by this absurdly large confrence table that would be tilted and floating in space. That's a scene I'm particularly proud of because all of the angles, the lighting, the costumes work so well together that there is this assumption that we know exactly where we are. All the elements come together but it starts with a clear understanding among the crew of what every shot is going to look like.

OM: In Barney Hoskyns' Glam! - the first comprehensive book about the glam era, to which you also wrote the preface - the author quotes Cecil Drake, Brian Slade's first manager, as saying, "Brian despised the hypocrisy of the peace and love generation. He felt his music spoke far more to it's orphans and it's outcasts. His revolution, he used to say, will be a sexual one." Is that your revolution as a social activist and an artist?

TH: What I meant by that specific line in the screenplay is very much related to the term "the sexual revolution" of the seventies. I always saw that revolution as going beyond just what you do in bed, but having a broader notion, a new political awareness, an understanding of how what you do in bed, and who you are privately, defines who you are culturally. Taking a political stand in what you do privately is something that came out of feminism and the gay liberation movement. What interests me most about it is the revolution of identity more than a revolution of just sexuality - but, of course, they are very linked. It's all about a shifting inward of a lot of the same political motivation to break down old ideas of power, privilege and hierarchy, which had been manifested in the sixties - in a more outward political perspective; unfortunately it had failed to a large degree. The revolution got taken up in the seventies as an internal politicizing of the personal choices we make as people in the culture. These choices became as important and as politically potent as teh outward, more hands-on ideas of political organization. I love that approach, and I think the effects of that revolution are still being felt today in ways the effects of the sixties mobilization aren't.

Also, I think the entire suggestion that glam rock presents to us about sexuality is one of liberation from the notion of sexuality as a fixed, biologically determinded state. Like identity itself, glam suggests that sexuality is almost a creative property that we have at our disposal - a medium of self-expression that we can paint and repaint.

OM: You've always been defined as a socially conscious gay film-maker of the AIDS era. Even Safe, which was about environmental illness, can be interpreted in many ways as AIDS-influenced. Was there a need on your part to return to the pre-AIDS days in Velvet Goldmine, to free yourself, in a sense, from the enemy, now that it is looked upon as less of a destroyer in the Western world?

TH: It's more of a coincidence, because I was reasearching the project and writing it during many of the years that we defined as the scariest around AIDS. It certainly affected so many people I knew and loved. So it wasn't a very different AIDS climate from that from which Velvet Goldmine emerged. But I was always aware that being affirmative in my films is something I really have problems with - many problems! I never really feel comfortable doing what I think motivates a lot of film-makers, which is to say, "Look how cool this is. Look how cool this character is; look how cool this girl is, this relationship is, this music, this moment. Don't you wish you, the viewer, could be like them?" That instinct gives cinema a power to inform your own radicality and your own potential liberation or questioning of the world in a way that depoliticizes audiences rather than opens them up to new ways of thinking. So I've always felf much more politically comfortable making films that emonstrated the problems and didn't tell you how to solve them, but made you feel enough for the subjects who were hurt by these problems so that it became important to think about alternatives and to question the solutions. I'm always much more excited by films that give you false solutions rather than real ones - whether they intend them to be false or not. Velvet Goldmine is therefore a movie about what I think is truly a lost, wonderful, invigorating cultural climate. The only way I could really approach that is through concerted nostalgia which did not, and could not, include AIDS. But I don't think it came from a need to "lighten up".

OM: Much of the film is about looking, about communicating cinematically by observing characters in the act of looking.

TH: The whole question of looking is really interesting to me. I was very aware of it while shooting. The nucleus of looks happens at the "Death Of Glitter" concert where all the characters, including Arthur, are finally in one place at one time and they're all engaged in watching various elements around the performance by Curt. To foregrounding the act of looking and, in a way, separating it a little bit from what's being looked at. All of a sudden the way you read what you were seeing was important because it might be a little bit different from what's being presented - there might be a discrepancy concerning the implicitly theatrical part of stage performance. It might have been about the blatant sexual ambivalence that had never before been foregrounded to that degree before. It might have been about mirroring back onto you what you wore to the concert that night, an interplay of dressing like your object of desire. So looking all of a sudden became an active and politicized part of the process of being a spectator. That's what I love about the chimera between the statement, the pose, the stance and the emotional result of Roxy Music and David Bowie. Glam rock was the first emphasis on style and clothes and hair, which would invariably lead to MTV, and inevitably to Madonna, and lead us to a point of saturation with style and look. So what was truly interesting about it - the act of looking and reading - has gone away and we've lost a critical distance, an interrogative relationship with ourselves and what we're seeing. We're so used to the pose now, we just take it all at face value.

OM: Hence the title card in Velvet Goldmine: "Meaning is not in things but in between them"?

TH: Yeah. To be totally semiotic about it, that's like saying there is something in between the signifier and the signified. That "something" is culture. But when you join the signifier and the signified together as a sign, you don't see the internally conflicted components; you see it as a whole thing and you miss it's potential meanings. It's like when Freddie Mercury died, and I thought back on Queen - the band, the concept, the name, the look - it took me (a fairly educated, gay man dealing with culture and technology and these kind of issues) a very long time to see how fucking gay Queen was to begin with. I didn't realize how unbelievably faggoty it all was, with the camp, shrill faalsettos, the feather boas, the Lurex clothes, everything. Because it's become this social phenomenon that we have just accepted as part of the vernacular of pop culture, it's become a sign onto itself, it's become QUEEN! Stadium rock! It was all there, it's still there, but the shock of it, the collection of various elements within it that ultimately conflict with each other and make you think, has gone away. Often it's the gay element that drains away first. And that's a lot of what happend with glam. To me the critical engagement with constructed meanings, and imposed meanings, is still based on my desire to understand the effect of culture production on what should be a free subject, but is never a free subject - i.e. we, the consumers. The constant proliferation of ironic references and information-laden societal preoccupations diffuse and remove our ability to be clear about the way one thing affects another. It goes against our ability to think. But I guess it sounds very old-fashioned to be worried about it at all. It's just a movie, not a philosophical investigation, right?

OM: Maybe.

TH: I'd like to think of it as just a movie for a while.

OM: The movie ends with Jack Fariy singing the great Roxy tribute song to Humphrey Bogart and the theme of "Here's looking at you, kid". But visually we are looking at "real" people, kids and dockers, women working in a sewing factory turning up the radio, a candle-lit bar during the miners' strike. What was your intentiion in taking the ending away from the stars and onto some representation of real life?

TH: It's about emphasizing how little slices of popular culture, little songs on the radio, float through our lives, and not only bring people together in a strangely random way, but also give them little tastes of other worlds, other ways of seeing and being that we have access to through the music on the radio. That's really all it is, a slight extension, in a sense, of what the Arther character stands for - a reminder that even though he got to sleep with Curt Wild - something most of us don't get to do - he's among the group, as we are. And that pin will keep moving through time and be picked up and passed on in many different ways. Maybe any of these people, being moved for a moment in time by the song on the radio, are potential recipients.

OM: It ends on the words "Fade away never", as the song fades away and the film fades out.

TH: It's a plea, but there is something already over about that plea. Bogie was over the hill when the song was written in 1972, and glam rock was very much over in 1984 when the film ends, and even more so in 1998, even though, the film brings it back to life for two hours and thre minutes.

OM: But that's still not the final note. The credits dance to the tune of "Make Me Smile" by Cockney Rebel. There's lots of joy in the colorful credit sequence. Was the making of the film joyful for you?

TH: I'm afraid not. But it was very joyful for a lot of people involved in the making of the film, which is very pleasing thought for me. Thre's a whole complex of reasons why the shoot was hard for me and it has mostly to do with this particular script and it's unique demands on any film-maker, which were further compounded by having less money than we needed to make the film. All of that made for a very difficult, extremely stressful nine weeks of shooting. I think I did a good job of finding great people for this project, and that did most of the work in terms of creating a positive atmosphere on et that was shared by most of people involved - one of great excitement, artistic commitment and celebration of the glam era. I did beat myself up in saying, "This should be a fun experience for you. How much more fun can a movie get?" But all the things I was trying to cram into it, and that style of excess upon excess, was something I knew would be hard to get. It was s jigsaw puzzle of a film to make. It required knowing exactly what was needed out of each piece and knowing as much as possible about the visual transitions on either side of that piece. There was not a great amount of improvisation possible. We were trying very hard to cut scenes while shooting, knowing that we were behind and we didn't have the money for the overloaded schedule. But there was hardly a scene we could cut without losing essential narrative information. The only scene we debated was the English Garden montage with the photographers, but Christine Vachon, my producer, fought for that scene and we managed to keep it in. One of the things we ended up cutting (in editing) is the final image of the script. It called for these two handsome dockers to kiss. We had to let it go because the shot was very confusing as the final note. It felt weightier than intended, although I must say it turned out beautifully. I didn't want the shot to imply glam rock made everyone gay, there's no message of that sort in the film. It was about pop culture transforming us momentarily, but it didn't work as a last shot.

OM: The film's world premiere will be part of the competition at the 1998 Cannes Film Festival. Do you have a sense at this point of how Velvet Goldmine will be received?

TH: I don't really have a secse of that yet, I'm too close to it, but for me there's a real sense of excitement in that whole scene. To see the film on that huge screen at the Grand Palais is really amazing. Any film shown there is made into an event. And this film is already somewhat of an event in my own mind because of the way it brings together the pleasure of music and the pleasure of film. The film feels refreshing to me for some reason, so just watching it at a good venue will be quite an experience, I'm sure. Plus, Cannes is so much about glamor, excess and theatricality, that it lends itself uncannily to glam rock event.

OM: There's an obligatory question in every interview of this sort relating to the film-maker's next project. When I interviewed you for Safe you told me you were working on this glam rock idea that was really difficult to write because you loved the subject matter so much. What if I pose the "What's next?" question now?

TH: I would say there's no answer.

OM: Meaning?

TH: There is really no answer to that question. I need to rest from Velvet Goldmine for a long while. It's been quite a fantastical trip, but now I need to do some living.

THE POST-CANNES QUESTION

On Friday 22 May 1998 Velvet Goldmine world premiered at the Cannes Film Festival. On Sunday 24 May Martin Scorsese, serving as head of the competition jury, presented a special award for artistic contribution to Todd Haynes who proceeded graciously to thank Mr. Oscar Wilde and Roxy Music for their boundless inspiration.

OM: What is your perception of the reaction to the film after it's Canes birth?

TH: It's really hard to say. The directors at Cannes have no real sense of the critical reaction to a film at the festival. There's no serious discussion going on, just this frenzy, excitement and celebration that is somewhat spoiled by the need to conclude it all with the competitive aspect of it. Obviously, I was honored by the jury's acknowledgment of the film. I remember a moment at the end of post-preduction when I was seduced by the idea that everyone was going to like Velvet Goldmine. But, of course, there will be plenty of people who won't like this film. Yet I've made the exact film that I wanted to make, so any flack I get for it is well earned. All the films I've made have had major critical divides. Now that Cannes is over, and the fog has cleared, I am sure Velvet Goldmine will be no exception. And that's really fine with me. I hope it doesn't sound too vain, but I'm really proud of this film.