In Glitter Gulch director Todd Haynes and cinematographer Maryse Alberti trace the rise and fall of a glam-rock enigma.
In between the lingering hangover from Sixties psychedelia and the banality of the late Seventies disco era, pop music entered into a strange new world of truly progressive sounds, outrageous fashion and even bolder inversions of sexuality and identity. Spearheaded by such pop icons as David Bowie, Iggy Pop, Lou Reed and Bryan Ferry, the glam-rock movement was doomed to a short life; like almost all provocative trends of the time, it was eventually drowned by the tide of crass commercialism that swamped the 1980s. But glam did provide a few years of unforgettable high theater that continues to echo and reverberate in the more stylish performers of the modern era.
Velvet Goldmine writer/director Todd Haynes, a passionate rock-music aficionado who grew up in Southern California, discovered the glam movement a few years after the fact, but says that the songs still had a powerful effect on him. "For Americans, glam rock was a bit different than it was for the British, because it didn't have the same sort of mainstream success over here in the States," he says. "I got to know about it a bit later, when I was in college. What was really interesting to me was the degree to which it was all happening at the same time, and how artists banked off each other's ideas. David Bowie was really involved in the production of a lot of people's music, like Lou Reed's Transformer and Iggy Pop's Raw Power. He really had his finger in a lot of pies. "
Although Haynes stresses that his film is not a note-by-note retelling of Bowie's early Seventies golden years, he admits that it is loosely inspired by the curious friendship that was struck between Britain's Bowie, the consummate stylistic chameleon, and American wild-man Iggy Pop, the rocker's rocker. In a story structure that winks cheekily at the venerable classic Citizen Kane, budding journalist Arthur Stuart (Christian Bale) is sent by his editors to interview former contemporaries of once-legendary glam-rock superstar Brian Slade (Jonathan Rhys Meyers), who has seemingly disappeared into the obscurity of a gloomy, weirdly Orwellian Eighties landscape. Through the reminiscences of sources such as Slade's ex-wife, Mandy (Toni Collette), his former manager, Jerry Devine (Eddie Izzard) and artistic muse Curt Wild (Ewan McGregor), Stuart gradually unveils an enigmatic, impressionistic portrait of fallen glamour.
"To me, Citizen Kane represents the classic structure of a Hollywood film which examines a famous, mysterious figure but is ultimately never able to define who he is," Haynes says. "In Citizen Kane, the result is all of these conflicting points of view, and this final hanging question of what 'Rosebud' means. That film proves that you can never really know anyone onscreen—and maybe no one in life, either—in some absolute, total way. That's the only way I could imagine approaching a film about a famous rock star. It wasn't my intention to presume this intimate knowledge of his private world, but more to look at him through the layers of people who knew him and the fans who followed him."
The director turned to cinematographer Maryse Alberti to translate his ambitious script to the screen. A longtime Haynes collaborator and Bowie admirer, Alberti jumped at the chance. The cinematographer had previously collaborated with Haynes on his experimental feature debut, Poison, and his short Dotty Gets Spanked. Alberti's other feature credits include Zebrahead and Todd Solondz's recent Happiness, and she has also lent her talents to the documentaries Paris is Burning, Confessions of a Suburban Girl, Crumb (which earned Best Documentary and Best Cinematography awards at the 1995 Sundance Film Festival) and the Oscar-winning When We Were Kings.
Ironically, Alberti had just finished working with Bowie on a forthcoming Michael Apted-directed documentary about artists' inspirations when she got the call from Haynes about Velvet Goldmine. "I was a great fan of Bowie in the early Seventies," the French-born Alberti says. "It was the music of my generation. He's just an amazing man. At the time of the documentary, everybody was asking him for the rights to use his music in Velvet Goldmine, and he kept on saying no. I tried too, of course, and he said, "Oh, not you too, Maryse!" .
While Alberti's knowledge of and affection for glam rock certainly was a helpful factor in her understanding of the script, Haynes says that other personality factors also came into play on Velvet Goldmine. "I like Maryse's style as a person, so our working relationship has a great deal to do with the fact that we communicate very well," the director comments. "One thing I've noticed about Maryse is that she creates an atmosphere on the set among her crew and particularly among actors that's extremely trusting. She's done films with me that have contained demanding content for actors — sexually or otherwise — and I think they trust her. They feel a kind of security with her that they might not feel in an all-male, macho kind of environment..
"On my film Poison, I remember her being extremely comfortable with gay male sexuality, when at that point I thought that most women felt excluded from it. I always felt that she could kind of enjoy it. It was sexy to her to watch it, and it definitely shows [in her cinematography]. I think she made it accessible to audiences beyond a gay male audience, which is great. Women in particular have found the films of mine with gay content extremely erotic, which is surprising to me! Velvet Goldmine deals with androgyny and turning men into sexual objects, really, so Maryse was the ideal person for the job."
Since the backdrop of the early Seventies glam rock scene in London was being used by Haynes as a mere jumping-off point for some very fertile flights of imagination, a healthy preproduction period was necessary for Alberti to get a handle on the film's visual style. Both the director and cinematographer live in New York City, so the two spent a week together hashing out ideas at a café near Alberti's home.
"A lot of the film isn't based in any reality as we know it," Alberti points out. "There are scenes in most movies where characters go to the supermarket, or they go home and have dinner, and right away you can see how it should look in your mind. In Velvet Goldmine, we have [imaginary] places like the 'Grand Ballroom' or the 'Posh Hotel' — it takes a little more work to visualize those scenes and communicate them to a crew. I tried to pick Todd's brains as much as I could; he has intelligence, a great imagination and is a great filmmaker."
To establish a set of visual references, Haynes and Alberti looked at specific films from the early Seventies, as well as some rather early, crudely made music video spots for glam-rock acts, and hundreds of still photographs and album covers by such definitive photographers of the era as Mick Rock. Haynes explains, "Like a lot of directors, I compile a lot of imagery not only as a whole panorama of references to guide myself, but also as a way to talk specifics with the other artistic people I bring onto the project. For this film, I compiled three mammoth books chock-full of clippings and photos. Maryse and I spent a lot of time looking not only at the way these artists were depicted in terms of costumes, makeup and hair, but also how they were photographed in terms of lighting and lenses. That was really the kickoff point for looking at a lot of films from the period that were inspiring to me while I was writing the script. It was also helpful to Maryse, since she could study the very different camera vernacular that existed in the early Seventies. Nicolas Roeg's Performance was probably the single most influential film for me. It still feels fresh and inventive today, which says so much about what was being done in film at that time."
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