Particulary inspiring to Haynes was the jarring use of zoom lenses in Performance and other films of the period, a technique now generally considered to be dated and passé. "Today, you have the constant movement in and penetration of the camera into physical space, with swooping tracks and pyrotechnics of all kinds," he describes. "The camera of the late Sixties and early Seventies seemed to really hold back — it didn't physically enter space, it would instead zoom, pan, or swish through space. It would rack-focus suddenly, identifying one part of the frame to the other. The difference is that you really got a sense of surface, this beautiful, almost caressing of the surface of the screen. In Performance or early Robert Altman films, like McCabe and Mrs. Miller, the camera searches for and finds the subject in a fog of blurry haze and grain, then finds focus on one thing and follows it somewhere else. It's a more voyeuristic way of seeing, because you're not physically entering the space — you're staying outside and using the technology to scan the surface and isolate certain parts of the screen."
By using zooms extensively to create a more voyeuristic visual style (the cinematographer relied heavily on Panavision's 4:1 17.5-75 Primo and 25-250mm lenses on a Panaflex Gold camera throughout the shoot), Haynes and Alberti aimed to as much as possible make the film look as if it had actually been made in the 1970s, with the narrative framing sequences set in the 1980s presented as a projection of the future. The director states, "We really tried to use a lot of the [filmic] language of the Seventies, whether it be the camera style, or the use of dissolves and voice-over — things that have gone out of fashion. I really wanted to bring those techniques back with a vengeance in how we told the story visually. I put the script together in the same way that glam rock was put together, as this great collage of sources. Glam rock drew from a lot of references — old-fashioned ideas of Hollywood glamour mixed in with futuristic notions of the space age. Musicians of the glam era kept projecting these notions of a doomed future — that it was all going to end and we'd be living in an Orwellian [dystopia]. They really thought that everything was going to come crashing down, and to a large degree they were right! There was a big repressive aftermath to the drugs and youth culture of the Seventies."
Given this strategy, Alberti was careful to clearly delineate the atmospheres of scenes set in the film's two different eras. "Todd wanted to show the Eighties as a very dry time creatively and sexually," she explains. "He decided to push that thought further, eventually portraying the Eighties as an almost fascist state. I therefore decided to go with very cool, greenish-blue, monochromatic colors in those scenes. The Eighties scenes are quite stark — the costumes and the lighting have almost no color."
By contrast, the film's many Seventies concert scenes are flamboyant in their expressive, deeply saturated colors. "I now fancy myself an expert in the Lee book of filters!" Alberti exclaims with a chuckle. "This was the first movie I've done where I used so many colored gels. We started using them very early in the film, during a prologue in which a little boy in England finds an Oscar Wilde pin and takes it back to his bedroom. I used Lee's 119 Dark Blue gel for the scene, and I tried to use that color throughout the film as a metaphor for the passing of the creative torch."
Since Alberti had never photographed a rock concert before, she did some basic research before the Velvet Goldmine production began. "I looked at some footage of Seventies concerts and found that they were all quite simple in terms of the lighting effects and camera moves," Alberti recalls. "I consulted with a lighting designer named Suzanne Sasic, who's worked with Nirvana and Beck. I went to a Beck concert at the Roseland club in New York City, and I really liked what she did with colors.
"I tried to approach the concerts [in the film] not only as concerts, but as dramatic scenes, each moving the story along in a narrative or dramatic way. For instance, there's a scene in which [Slade's onstage alter ego] Maxwell Demon goes over and starts playing Curt Wild's guitar with his teeth. That's a really sexy scene, so I used colors that I find sensual. I started the concert with very acidic gels — greens, yellows, and edges of reds — and as Brian started his cat-like move toward Curt, I followed him with a Lee 118 deep purple. He then enters a pool of Lee 106 bright orange and starts to play Curt's guitar with his teeth. At the 'Death of Glitter' concert, which symbolizes the end of an era, I used very pale-green and pale-blue colors, with edges of lavender. Why these colors? They just felt right. I once went to see a talk by Vittorio Storaro [ASC, AIC] where a group of young-by-experience cinematographers were all trying to ask him, 'Which gel, which filter?' And Vittorio just started talking about the moon, the sun, the conscious and the unconscious! The message I got from that was to learn your technique but don't let it be the driving force. Instead, trust your intuition and instincts."
Many of the Velvet Goldmine concert scenes were shot at London's venerable and spacious Brixton Academy, the site of countless rock shows over the years. "When I first saw it, it was a bit intimidating because it's a big space!" Alberti exclaims. "For stage lighting I used standard rock 'n' roll concert rigging — truss, grid, and lighting trees and a computer board. Each song had its own color scheme and I played the board almost like a musical instrument. For the Seventies concert scenes, I used traditional lights like Par cans, augmented with a couple of 5Ks, because some of the gels I was using — like the purple Lee 180 — are very saturated and have very low light transmission."
Alberti opted to use Kodak's EXR 5298 for most of the film. "Vision 500T [5279] had just become available at the time, but I felt 98 had a look that was closer to the stocks used in the Seventies," she explains. "I used 93 quite a bit as well for exteriors and some newsreel scenes, which I shot with my Aaton camera in regular 16mm and later blew up to 35mm."
In keeping with Haynes's desire to contrast his view of the vibrancy of the Seventies with the blandness of the subsequent decade, Alberti approached the Eighties concert scenes in a much more sober style. "For the Tommy Stone concert in the Eighties, I used a couple of CyberLights, which give you thin rays of light that can cross and caress and sweep across the stage and audience. Those lights really came along in the Eighties. Todd stressed that the Tommy Stone musical figure had to be much more corporate and cold — he has lost his passion, sensuality and creativity. I therefore used those very electronic tools and cool colors."
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