The velvet underground songs movie#

The velvet underground songs movie#

We spend a lot of time excavating the musical origins and avant-garde music that John Cale was exploring with La Monte Young, and a lot of the early Lou Reed compositions where you’re seeing the seeds of what the Velvets might sound like.Īll these things almost make you forget that you’re watching a movie about the Velvet Underground. But we also spend a great deal of time before getting to the first Velvet cut in the film. It was our hope that the film would be led by the images and the music, not the interviews, and that you’d leave feeling like you almost dreamed the words and the stories. With this film being driven by the Velvet Underground’s music, what was your approach to scoring it? As is true for so many people when they discover the Velvet Underground, I was already attracted to genres of music that would not have existed without them. I’d already been listening to Roxy Music and David Bowie and Patti Smith and going to punk clubs in downtown L.A. I started listening to them when I was at Brown University. When did you first hear the Velvet Underground? Haynes sat down to talk about “The Velvet Underground” from Portland, Ore., via Zoom. What Andy provided most was the springboard and encouragement to live dangerously outside the margins.” He set the table for the subject to fill the screen and take over all the senses without use of the standard documentary format.”Īlthough this period of his life was etched into his memory, Cale added: “Seeing this film reminded me of the magnitude of ‘others’ that were not necessarily front and center, but played a valuable role in carving out a space in spite of mainstream constraints. Through visually striking use of tiling and split screens, via Warhol’s single-shot experimental films, including “Empire,” “Sleep” and the many “Screen Test” shorts, the documentary augments the central story with layers of visual cues and accents.Ĭale, 79, said via email that after seeing the completed film, he was struck by “Todd’s ease and charm in navigating the channels of each member of the list of characters he encountered on the journey - many of whom have passed on. ( Reed died in 2013.) Anderson had identified Haynes as a potential director, and when the ask arrived, Haynes didn’t hesitate.įeaturing new interviews with surviving band members Cale and Tucker, the late filmmaker Jonas Mekas, inhabitants of Warhol’s art studio the Factory, musicians Jonathan Richman, La Monte Young and his artist-wife Marian Zazeela, Nico collaborator Jackson Browne and others, “The Velvet Underground” doesn’t just document the complicated characters at the center. The Velvets project sprung from a desire on behalf of Reed’s widow, Laurie Anderson, and Universal Music Group, which owns the band’s masters, to renew a conversation about the Velvet Underground’s legacy while taking advantage of the footage and material housed in Reed’s and the band’s archives. “The Velvet Underground” is the first feature-length documentary for the acclaimed Haynes (“ Safe,” “ Carol”), whose prior music-focused projects revealed the creative depths of his fandom: “Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story,” a controversial short film that used Barbie and Ken dolls to represent the sibling soft-rock duo “ Velvet Goldmine,” set in early ’70s glam-rock London and his kaleidoscopic Bob Dylan biopic, “ I’m Not There,” featuring six different actors playing Dylan. Singing great Dionne Warwick, riding the viral success of her Twitter persona, has helped her son open a sound bath and meditation center in Venice. Now Dionne Warwick will help unblock your chakras “It was the only place where people as different as Lou Reed and John Cale would have been able to meet.Music She’s conquered music and Twitter. “Without New York, the Velvets would not have existed,’’ said Christian Fevret, the exhibition’s main curator. A ‘Pop District’ : The Andy Warhol Museum plans to turn six blocks in the artist’s hometown of Pittsburgh into a new arts and music destination.A Musical: “Andy,” Gus Van Sant’s Warhol-inspired stage debut, may be the movie director’s oddest tribute to date.A Book: “Warhol” by Blake Gopnik, the first true biography of the artist, reveals a narrative that gets more complex the more closely you look.A Play: In “The Collaboration,” Paul Bettany and Jeremy Pope give memorable performances as Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat.Warhol-mania: If Andy Warhol seems particularly ubiquitous right now, that’s because he is: onscreen, in museums and in the streets.The Enduring Legacy of Andy Warhol The artist’s cultural prominence has hardly diminished in the decades since his death in 1987.