I’ve seen that happen in films I’ve made about other musical subjects. But you realize that what you’re sort of giving up in the process is ideally making it possible for somebody else to become that innocent fan in the thing that you’ve made. There’s a transformation that goes on and you ultimately are not the innocent fan that you were. That’s always going to be the case when you make a film about music or an artist that you really love. Because then you feel like your hunger or your passion goes away, or it’s been transformed into something else. I think I do, but I feel like I don’t ever want to completely come out of being sort of lost in it a little bit. The Last of Us Does Something No Other Post-Apocalyptic Show Does.You’s New Season Feels Like an Apology for the Old Ones.Pauly Shore on Watching His Encino Man Co-Stars Go on to Oscar Glory The Utterly Bizarre Exit of a College Basketball Legend Did that change your relationship to the band? Do you understand them differently now? You’ve been listening to the Velvet Underground for a long time, and making this movie for three years. A piano version of “Heroin” and an early, Everly Brothers–esque take on “I’m Waiting for the Man” illustrate what Lou Reed’s songs might have sounded like if he hadn’t met up with John Cale, an avant-garde Welshman who’d come to New York to study with the drone composer La Monte Young. Haynes, whose movies Velvet Goldmine and I’m Not There are deeply informed by the music of glam rock and Bob Dylan, isn’t interested in explaining the Velvet Underground so much as transporting the viewer to the time, and more importantly the place, where they first emerged, so you can hear them now as they might have sounded the first time, as if all those bands they influenced never existed. The film is a dizzying, sometimes overwhelming collage in which its interview subjects’ voices are just part of the fabric, and their faces are rarely seen. For Haynes, the story of the Velvets, who formed under Andy Warhol’s aegis in 1964, is also the story of the artistic community that produced and sustained them, a heady mixture of experimental film, pop art, and sexual liberation. But Todd Haynes’ documentary The Velvet Underground, which is now in theaters and streaming on Apple TV+, isn’t especially interested in them as the forebears of underground rock, or even solely in their music. It’s impossible to write about the Velvet Underground without quoting Brian Eno’s adage that their first album may have sold only 30,000 copies, but everyone who bought one started a band.
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