Todd Haynes and His Editors on Poring Over 600 Hours of Footage to Bring ‘The Velvet Underground’ to Life
variety.comJazz Tangcay Artisans Editor“The Velvet Underground” marks Todd Haynes’ first foray into documentary filmmaking, and with the film on the Oscar documentary shortlist, Haynes could find himself making the cut for best documentary feature come Feb.
8. But when Haynes was first developing the project years ago, one of the hurdles he had to overcome was the fact that very little footage existed of the hugely influential rock band.“What existed was entirely within the cinema of Andy Warhol, and they had a very close relationship to the avant-garde film world,” Haynes said of the group, which came out of Warhol’s Factory scene in 1960s New York.With that as the groundwork, Haynes told his editors, Affonso Gonçalves and Adam Kurnitz, that the film needed to be visualized by the artists and people who were there.
Through doing that, the audience is transported into the visual and sonic world of Lou Reed, John Cale and the other musicians and artists Haynes fused in with Warhol.
Haynes says, “Our goal was really going to be to try to show that rather than tell.” As Gonçalves and Haynes went off to work on Haynes’ 2019 film “Dark Waters,” it was Kurnitz who was left with 600 hours of licensed archival films, along with the interviews that Haynes had done for the documentary over the course of three years.
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