Todd Haynes To Direct The Velvet Underground Documentary Film

Acclaimed director Todd Haynes is working on a documentary film about iconic 1960s rock band The Velvet Underground. Haynes’ previous work includes the 2007 Bob Dylan biopic I’m Not There and the feature films Velvet Goldmine and Carol.

Variety spoke with Haynes at the Locarno Film Festival in Switzerland where the filmmaker will be accepting the Pardo d’onore Manor lifetime achievement award. The currently untitled VU project “needs to be an intensely visual experience,” Haynes said.

“[I will] rely certainly on [Andy] Warhol films but also a rich culture of experimental film, a vernacular we have lost and we don’t have, [and that] we increasingly get further removed from,” Haynes told Variety. He added he’s anticipating, “the thrill of the research and visual assemblage” and “getting in deep to the resources and material and stock and archival footage and the actual cinema and experimental work.”

Haynes’ first documentary film is expected to feature interviews with surviving The Velvet Underground members, which includes John Cale, Moe Tucker, Doug Yule, Walter Powers and Willie Alexander. Founding member Lou Reed died in 2013 and Sterling Morrison passed away in 1995. The band’s first drummer Angus MacLise died in 1979.

The project again finds Haynes working again with Killer Films producer Christine Vachon, along with David Blackman and Universal Music Group.