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Film 803: Velvet Goldmine

Trivia: Jonathan Rhys Meyers and Ewan McGregor sang their own songs in the movie. (Some of Rhys Meyers's songs were overdubbed by Radiohead lead singer Thom Yorke.)

When Brian first sees Mandy, he says "Do you jive?" That's what David Bowie is supposed to have said when he first saw his first wife, Angela Bowie.

During the Festival sequence where Brian sees Curt perform for the first time, Ewan McGregor was only due to moon the disgruntled crowd. But inspired by the antics of Iggy Pop, he improvised, and ended up gesticulating wildly while flashing the audience, leaping about with his trousers around his ankles.

When Christian Bale and Ewan McGregor were filming their sex scene, the director cut without letting them know, so the two continued to simulate the act until they realized the trick that had been played on them.

The Curt Wild character is mainly inspired by David Bowie's relationship with two American 1960's underground rockers whose careers Bowie resurrected, 'Iggy Pop(I)' and Lou Reed. Iggy Pop hailed from Michigan and shared Wild's long blond locks, while Reed underwent shock therapy for bisexuality as a teen and was rumored to have had an affair with Bowie before their falling out after Bowie produced Reed's album Transformer. Much central to the film is fictionalized such as the mythical, mysterious decade-long disappearance of "Slade", although he reincarnated himself as Tommy Stone, a blonde with a white suit (the 'thin white duke'). Bowie wasn't as huge of a star as Slade is depicted here and never withdrew for so long from the public-eye as did the film's character.

Courtney Love considered supplying music to the film's soundtrack, however after viewing a rough cut she withdrew, claiming that the character of Curt Wild too closely resembled her late husband Kurt Cobain both in character and physicality. The Wild/Cobain parallel later became a much-discussed point among critics, and while director Todd Haynes and actor Ewan McGregor have noted similarities between Cobain and Wild, both claim the resemblance was unintended. Haynes, for his part, notes that Cobain borrowed many style traits from Iggy Pop, who served as partial basis for the Wild character.