Just the Job Eddie Izzard on his love for The Italian Job

Making the Rounds

The last time New Yorkers heard from Eddie Izzard, the eccentric British comic was going on about all sorts of topics, including the moon landing ("It's all sticky"), the naming of Engelbert Humperdinck and, of course, the French.

This time around, it's circles.

"The idea, basically," he said, winding up, "is to get at, loosely, the idea of huge space stuff, that space is curved and the planets' orbits are curved. The Native American religion is also all about circles. I will nip that in at one point. And, oh yes, the Renaissance period."

This list should come as no surprise to anybody who has experienced Izzard's ream-of-consciousness style. Audiences will have a brief window to check it out themselves, April 4-8, when Izzard arrives with a new show, "Circles," at Westbeth Theater Center, where his last show, "Dress to Kill," was a hit in 1998.

The weeklong stint is part of a two-month tour that will include a trip to Australia, as well as American stops in Philadelphia, Boston, Los Angeles and a city he called that "little bit up there," known to many as Seattle. Then, Izzard said, he will return to New York in June for a longer run in a larger theater.

"I think maybe comedy should be road tested," he said. "Rock bands make shows and tour them. I think I tour the whole show to write it."

Four days before the 'Velvet Goldmine' shoot wraps, Haynes is all concentration, directing his attention towards performance, camera movement and framing (will those posters of Dietrich and Valentino show on screen?) and away from the cramped assembly of actors, technicians and production types who, involved with the shot or not, want to see how it turns out. It's difficult - resting cast and crew keep breaking into conversation in neighbouring rooms - but by take seven Haynes has what he wants and is, ready to relax awhile as the next set-up is prepared. Since I'll interview him properly once the film's finished, I use the time for small talk, enthusing over a couple of scenes in the script where, rather unexpectedly in a rock saga, he pays homage to 'Citizen Kane'. 'Homage?' he laughs. 'C'mon, Geoff. . . I ripped it off!'

A typically modest joke, the remark's also revealing in that it highlights Haynes' postmodernist magpie mind and broad source of reference. Enough has already been written about the film to fill a few volumes, most treating it simply as a trip down the twin memory lanes of music and fashion or as a film-a-clef hinting at the behind-the-scenes goings-on between David and Angie Bowie, Iggy Pop, Lou Reed et al. For Haynes, however, for whom glam has long been something of an obsession (while he was promoting 'Safe', he even sported a spiky orange haircut), it's about far more than mere nostalgia.

Oft lauded as New Queer Cinema's leading auteur (though he's also one of contemporary film's most exciting talents, period), Haynes has chosen to celebrate/mourn glam's brief glory days as a time when sexual identity and preference were, at least for the music's practitioners and fans, fun, flexible and openly subversive. Accordingly, in drawing on countless cultural allusions to create a pop-biopic fiction inspired by'reality', he not only enlists the characters and lives (in so far as they were perceived by the public) of Bowie/Ziggy, Iggy and others, but even cheekily harks back, via a sci-fi intro involving a spaceship visiting 1850s Dublin, to Oscar Wilde a gay, outraging icon way before his time, not only in his devotion to wit, irony and style, but in his interest in the gulf between public image and private lives ('Dorian Gray', fittingly, foreshadows the importance of youth in pop culture).

Then, too, there are those allusions to 'Kane' through specific shots and the overall narrative structure of journalist Arthur Stuart (Christian Bale) investigating the whereabouts of glamrock star Brian Slade Jonathan Rhys Meyers) ten years after he vanished in a wave of bad publicity and fan hatred following a faked on-stage assassination: the search, leading via Slade's ex-manager and his former wife Mandy (Toni Colette) to erstwhile American collaborator Curt Wild (Ewan McGregor), frames flashbacks charting the rise and fall of Slade and his alter ego Maxwell Demon. Whatever Haynes says, however, the borrowing is no mere plagiarism, since his film is an exploration of identity: an attempt to fathom what Borges, in his famous review of Welles' film, called a labyrinth without a centre'. Oh, and lest we get too serious, 'Velvet Goldmine' is also exhilaratingly imaginative and enjoyable.

A year on, Haynes is back in London with a well deserved Cannes prize. He's less tired now - 'Velvet Goldmine' may only have cost $7 million ('we really needed $8m minimum'), but it's still by far his biggest most technically demanding film to date - an] happy to offer his articulate

best on its raison d'etre. Amazingly, given the film's accuracy, at the time of glam's heyday he was a ten-year-old living in LA; he came to the music years later. Nevertheless, he was sufficiently impressed to immerse himself in lengthy research and ensure he got the details right.

'It's shocking,' he notes, 'how glam, despite being such a visual part of rock history, hasn't really been dealt with on film in any way. The

closest was perhaps "Rocky Horror", which people used to get quite obsessive about. One night about four years ago I saw it again and wondered how a young audience now, and probably more conservative, would deal with it: would they pull back from identifying with the Tim Curry character and targeting the nerds? They didn't -pop-culturally at least, the film retained its transgressive status. Anyway, then I started researching glam rock, and wondered why it didn't get canonised, didn't fall into that cycle of punk, grunge, Dead-headism and '60s rock that's in constant rotation for each new generation. And it wasn't just that it was so gay; it's that it was so artificial, an attack on authentic, direct emotional communication which is what tends to define music, at least in America.

'And the more I looked at it, the more it seemed a conceptually whole phenomenon where style and content blurred together. The music spilled out into the stars' lives, in that they often used their "private" lives to further the myths and fictions they were building about the Ziggies and so on: the Bowie persona was a construct, and he didn't pretend otherwise. Similarly, those witty, ironic, intellectual/conceptual elements co-existed with a music that was emotionally resonant, it had a distancing quality, but was also enveloping. That was extraordinary, especially for Americans though that ambivalence was in line with what Sirk and Fassbinder did, where emotion isn't excluded at all, but you do see how emotional effect is inextricably connected to the mechanisms of film-making. That still gets me going.'

It should be clear from the above that Haynes, whose various studies of transgression, illness, celebrity and identity-crisis - 'Superstar: the Karen Carpenter Story', 'Poison', 'Dottie Gets Spanked' and 'Safe'- have always been marked by irony and ambiguity, is unlikely to have made a simplistic celebration of the glamrock age. 'Velvet Goldmine' does portray (and participate in) glam's unbridled energy, its anything goes sexual ethos, and the lurid joy taken in posturing artifice, but it doesn't ignore the fickle supefficiality, ruthless business strategies, the various casualties, and the capacity of 'subversive' anti-heroes to sell out in the blink of a heavily mascara'd eye. If the era is viewed partly through pink-tinted glasses and contrasted with the'80s (depicted in the fiim in monotonous grey-green hues), Haynes' own perspective remains, emphatically, crystal clear.

'It's my most affirmative film, but I have a knee-jerk reaction against films telling you what's cool. Many things about glam I wanted to show as radical and progressive, particularly how young people were given a creative initiative in deciding who and what they were. But I also wanted to show how that was lost, and how the music - especially Bowie and Roxy Music - was often melancholy and locked in a past, yet overlapped with a kind of futuristic curiosity. Actually glamrock wasn't about the present.

'At the same time, I couldn't imagine a film about glamrock tackled in a verite way. The characters, being rock stars, had to be somehow out of reach rather than known intimately; that's why I had a fan figure like Arthur who reflects where we're grounded. Also, I wanted to replicate how Bowie and others would draw from various historical and cultural sources which I did by extending that to film references. And "Kane" was just the classic example of a magnificently baroque construct with an empty centre, where you can never get to know the main character in psychological depth.

'As for Wilde, he came in early on when, in compiling sources, I read Richard Ellman's biography: there was no more articulate spokesman for that artifice, that informed camp sensibility, than Wilde. As I was doing research I discovered a lot of crossovers between Wilde and glam, from the way he and Bowie both constructed themselves very self-consciously as celebrities, to how Bowie wore a dress when he first took a ship to America, just as Wilde had worn that green coat down to his feet as he stood on the prow watching New York harbour hove into view. Then, of course, I decided to align the sexually ambivalent Wilde with aliens - homosexuals and teens are often seen as "alien" - so I opened with the spaceship, which tied in with glam's interest in sci-fi. It's funny: when we previewed in New York, what bugged some of the audience more than the homosexual aspects was the spaceship... it was too tacky. But this is not "Independence Day", it's a fairy-tale! Even Dublin's rooftops look like "Mary Poppins"!'

Fairy-tale is just about right - the character who shoots Slade in the publicity-stunt murder is even called Jack Fairy - but not only because the movie's informed partly by a pansexual sensibility; there's also the wicked way it plays with the facts (or what we know of them) to construct an alternative history. 'Though there are obviously gay elements,'says Haynes, ' the film can be read in larger ways; it doesn't have one specific agenda. I'm sure if you fixated on the real life counterparts to each character, you might be sceptical about the revisionist queering of Iggy and Bowie, but my feeling is that you never know what people do in their bedrooms, especially with public figures; all you see is what's photographed at parties and so on. Now, these musicians were very involved in creating their images, and that, along with what was being sung and acted out on stage, such as Bowie "fellating" Mick Ronson's guitar, is what fans had to take home and fantasise about. So in a sense those cultural images are more "real" because that's what the artists chose to let us see.'

And what of the New Queer Cinema label pleasing as it is to be acclaimed as a leading light of any movement, can't pigeonholing be a burden?'At the time of "Poison", the phrase "New Queer Cinema" felt fresher. But notions of "gay cinema" have always struck me as problematic - especially now when half the "gay" films being made are from Hollywood with its new fondness - for the perfect, desexuaiised, innocuous gay male in films like "My Best Friend's Wedding", "As Good As It Gets" and "The Object of My Affection". It's like we've been domesticated as a comfortable minority to bring into your living room, to put on the mantle right next to the Sidney Poitier statue! Things have been lost and drained in that process. When it's felt that gay films have to have positive affirmation of gay life or characters, ultimately it's not an affirmation of one's identity but of a prescribed set of choices which are most acceptable to the mainstream. That's always been abhorrent to me: that's why "Poison" was not an affirmation of homosexuality but an examination of how the dominant culture feels threatened and undermined by it.

'But I also prefer not to characterise films by content alone; form and style are interesting too and may have a larger resistance to dominant film modes. Even then, though, you can get into in that "Okay, it's gotta have camp, witty, spectacular elements", which isn't the whole story. And of course "Velvet Goldmine" includes those elements because it suits the subject - but "Safe"didn't. Actually, "Safe" was important in that it broadened the way people looked at my work. So no, I don't feel burdened by the Gay Film-Maker Iabel any more, thanks to that movie. Anyway,' he laughs, 'whenever I feel confused about all that, I just look back to Fassbinder, and feel comforted and inspired again...'.