With Andy Warhol: Other Voices, Other Rooms at the Hayward Gallery (until 18 January) it's the perfect moment to devote some attention to our Art Lives DVD about the artist. Andy Warhol was produced and directed in 1987 by Kim Evans and it remains a definitive profile. In the first of what we intend to be a series of such interviews, we posed questions by e-mail to the filmmaker. The first part of Kim Evans' responses is in the jump, with thoughts on the Factory, Warhol's death and Andy's likely enthusiasm for the internet.
What was the context in which your Andy Warhol film was made?
Kim Evans: The film was made in 1987, the year Warhol died. I was a director on the television arts series The South Bank Show. The previous year I’d made a documentary about The Velvet Underground and had got to know some of the people at the Factory in New York. We wanted to use some of the Warhol footage of the Velvets. 'Bring your cheque book,' we were told, 'hang around, and let’s see what happens.' It was a long flirtation. That’s the way Andy liked to do things. It was working on The Velvet Underground film that convinced me and my researcher, Mary Harron, that there was a film to be made about Warhol.
Why did you want to make the film?
Kim Evans: I really believed that Warhol had made a significant contribution to 20th century art through his paintings and his films. I loved the way he understood the transaction between the image and the world; between life and the consumer event; between money and art. We see his legacy all around us today, as much in the pop music world as the art world. He was also a great subject for The South Bank Show -- an accessible artist who was a celebrity and painted celebrities; the son of poor Slovakian immigrants who ended up in the Museum of Modern Art, via Bloomingdales.
When was the film produced?
Kim Evans: I knew Warhol was having a show in London at the Anthony D’Offay Gallery in 1986 and so I pitched the idea to The South Bank Show’s editor Melvyn Bragg. But Melvyn had heard that a director called Russ Karel was already filming the installation of the show. I went to the opening in the summer of 1986. The exhibition was entirely made up of self-portraits of Andy. Massive photographs of him painted over with camouflage, X-rays, skulls. Now it seems prophetic.
At the opening he did his usual signing. I queued with the others and got him to sign a cheque in my cheque book. Andy was always very canny. He paused, looked around and said in that high little singsong voice of his, 'Fred, is it OK if I sign this? I won’t owe her any money, will I?' Andy loved London. He came all dressed in black with Billy Boy jewellery. There was a huge dinner for him in the William Morris rooms at the V&A. It was, in his words, 'so glamorous'. But I wasn’t making the film!
In the end Melvyn Bragg bought the footage that Russ Karel had shot and commissioned me to make the documentary. Then, on 22 February 1987, Andy died. Everyone at the Factory was in shock. Everyone in the art world was speculating on whether the work would survive without Warhol around to front it. I went and hung around at the Factory again. We didn’t have a very big cheque book but I knew Brigid Berlin (aka Brigid Polk in Chelsea Girls). She was one of Andy’s true Best Friends and still worked on the reception desk at the Factory. She opened some doors and so did Vincent Fremont, the Vice-President. Victor Bockris who we’d worked with on the Velvets agreed to act as an advisor to us. We were on our way.
What did you think of Warhol when you started to make the film -- and did the production change your views of him and his art?
Kim Evans: I really liked his work but I hadn’t tested why I liked it. Making a documentary is a good way of doing that. You spend so much time with someone’s work and of course, making a biographical film you hear so much about them. Sometimes your feelings change. I ended up convinced of Warhol’s power as a visual artist. Seeing his very early paintings and drawings gave me a new insight into his skill. And I hadn’t seen his television shows before I started work on the film. He never answered questions about himself but he was a good interviewer. He was always ahead of the game. He knew he needed to get into the media that got straight to people’s living rooms. He’d have loved the internet!
I have mixed views about the Factory. It’s a seductive Sixties silver-foil world when you see it on film. But a lot of people died and a lot of people found it hard to survive after their 15 minutes of fame. How responsible -- or rather, irresponsible -- was Warhol? He did exploit people but he didn’t create the culture. As he said about the Factory, 'I just opened the door and in they came.' Of course, the Factory went through as many changes as Warhol. It became very preppy in the Seventies and Eighties. Today The Andy Warhol Foundation is a highly respected organisation. Warhol in one of his clearest and most serious gestures left most of his estate to it to further the development of the visual arts.
Why did you choose to adopt the very distinctive way of filming the interviews?
Kim Evans: I worked out how we would shoot the interviews with the cameraman, Paul Bond. I wanted to get as much of the art on screen as possible. I also wanted to reflect something of Warhol’s own film-making style. So we had his paintings taking up at least 50 per cent of the frame and the interviewee right in the bottom corner. About nine months after the film went out on The South Bank Show I was watching French & Saunders and they did a sketch parodying Warhol and his entourage. They shot all the interviews with exactly the same framing. I felt honoured!
Part 2 follows tomorrow.
Kim Evans was a producer/director on The South Bank Show from 1983 to 1989, where her other films include Marc Chagall [also available on DVD in our Art Lives series), Jackson Pollock, The Velvet Underground, Ian McKellen and Phoenix Dance. Her films as a producer/director for the BBC include Don DeLillo, The Art of Boxing, Angela Carter's Curious Room (BAFTA-winner), John Le Carré, and Leonora Carrington.
She was Head of Music and Arts at the BBC from 1993 to 1999 and then Executive Director, Arts at Arts Council England. She is now a cultural broker, a board member of London Artists Projects, and a Trustee of the Heritage Lottery Fund.