Toni Collette has the enviable Velvet Goldmine role of Mandy Slade, loosely based on Angela Bowie, an American woman who was married to British Glam-rocker, Brian Slade during the height of the Glam-Rock era when the word 'experiment' applied to music, ethics, sexuality, drugs..literally everything.

"I was born in 1972, so I am basiclaly an 80's child and hardly remember anything of this era myself. Todd provided us with a lot of material he had researched, so there were old articles and stories and video archival stuff...autobiographies. Basically, once we had that, it was all in the script, because the film is really it's own story. It might have been nice to have met with some of the real rock people who were icons in this period, in fact, Angie Bowie wanted to become involved at the beginning and then sort of fell off the fence. I don't know exactly what happened. Bowie refused to let us use some of the music Todd wanted for the film and I think that was beneficial because we didn't identify the characters with any one real person and let the story tell itself with Brian Slade and the others. I think it was more challenging the way we did it."

" I was really nervous. I was desperate to do this film and I faxed Todd and I met him a couple of times. and I thought I couldn't do this. My American manager at the time called me and told me there was this project I would love. I arrived in London to do something and I got the script in this big Fed-Ex package while I was talking to my British agent. I read it and re-read it...I think original thought is so rare, and for Todd to have this admiration of this era. I was petrified. It was so much sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll. It was 180 degrees from what I had ever experienced that I really had to let go and be crazy. I loved the characters and the structure and the language. We worked so hard on it. I had worked with Ewan McGregor before and I think he is amazing and I had heard about some of the others. I had friends in London and we worked so hard long that I didn't see anybody while we were shooting the film. We were in our own world. I have never worked a film before where I didn't want the shoot to end. It was so emotional and nostalgic, it was just the most amazing job I've ever had. We really got caught up in it. It was the most original script I had ever read-it's entrancing and it draws you in. Its magical and spectacular. It was very fast, socially and politically, everything and everyone was constantly re-inventing themselves. The youth of that time used this glam-rock to rebel. It was really shock tactics on the establishment."

"I gained a great appreciation for the music. I don't think I could listen to 'Hunky Dorey' again. It was played so much...literally daily. David Bowie very much part of my experience in this film. But I also listened to T-Rex and Roxy Music. It was mostly that one album. It just captured an ecstatic brilliance and something that shines. It was quite emotional. Mandy's story is quite sad. The film is really sad. She is the driving force behind Brian. She's the strongest and most truthful of them all. When we see her in the present, singing in her little cabaret dive, she's arrived at a place of acceptance and truth within herself, whereas Brian is still out there behind another mask, not really in any tangible reality."

"I left high school when I was 16 because I knew I wanted to act, but I didn't work professionally for a year. I worked selling jeans and delivering pizzas and I worked in a crafts store. I did my first film, The Efficiency Expert (aka Spotswood) and did a few plays and a musical. Then drama schools which had seen me work made offers and I ended up in place which was the equivalent of Julliard in New York, but I left after the first year of the three year course because I was offered a great job in a film."

"I don't know if any of the real glam-rockers have seen Velvet Goldmine. I know that Killer Films/ Todd Haynes has offered to screen it for both Iggy Pop and Bowie. I think it's too close to the bone for Bowie. I get petrified when I think of Angie seeing it. I was afraid that I couldn't do it. Jonathan and Ewan had this rock star quality to themselves, but ..it involved parts of me that were lying dormant and it all just came up...I went crazy in a way...I was not myself during the shooting of this film. Making this film was a great challenge for me personally and it changed my life."

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