HP: I can’t let you go without asking who helped create the art in this movie. You didn’t have the luxury of not
showing the work in the film. What was the process of bringing these pieces to life?

DG: It was a big hurdle. There’s two kinds of art in the film – one is the art that “Vetril Dease” makes, and then
there’s the art that exists on the walls of the galleries. For the art that the artist makes in the film, I had gone to our
art adviser, David Hundley, about six months before we started shooting, and we started talking about what we needed. 

So we contacted this Los Angeles artist named Saxon Brice.  We spent three, four, five months working with them and our production designer, Jim Bissell, and creating dozens and dozens of pieces.  The paintings themselves are dark and a little arresting because the artist in the film is continuing to work through a ton of childhood trauma.  And they’re representational.  They couldn’t be abstract because we had to have the father and the mother and the daughter and the son.

“It starts when Josephina comes home to find her upstairs neighbor deceased in the hallway.  She…finds dozens of gorgeous paintings – and the design of the art is truly fantastic.  They’re haunting pieces of work and the movie could have collapsed if they were not.  Much of Velvet Buzzsaw rises or falls on whether or not the art (she) finds would believably incite the buying frenzy and fandom that it does, so it’s essential that we believably buy that she’s captivated by the art…The design of the film always kept me engaged, impressed by the visual choices from the paintings to the production design to the costumes to the kill scenes…”

“From the bits we see of the work, it’s stunning and extensive, some of it very dark in the manner of Francis Bacon, others in varied styles…”

“…strange and intriguing paintings.  The violent and horrific elements of Velvet Buzzsaw aren’t intended to make you jump once and move on.  They stick with you. They haunt and linger.  Much like the work of great artists which still adorn museum walls centuries after their creation…“

“The haunted paintings featured in Buzzsaw are the real show-stealer…The paintings themselves are so unnervingly weird that the movie could have done with little or no special effects at all.“

“…a trove of thoroughly original artwork.  You can feel the characters’ interests and desires for fame and money pressing up constantly against their hunger for original, provocative work – precisely the kind the Josephina finds in her dead neighbors’ apartment.“

“Dozens of ghoulish paintings that have never seen the light of day.  They’re clearly the work of a troubled mind…but they could mark the discovery of a major new artist.“

“…a pat-rack apartment full of disturbing and strangely compelling paintings…Who was this man, with his history of horrific abuse and criminal insanity, and also his genius sense of color?“

“Dease’s paintings, as many observe, seem to be alive.  More specifically, they’re alive with a sadness and horror that can never be mentioned for anyone in its midst.  The images are entrancing, nightmarish, offering an even more captivating mirror that of the “Sphere”“

“…rich and disturbing portraits…There is something real about Dease’s dark, earth-colored paintings, they stand out from the art being sold elsewhere in Velvet Buzzsaw, mostly theses and techno-driven work.“