Loosely resembles the life of Henry Darger, who too was a recluse that created a prodigious volume of artistic work which was celebrated posthumously, and who also spent some time in an asylum. Darger is largely known as an outsider artist, much as Dease is in the film.
The term "velvet buzzsaw" has an explicitly sexual origin, related to cunnilingus.
When Dan Gilroy was asked by Vanity Fair what he wants audiences take away from the film, he said: "I hope people look at art in a slightly different way. Any time you listen to a piece of music or look at a sculpture or a painting or a film, you realize the artists behind that have invested what I believe to be their creative soul into the work. To me, that's a bit of a sacred thing and I think we've lost that a little bit. I would love it if we could return to that."
Dan Gilroy was struck by the idea for Velvet Buzzsaw after having visited the Dia contemporary-art gallery in Beacon, New York, in 2017 and hours after came up with a rough plot. In an interview with Vanity Fair he described: "It was the Tuesday after Christmas, at about 5 o'clock in the afternoon, and no one was there. I was wandering around this huge, empty warehouse with all this rather disturbing contemporary art. And I wound up in the basement in a video installation with, like, dentist chairs and rats running around. And I just thought, 'Man, this would be a great place for a horror movie.' The idea that artists invest their souls in their work and it's more than a commodity--that has always interested me. I suddenly saw a way of incorporating it all, to explore how, when art and commerce are dangerously out of balance, bad things can happen. It clicked very quickly."
In an interview with Insider, director Dan Gilroy reveals that the name, Vetril Dease, is a real name that belonged to a man who lived in the 1800s. He discovered the name while researching names in census rolls for a film project he did a decade prior to this film. He states, "I collected like 50 names, and one of them was Vetril Dease. So Vetril Dease was a real person who lived in South Carolina in the 1850s, and I've resurrected him somehow."