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Home » ‘A Complete Unknown’ Director James Mangold Says Bob Dylan Is A Cinephile
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‘A Complete Unknown’ Director James Mangold Says Bob Dylan Is A Cinephile

MNK NewsBy MNK NewsDecember 24, 2024No Comments11 Mins Read
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Director James Mangold and Timothée Chalamet as Bob Dylan on the set of ‘A Complete Unknown.’

Macall Polay/Seachlight Pictures

For James Mangold, the writer, director, and producer of the Timothée Chalamet-led Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown, a perfect storm of happenstances allowed him to sit down and shoot the breeze with the reclusive music legend. Those conversations proved invaluable.

“His people had read the script and were concerned that I was breaking a boundary that either they or their client had set up. They weren’t reticent about making the movie. Still, there was an initial edict that was to make it about the studio, what was happening, and not other stuff,” the filmmaker calls as we sit chatting at the Four Seasons Hotel in Beverly Hills. “However, Covid hit, Bob had to cancel a tour, and I think he asked them to send him the script. He read it, and the next thing I knew was his manager, Jeff Rosen, called me and said, ‘Bob has read your script, he likes it, and he’d love to sit down with you and talk about it.’ A series of one-on-one meetings with him followed, in which he offered himself up to me. It wasn’t like he had a really big agenda to set me straight about; he wanted to make himself available so I could ask the questions he imagined I wanted to ask.”

The acclaimed musical drama, which is a serious awards contender, sees Chalamet play Dylan, charting his arrival in New York’s Greenwich Village in 1961 as a 19-year-old complete unknown through to his creatively controversial 1965 concert at the Newport Folk Festival, where he used electric instruments. A Complete Unknown, which also stars Elle Fanning, Edward Norton, Monica Barbaro, and Boyd Holbrook, lands exclusively in theaters on Wednesday, December 25, 2024.

What Mangold Wanted To Know For ‘A Complete Unknown’

When Mangold and Dylan first met, was the iconic singer-songwriter surprised by what the filmmaker wanted to know?

“I don’t think so,” he muses. “If anything, he might have been relieved because I don’t think I had an agenda, like a biographer might, where you feel this kind of thesis they’re shaping their book toward. I had no agenda other than to know what he felt and experienced. The questions weren’t shaping him toward a story I already wanted to tell. To some degree, the story he saw I was already telling was observational and didn’t pick sides. I don’t think of the movie as dispassionate; I don’t see there being a villain or a hero at all. I adore every side of the argument and all the characters representing them.”

Not only was two-time Oscar-nominated Mangold encouraged by the singer-writer’s love of cinema but also by his groundedness.

“More than anything, the last word that would have come to my mind about Bob was enigmatic,” the filmmaker recalls. “Bob was straightforward and friendly and disarmed me at the beginning by talking about how much he enjoyed Cop Land, an old film of mine. Bob remembered it with great clarity, the whole plot line, and was playful about asking questions about making that movie. We then talked about the Johnny Cash movie I made, Walk the Line, and he admired it. Then, we talked about other movies. He clearly loves watching films. I found that true with a lot of musicians. The connection between musicians and movies is really strong. By the time we got down to brass tacks and talking about our project, I already thought this was a lovely person with an encyclopedic knowledge of the entire world of art who was interested in sharing whatever perspective he could.”

Dylan is no stranger to movies, having starred in several over the years, including Sam Peckinpah’s Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, Hearts of Fire, and Catchfire.

Timothée Chalamet as Bob Dylan in ‘A Complete Unknown.’

Searchlight Pictures

Mapping Bob Dylan Changing The Course Of Culture

When it came to discussing Dylan’s memories of the few years A Complete Unknown focuses on, Mangold, also known for such films as Logan, 3:10 to Yuma, Ford v Ferrari, and Girl, Interrupted, got a number of “big things” out of the meetings including “a sense of that he still wrestles with exactly what went wrong and what went down.”

“Speaking as a filmmaker, as a director of actors at this moment, not even just as a writer, even though it affected the way I wrote the scenes, I didn’t want the movie to be a collection of landmark moments or recreations,” he explains. “Obviously, a part of that happens when making a movie like this, but I wanted to feel in it or its emotions. One of the things that happens with iconic artistic figures like Bob is that every move they make and everything that happened along the timeline of their career becomes a turning point and cultural inflection point.”

“I’m not arguing all of that may be true, but it wasn’t true for the players that night. They didn’t feel like they were changing the course of culture, nor did Bob when he got a band in the studio. I got from Bob that these things came from very primal human feelings, like the whole blow-up at Newport. It was effectively some kind of Thanksgiving or holiday dinner family implosion like any other we might experience. These people had all been living under each other’s rules, edicts, and philosophies, and the Prodigal son might have had just about enough of what Dad told him he could or couldn’t say or do anymore. That whole thing became a bit of acting out as much as anything else.”

When it came to recounting the memories and motivations Dylan recalled from his rapid rise in the early 60s, Mangold was realistic.

“Do I remember why I did everything between 19 and 23 years of age? No,” the Identity filmmaker laughed. “I definitely got from Bob that his grasp on how things went down like they did and why is a little bit elusive as anyone’s behavior when they were in their early 20s might be to recapture in their 80s. The second thing that was really clear to me was something very plain spoken he shared with me: being a solo folk act is profoundly lonely. You are on stage, and it is just you. In a sense, before you go on stage, it is just you; when you come off, and they are cheering or reacting, it is just you. There’s obviously something he liked about that, but loneliness was a word he used more than once to describe what it felt like to be that guy.”

Timothée Chalamet on stage in ‘A Complete Unknown.’

Searchlight Pictures

Revisiting Johnny Cash In ‘A Complete Unknown’

The other overriding reality is that Dylan never set out to be famous but to create and play music and make a living. He wanted “to be Buddy Holly or Little Richard” and had no idea what was going to happen.

“What it seemed to me to be so important that the movie articulate was that Bob was willing to inhabit this world that welcomed him and able to fulfill that role to a degree that had never happened before, which was that he became their greatest star,” Mangold says. “He was very good at it and enjoyed it, but I don’t think that dream of camaraderie with a band and playing with other instruments ever went away. When it came time that every option in the world was open to him and he could go electric, why wouldn’t he? To him, it was just getting the chance to do something he had always wanted to do, not just as a kind of, ‘I’m going to change the cultural paradigm.’ I don’t want to say it was unintentional, but it was personal. His main motivation was one of wanting camaraderie.”

Something the multi-hyphenate filmmaker enjoyed with A Complete Unknown was telling the legendary Johnny Cash’s story through a different lens than his Oscar-winning film Walk the Line. In that film, Joaquin Phoenix inhabited the role, a performance that garnered him an Oscar nomination. In A Complete Unknown, Boyd Holbrook embodies Cash.

“The deeper I got into working on the script, the clearer it was that he played a huge role, representing and modeling a point of view because Johnny had a band,” Mangold enthuses. “One of my favorite moments in this movie is almost a silent one, as Johnny Cash takes the stage for the first time in Newport in 1964. This shot follows Johnny and the Tennessee Three out onto the stage, and you hear their boots against the wood planking of the stage. The camera pans and finds Bob; he’s looking at them with adoration and admiration as the band files by, and it was an attempt to capture exactly what Bob described to me, which was the yearning for that kind of camaraderie, to be on a team, to maybe the leader of a team where you went out, and you did a job together.”

“That was the dominating reason I felt Johnny had to be a part of the movie despite the fact I had already made a movie about him. In a weird way, as a writer and director, everyone’s so aware of branding in their career, and I try not to be aware of it at all. I needed Johnny Cash in this movie. It occurred to me, ‘Wow, I did that already,’ but then I returned to brass tacks and said, ‘I need him in this movie because he plays a significant role.’ The part of his life we’re playing is slightly different in that Walk the Line was mostly an origin story. Boyd is someone who I’ve worked with multiple times. I think he’s an incredible actor. Because we’re just focusing on him in his later period, we would get these two sides of Johnny, both of which were real. Bob also sees a slight cautionary tale about stardom, its loneliness, and the fact that that problem doesn’t necessarily get solved just by having a band.

(Left to right) Timothée Chalamet and James Mangold attend The Gothams 34th Annual Film Awards … [+] Winners Room at Cipriani Wall Street in New York City.

Getty Images

Why Timothée Chalamet Was The Perfect Dylan For ‘A Complete Unknown’

However, none of this would have been possible without Mangold’s dream Dylan, who came in the form of Timothée Chalamet, who is also a producer on the movie. While A Complete Unknown lands in theaters in December 2024, their journey on the project together started back in 2019. It has been a long road.

“To me, it was the only time I’ve ever been approached where they had this book, and they had a first draft of the script, and it obviously needed to be worked more, but the reality was it was a great story, and there was an actor circling it who was perfect,” the writer-director reveals. “I saw myself, and I imagine they saw me as the piece who could bring the script home, get Timmy on board, and solidify all the elements. I literally heard about this movie on the way to the Telluride Film Festival. Then, ten days later, I met with Timmy at the Toronto Film Festival, where I was premiering Ford v Ferrari, and we shook hands on doing it together. I was already writing a new script while in Telluride and Toronto. I couldn’t stop thinking about what, to me, a huge opportunity this was.”

“It’s also credit to Arianne Phillips and the costume department, as well as makeup and hair, but he’s the right guy for the role. Seeing the results, it’s obvious. Singing, performing live, the mastery of the guitar he demonstrates, it’s all pretty amazing, but there’s also an innate way he’s bringing a piece of himself to Bob. That’s always what’s so important to me.”

Mangold concludes, “It happens more often with true-life films that the actors can fall down a rabbit hole of ticks, gestures, and impersonations, and especially if the person is famous, there’s so much stuff to study. In Bob’s case, there are reams of documentary material and clips. I don’t want to stop them from absorbing that, but my job is to ensure they don’t lose themselves. I thought that what Timothée Chalamet had to bring to the part in A Complete Unknown was as valuable as what he was absorbing from Bob.”



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