[IMG:L]Raise your hand if you’re Bob Dylan: One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six Bob Dylans?!
In Todd Haynes’s anachronistic film world, he creates a life journey through employing a diverse palette of indiewood–and Hollywood–heavyweights who represent various incarnations of Bob Dylan, to whom this biopic serves as an experimental love letter.
Whipping its way through space and time, the haltingly visual story charts the oft enigmatic folk singer whose career took rise in the 1960s and was a composite of a world he often touched, sometimes denied and even fetishized, during a time when his generation was trying to rise-up; meanwhile Bob was trying to dig down … into his tangled up roots.
I’m Not There bravely serves a virtual triptych that cleverly meanders through the invisible and imagined life path charted by iconic ‘folk’ singer Bob Dylan.
[IMG:R]With his prickly biopic that revels in its dynamic re-staging of a living legend’s life, Todd Haynes carries a heavy helming burden–however, alongside his powerful cast, he lifts the weight with visionary glee.
We caught up with the risk-taker at Walter Reade Theater as he shared about his latest work.
HW: Has Bob Dylan seen the film, and what are his thoughts on it?
Todd Haynes: I wish I knew–but he hasn’t seen it yet as far as we know. We gave Jesse [Dylan], his oldest son, a DVD. Dylan didn’t want to come to any big public events but rather wanted to watch it in the quiet of his own home.
HW: What drew you into this story, even before clearing rights to use Dylan’s music?
TH: I found myself at a time in a curious desire to listen to Dylan music again and I hadn’t really been in that mode, quite like that, since high school. It drew me ever deeper into his music, his life, his unreleased recordings, stuff I hadn’t really known before. I found myself getting this little itch to respond to it creatively and possibly make a film.
HW: You’ve had past issues with your films in getting music rights.
TH: I had a very difficult history as a filmmaker with music rights at different stages in my career, one of my first short films Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story which still can’t be publicly shown due to the fact that I used the music without permission as a young, sort of guerilla filmmaker; and then later [using music] with David Bowie’s Velvet Goldmine about the glam rock era, which he did not want to give us [rights to]…
[IMG:R]HW: So were you proactive about securing the music rights for this film prior to scripting it?
TH: I called Christine Vachon, my producer, and said almost ‘guilt-fully’, “I’m thinking about doing a film about Bob Dylan…this kind of cluster of different selves…” And she said, “Look, don’t write it. Don’t do anything rash. Let’s just see what happens.” We started by approaching Jesse [Dylan’s son], we set up a meeting; he’s an independent filmmaker … Jeff Rosen, Bob Dylan’s manager, was on the phone.
HW: Can you take us for a moment into the I’m Not There pitch meeting?
TH: I just described the concept; Jesse and Jeff Rosen found it very interesting. But said, “We might like it to bits–but there’s no way of knowing what Bob would say. He’s basically said ‘no’ to any film version of his life up until this point.” They both said to write it out on a one-sheet page and keep it very simple. They told me all these [terms] to avoid like: “voice of a generation!” or “genius of our time!” or any major accolade.
[IMG:L]HW: Why did you choose to focus on making ‘six Dylans’ as opposed to more?
TH: In the original concept there were seven different Dylans. There was even an additional character in the proposal called “Charlie” who kind of got absorbed into the Woody story. I liked seven because it came up in a lot of Dylan lyrics and it had a kind of seven stages of man logic to it–I guess I had to stop somewhere!?
HW: How was it to work in cinemascope?
TH: It was exciting. It was so exciting. It really felt like this film, the first of any of mine, I think really called for a more panoramic format. It has a kind of epic, American calm about it, in feel and in breadth.
HW: Do you feel you were given enough ‘creative license’ in charting Dylan’s life?
TH: Jeff [Rosen] gave me a huge amount of creative space that Dylan obviously approved and didn’t really need to hear more about what’s the terms were set.
[IMG:R]HW: What’s your directorial point of view on charting ‘time travel’?
TH: That’s an interesting term that came to mind when I was looking at Dylan’s life and particularly things he said–like, “Yesterday, today and tomorrow all in the same room, and there’s no telling what can happen.” That came out of a period where he was studying with this unique painter in the mid-‘70s–the theory the teacher was putting out there was that on a canvas all of these separate realities can co-exist.
HW: How do you interpret Bob Dylan‘s play with concept of temporality?
TH: It inspired Dylan, I think, to take more liberty with playing around temporal representation and meaning in his lyrics, and also put together different stories in single songs. His song “Tangled Up in Blue” seems to be talking about a woman that he once knew–but suddenly he’ll be talking about ‘a revolution’ [that’s] in the air…and [then] he’s then talking about slaves. This idea of mixing-up temporal experience seems to be what a lot of great artists, and people in the sciences, and people in the philosophical work all kind of end up veering toward.
[PAGEBREAK]HW: Was it liberating or restrictive to work with six characters?
TH: From a conceptual standpoint and in the creation of the script, that was a tremendous liberty and freedom. If anything it was a process of how to pull it all together and create some cohesion in a film that I knew was never going to deliver the kind of palpable reductive results that the traditional biopic delivers. And, yet, it is a biopic. It does quote the early life of somebody: the famous moments in somebody’s life that we come to the theater with some knowledge of–the hit songs, the hit moments.
[IMG:R]HW: Following five years of intense work on your script, when did casting come into the picture?
TH: I didn’t really have any actors in mind with the writing with the possible exception of Charlotte Gainsbourg who I had seen in films and really, really loved. There was something about her quality as an actress. And her ‘Frenchness’ did inform me to make her character French because she just felt so right as the love object.
HW: How did you approach the layered topic of Bob Dylan and his relationship to women?
TH: I looked at the early [Jean-Luc] Godard films and found there to be a quick cleanness in the way they’re shot and framed that I also found very present to the era. I also found them to have a contradictory relationship toward women, which I thought was very symptomatic of Dylan, in some ways, in that they [often] treat the female characters in the early Godard films with a kind of poetic susceptibility and beauty, but they’re kind of exempt from the political discourse that’s also defining those films and the man-talk. The women are more involved in existential or personal kinds of questions that aren’t treated with the same weight.
HW: So you feel Dylan treads similar waters as Godard?
TH: There’s been ways in which Dylan’s music has been questioned for the way it talks about women–its regard toward women … So I used the film to both critique the way some depictions of women were executed in the ’60s, but also let the female have the final word.
[IMG:L]HW: Why do you choose to focus on the ’60s timeframe in Dylan‘s life?
TH: Because of the potential for this [film] to unspool chaotically in every direction, I felt that the stylistic references, and in many cases the literal historical references in the film, could and should all be rooted in the ’60s. I kind of felt that all of the major strands of these Dylan archetypes have their root in the ’60s.
HW: Was it tricky deciding which of the six stories to concentrate upon and when?
TH: One story is kind of filling in the other. When you’re away from another story something is being learned in the story [that] you’re in that gives some sort of secondary knowledge or feeling that you lived [just] through. They all sort of co-exist.
HW: Regarding Cate Blanchett‘s riveting role–was that pre-cast?
TH: I knew in the beginning that the ‘Jude’ character that Cate [Blanchett] plays would be played by a woman. That was a part of the original concept, but exactly “who” was not something I knew at the time.
[IMG:R]HW: Still the question on everyone’s mind–how did you come about deciding to have a woman play Bob Dylan?
TH: He’s gotten to be so normal. So canonized. We know those images of Dylan so well. But, he was bizarre. The way he would play piano in concert, which Cate sort of mimics in film–and you sort of see it in the Scorsese documentary where his hand sort of flies up between every line, and he would jump around the stage. The way he spoke, his [quirky] gestures, everything about him from that one time is not evident in the Don’t Look Back [documentary] from a year earlier–and would never return again after his motorcycle crash at the end of 1966. It was such a complete immersion in this ‘moment’.
HW: How would you describe this very ‘moment’?
TH: It was androgynous. It was a different kind of androgyny that you would see later with people like Bowie and artists like that. It was almost more like channeling Patty Smith. It was unmanly. Un-macho. For all the kind of ways that Dylan is associated with as a “guy’s artist” or a “heterosexual” kind of icon, his flamboyance during that time is really profound–and it must’ve been ‘a freaker’ for people at that time.
[IMG:L]HW: Do you feel the film truly dives into the many layers of African-American influences on Dylan’s art? Or into the very real Jewish components of Dylan‘s own identity which he generally evades?
TH: I can’t imagine getting deeper into his African-American influence than turning him black! What was so fascinating about Dylan is the way he so skirted who he “really was” for things that he really wanted to be. The ‘wannabe’ kept changing faces–so he wanted to be Woody Guthrie, and he waned to not be Jewish, and he wanted to be Arthur Rambo at some point and he wanted to be Billy the Kid. So I let him be all those things, basically.
HW: Your thoughts on him constantly swapping identities?
TH: A lot of the jokes of the films are about trading one authenticity for another or fakery for another. So, Cate’s character gets revealed as the ‘Jewish Dylan‘. That is, I have to say, one aspect of Dylan’s life that is–maybe–the most secret and the most well preserved. But I still really don’t know what his relationship is to Judaism. I think it’s kept very close to his family life which is the thing he’s most successfully protected his whole life. [Smiles] Yeah, yeah–it’s not all there.
