Ben Whishaw is one of many incarnations of Bob Dylan in Todd Haynes's offbeat biopic, I'm Not There. (Jonathan Wenk/TWC/Alliance Atlantis)
At least a few of the multitudes contained in Bob Dylan are given their due in I’m Not There, a rabbit-hole investigation of a man — or the construct of a man — who has spent nearly half a century telling the world that he would rather no one investigated.
Six actors, including a black boy (Marcus Carl Franklin) who calls himself Woody Guthrie and a woman named Jude (Cate Blanchett), represent six different incarnations of the singer’s life and work. Mimicking early-Dylan-era films like A Hard Day’s Night and 8 1/2, writer-director Todd Haynes focuses on aesthetics and inspiration rather than motivation — no long-buried childhood incident at the homestead is offered up as Dylan’s raison d’etre. The result lobs a gigantic spitball at the hackneyed music biopic; Ray and Walk the Line can slink into the sunset now, please. Haynes, best known for the acclaimed films Safe and Far from Heaven, has a bigger vision; he’s a director who gleefully references Dylan’s (and Haynes’) hero, poet Arthur Rimbaud, and has no qualms about putting a Fellini-esque giraffe in a scene opposite Richard Gere (as a Billy the Kid-phase Dylan).
Giraffes are rarely an easy sell. Haynes, 46, spent seven hellish years piecing together script, cast and financing for the $20 million US film, which was finally shot in Montreal. Harvey Weinstein’s new company, The Weinstein Brothers, picked up distribution in the eleventh hour, though Weinstein was reportedly confused and displeased by an early version. Ultimately, Haynes got final cut.
During the Toronto International Film Festival last September, Haynes sat in a darkened hotel room wearing a red silk shirt and holding a stubby, hand-rolled cigarette, blowing smoke at the closed curtains. Haynes spoke eloquently — he is a fan of the lingering sentence and the comma — about un-fixed identity, the history of American soul and what Dylan might think.
Q: When did Bob Dylan first matter to you?
A: In high school. The music was a rallying cry, a fearlessness, a sense of possibility that made a lot of sense to an adolescent. I think it was something about those signals that I turned back to years later, well into my adult years, when I needed some of that assuredness and fearlessness to take me from one place to another in my life. Change is exciting when you’re young and has all the glamour of the future attached to it, and then as you get older, it gets more scary and harder to look at as a positive force. Dylan is someone who reminds us that change is radical and good and exciting and irreverent and important.
Q: Did you have to consider the Dylanphiles while you were making the film? One gets the sense they are un-pleasable.
A: Absolutely — you can’t make a film for them, and I wasn’t. They get a little too serious, a little too organized, rigid in their love.
Q: You paid tribute to the director Douglas Sirk to get at some truth about the ’50s in Far from Heaven. In a similar way, I’m Not There seems less about the real ’60s than a cinematic, or mythologized, ’60s. Why this approach?
A: It was all about the cinema of the ’60s, the Fellini, the Godard, the hippie westerns of the late ’60s, early ’70s. My rule for myself was that I would draw from the cinematic language that surrounded Dylan. That’s how I was making the film, which is a visual medium, a medium of music and temporality. I wanted the different types of cinema to distinguish these stories from each other.
Q: From that first image of the Woody Guthrie kid riding the rails, the film is as much a portrait of the history of American popular culture as it is a portrait of Dylan. Was it your intention to go this broad from the beginning, or did you find that talking about Dylan ends up being a conversation about all of American pop culture?
A: I can’t remember. Wait, no — that was probably very much in mind from the beginning, the history element. I didn’t want to get carried away with myself there, but I figured out quite quickly that by committing really closely to Dylan’s relationship with each of these genres and phases, I would end up with a fairly comprehensive tapestry of American music, pop culture, music culture, American soul.
Director Todd Haynes, left, with actress Charlotte Gainsbourg on the set of I'm Not There. (Jonathan Wenk/TWC/Alliance Atlantis)
Q: There were a lot of reports about how difficult it was to make this film. How do you feel about the film now?
A: It was so unbelievably hard, but now I’m thrilled with it. I can’t believe how many ways it could have gone so wrong and been just an interesting failure. I really feel like we overcame so many challenges and I did it with such tremendous help, support, commitment. When you’re directing, you’re holding a phantom up and you’re leading all these people into the abyss in the shape of this phantom. Any movie is like that, but the more unlike any other movie your new one is, the more of an unknown you’re entering, and the more the risks abound.
Q: Dylan always divorces himself from his status as political icon, but do you believe he’s sincere? Can’t we look at him as political?
A: Of course we can. The thing about a creative person is that all his output still exists; just because he moved on and did something else, it doesn’t negate it. It’s sort of like when you have a relationship that doesn’t work out, it doesn’t mean it didn’t exist, it didn’t have meaning or purpose for you, especially if you have offspring from it. You don’t negate the offspring because the relationship failed, and that’s what all these phases are. This is a guy who just produced hundreds of thousands of babies all the time, that we all get to enjoy and keep returning to and sharing in. They’re all alive.
Q: What did you tell Cate Blanchett to get that Don’t Look Back performance out of her?
A: We looked at the pictures and we looked at the footage. I think she saw exactly what I was talking about with the strange androgyny that he embodied. That was why I wanted to have an actress play that part, to make something kind of strange out of it, something never before really seen, which I think Dylan must have been for people at that time. I think that strangeness has gone away now. It’s like when people heard The Beatles for the first time and they had to pull their cars over. I think Dylan said he did that; he had never heard anything like it before. You just crave to know what it would have been like to have never heard anything like it before. Literally, what does that mean? [Dylan] is so woven into the culture now, such a mainstay, that it’s about trying to find that freshness and strangeness that these things have lost over time that gave them that full force to begin with. Cate understood that immediately, and she was her own driver. She’s extraordinary.
Q: What would you want Dylan to say about the film?
A: That he laughed. We have enough serious contemplation about Dylan in the world, and there’s plenty of serious things in the film, emotional moments in the film, things that have weight and importance. But I don’t expect those to necessarily be the things that move him about it. I just hope he laughs.I’m Not There opens in Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver on November 30.
Katrina Onstad writes about the arts for CBCNews.ca.
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