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Like a Rolling Stone
Todd Haynes plans to direct Bob Dylan biopic. The filmmaker behind the acclaimed ''Far From Heaven'' and ''Velvet Goldmine'' sets his sights on the music legend

The man behind ''Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story'' and ''Velvet Goldmine'' is gearing up for his most ambitious music film yet. Writer-director Todd Haynes -- currently bathing in acclaim and Oscar buzz for his ''Far From Heaven'' -- is planning a movie based on the life of Bob Dylan. ''I don't have a script yet, but when all this [awards hype] settles down, I'm going to get to work,'' he says. ''I have some notes and some very rough things fleshed out, but I'm looking forward to going back into the cave.''

The plot is itself rather Dylanesque. ''It will be a fictional drama that will draw from his life, but it will refract who he is into a cluster of characters played by different actors who will be him, but none of them him,'' says Haynes. ''It's probably the most honest way to tell anybody's story, because we look back on our lives and, hopefully, we occupy different selves that have changed and grown and [been] discarded. He's a great example of that. It's the only way to tackle his multiplicity.''

Haynes hasn't spoken to Dylan but says the singer-songwriter has, through his manager, given his go-ahead and permission to use his music.

As much as I love Dylan and all, I'd rather have Pennebaker's "Dont' Look Back" as his definitive film. Not to mention, doesn't this seem a bit premature to go to press with?

This is an extremely interesting idea with great possibilities. Lets just hope that it doesn't pain Dylan to be just God instead of trying to show who he really is, and from reading reviews of Don't Look Back, and that he can be as petty as any other rock star. Everyone these days seem to just want to suck the man's dick.

~rougerum

I think it's a great idea. I love Don't Look Back, but I'm willing to see what Haynes can bring to the table.

Has anyone heard anything about 'Masked & Anonymous' since its disastrous Sundance debut? I wonder if it'll get released. The whole premise sounded really lame, but I'd really like to see it...just to see what sort of a trainwreck it is.

If the honest way Haynes had of allegoricizing David Bowie in Velvet Goldmine is any indication, he will not be deifying Dylan, but rather using his story as an example of the way our modern culture/celebrity works in conjunction with identity (on the performer's and audience's part).

in this film bob takes it Up the butt

damn you todd haynes ::waves fist::

Your obsession with the topic is embarrassingly Freudian, pal. Just try it and get it over with so we can all stop hearing about it from you here- I'm sure Jay and/or Silent Bob would be happy to help you out, since they're similarly focused. The practice itself is hardly "gross," but your consuming desire to talk about it here really is, for some reason.

??

Quote from: SoNowThen??

Yeah, that joker has posts on the topic of what he calls "man-man butt sex" in more than one of these forums... which he(?) vociferiously finds "gross," which must mean it weighs heavily on his mind... which Dr. Freud would tell us is the sign of a desperately repressed desire to do exactly what the topic of disgust is.

Yeah, but Freud was a coked-out lunatic.

...like so many geniuses...

The cocaine and the personal problems are always quite exaggerated by Freud's detractors, but you're not seriously saying you think he had any less of a point about our subconscious and sexuality just because of those things??

Quote from: godardianDr. Freud would tell us is the sign of a desperately repressed desire to do exactly what the topic of disgust is.

Quote from: Jeremy Blackmanthe fighter of all things goatse.

Freudian.

:)

fag.

Taz, I'm gonna lock this thread and ban your ass.

Quote from: godardian

Quote from: SoNowThen??

Yeah, that joker has posts on the topic of what he calls "man-man butt sex" in more than one of these forums... which he(?) vociferiously finds "gross," which must mean it weighs heavily on his mind... which Dr. Freud would tell us is the sign of a desperately repressed desire to do exactly what the topic of disgust is.

i always wanted to be called a joker in such a fashion, this is a thrill

Quote from: bonanzatazfag.

True, but sort of a predictable word for it. Name-calling has always been the last resort of the infantile, ignorant, and fearful, though, so it's to be expected. I use the world all the time, myself, but as Andrew Sarris would say, "It's not WHAT, it's HOW."

All that being behind us (hopefully, and no pun intended, ha ha), maybe we can actually talk about the so-called Bob Dylan biopic for once...

I've not seen Don't Look Back. Not being much of a Dylan fan, I'm hoping (and I think I'm right) that we won't be getting a direct Dylan biopic from Todd Haynes. I wouldn't be surprised if the character is not actually called "Bob Dylan," but is a more "based upon" kind of thing a la Brian Slade/Tommy Stone (not called "David Bowie," though they obviously were to a large extent) in Velvet Goldmine.

The most interesting thing about Dylan to me is not his music- for some reason, his songs always sound better to me when they're sung by someone else, love PJ Harvey's "Hwy. 61"- but his mythmaking. And seeing as how Haynes's recurrent theme is socialization, media, technology, and cultural myth, I think it can reasonably be expected that the oft-self-revised and largely self-exaggerated Ballad of Bob Dylan will be seen through many different facets to present variations on Haynes's themes.

But... who here would be disappointed if it does, indeed, turn out NOT to be a Bob Dylan biopic in the conventional sense of the word (Haynes never does anything conventional)? Would you lose interest if, for his own creative ends, the finished film is something that plays fast and loose with anything one could take literally about Dylan?

I fully expect a Performance-type thing, conjoining Dylan and Haynes like this. It remains to be seen, though, since apparently the script isn't even completed yet.

MacGuffin... you could turn that on its head and take Mr. Xixax as an example...

I think Todd Haynes said in Spin magazine when Far From Heaven came out that this film would not be a direct dylan bio pic but more of a story about dylan related characters.

That actually sounds like a better idea then the straight bio pic. who the hell would play dylan?






//www.thestate22.com

Quote from: Meatwad
That actually sounds like a better idea then the straight bio pic. who the hell would play dylan?

i'd put my vote for james franco.

Quote from: godardianIf the honest way Haynes had of allegoricizing David Bowie in Velvet Goldmine is any indication, he will not be deifying Dylan, but rather using his story as an example of the way our modern culture/celebrity works in conjunction with identity (on the performer's and audience's part).

I think you're right, godardian. I'm open-minded about this project, and like Velvet Goldmine (although I don't know why explorations of surface and style have to be so emotionally uninvolving - or maybe it's just Haynes' that are?), but I wish that he would choose a figure less obviously enigmatic. It doesn't seem a striking choice if Haynes uses an already elusive pop-culture icon like Dylan to explore his themes. I'd be more interested if he chose someone from the pre-modern period, and not a rock star.

Masked & Anonymous is pretty bad, in case anyone was wondering.

Quote from: budgie

Quote from: godardianIf the honest way Haynes had of allegoricizing David Bowie in Velvet Goldmine is any indication, he will not be deifying Dylan, but rather using his story as an example of the way our modern culture/celebrity works in conjunction with identity (on the performer's and audience's part).

I think you're right, godardian. I'm open-minded about this project, and like Velvet Goldmine (although I don't know why explorations of surface and style have to be so emotionally uninvolving - or maybe it's just Haynes' that are?), but I wish that he would choose a figure less obviously enigmatic. It doesn't seem a striking choice if Haynes uses an already elusive pop-culture icon like Dylan to explore his themes. I'd be more interested if he chose someone from the pre-modern period, and not a rock star.

Well, we'll just have to wait and see... I've heard nothing of specifics as yet, so who knows exactly what it'll be? I love the idea of him being "different people," whatever it means. It evokes some things in my head that may prove to be entirely not what Haynes is planning to do.

There's a really nice interview/introduction with Haynes on the DVD of Ali: Fear Eats the Soul wherein he talks at length about ideas regarding emotional involvement, relation/identity to characters, etc. I personally find the films very emotionally involving, regardless of the degree to which we're discouraged from getting "inside their skin" of the characters.

I've heard Masked and Anonymous is pretty bad, too. I think I'll see Seabiscuit instead.  :)

A long time on, and in retrospect, Seabiscuit couldn't possibly have been any better than Masked and Anonymous.

This from the BBC:


Woman to play Dylan in biopic

The Dylan of 1965 will be played by a female actor

Music legend Bob Dylan is to be played by an actress in a film about the singer's life.

An unidentified woman will portray the singer-songwriter at the height of his popularity in the mid-1960s.

The unlikely role is one of seven stages of Dylan's five-decade career represented by different actors - who also reportedly include an 11-year-old black boy.

The film is being made director Todd Haynes, whose film Far From Heaven has won an Oscar nomination for actress Julianne Moore.

Haynes said he wanted to capture the many facets of Dylan's character.

He said: "Bob Dylan is somebody who has continued to reject all of the various personas that he has embodied over the years.

"(He) continues to move forward by discarding himself, so my idea is to put together a film of multiple characters and tell their stories simultaneously."

Haynes said although each of the actors would portray the singer, none would create "the definitive Dylan".

The woman actor would play him as he appeared in the era "when he was best-looking", said Haynes.

Dylan fans will be intrigued by the prospect of the first major Hollywood film project in recent years to chronicle his life and work.

Haynes has reportedly struck up a close friendship with the artist and gained unprecedented access to his catalogue of hundreds of songs.

Dylan's life story - also due to be told in a forthcoming autobiography - makes for a potentially colourful film.

Wow, that's a great approach.  Haynes will undoubtedly dodge every traditional biopic cliche. I just hope he doesn't 'steal' any of my ideas for my eventual Kurt Cobain movie. Darn that collective unconsicousness theft...

Todd Haynes Next Making Bob Dylan Film
Source: Variety

Paramount Pictures has reached a deal with Killer Films and Wells Prods. to produce writer-director Todd Haynes' next feature, a film about the life of Bob Dylan.

Variety reports that Haynes is currently scripting the project, tentatively titled I'm Not There: Suppositions on a Film Concerning Dylan. The singer has also licensed music rights to the production.

"The film is going be inspired by Dylan's music and his ability to re-create and re-imagine himself time and time again," said Killer principal Christine Vachon. Haynes is expected to finish the script in another few months.

Director Todd Haynes (FAR FROM HEAVEN) has found his star for the upcoming Bob Dylan biopic I'M NOT THERE - Adrien Brody. And Colin Farrell. And Richard Gere. Oh and Julianne Moore and Cate Blanchett too. And then there's Charlotte Gainsbourg. And, yes, they'll all be playing Bob Dylan. Confused? It's all part of Haynes's plan to create an unconventional biography of the legendary musician that will use different actors to portray the singer at different portions and aspects of his life and career. Six of the seven "Dylans" are above and Haynes is still looking for one more - a young black woman the director hopes will accentuate Dylan's "inner-blackness." If this all sounds a little weird to you, know this - I'M NOT THERE is the first time Dylan has given his approval to a feature film based on his life. The project was initially set up at Paramount but whent he new regime came in, lead by new president Brad Grey, the studio dropped it from its schedule. A new deal with a distributor is expected to close at the Cannes Film Festival. The film, which has been described as Haynes's dream project, is expected to film this fall but that may be contingent on the schedules of all the talent involved.

what a fucking idiotic idea

posting that?  yeah

Quote from: RegularKarateposting that?  yeah

no, the idea

But why?

I really hope this works. And even it it doesn't, you have to applaud Haynes for trying to something so audacious and challenging.

Filmmakers trying things like this keeps cinema exciting. The other Todd already proved that eight people can play the same person to a really beautiful effect - why can't a similar technique be used on a historical figure? It's bound to be far more interesting than any traditional biopic could, or would, be.

Also, I love the blatant artsiness of the title.

Quote from: GhostboyBut why?

I really hope this works. And even it it doesn't, you have to applaud Haynes for trying to something so audacious and challenging.

Filmmakers trying things like this keeps cinema exciting.

it may keep things exciting in speculation, but does not neccessarily mean it will be best for the film.

I just can't see it working.

different actors for different ages is one thing...

using women to play a man (especially Dylan) just seems is absolutely absurd - a novelty act.

call me a traditionalist if you will, but i can't see this working as a storytelling device - a conversation peice...maybe.

Palindromes

I think you're dismissing it too quickly... that's what I meant by that

i haven't caught it yet - been meaning to.

are there men and women playing the lead in palindromes? that's the core of Hayne's idea that I can't see working in the Dylan pic. I can see it work if it was all the same sex.

the only film ive seen work using multiple cast members for one character was That Obscure Object of Desire - was done in a very tactful and subtle way. And with only 2 actors, opposed to 5,6,7...

Such a bold move seems like it would be very disjointed and distracting. There are certain filmmaking/storytelling conventions that are very hard to stray from.

however, I can't fully disregard or condemn until I see it.

Quote from: cowboykurtisare there men and women playing the lead in palindromes? that's the core of Hayne's idea that I can't see working in the Dylan pic. I can see it work if it was all the same sex.

There's one boy amongst all the girls.

Okay, so of course I have to come back to post in this topic... sorry, no triumphant return, but please know that you guys are all always lurking somewhere in the back of my head (in the little pantry not crammed full of school info).

I disgree with cowboyk's assessment... Haynes has certainly not ever been one to leave gender roles unchallenged, and I'm sure he'd be the first to embrace the idea that there's masculine and feminine in each and every human being, and Dylan was so androgynous that he makes the perfect example.

I liked Palindromes a lot, too. But this sounds like a very different motivation. Solondz's well-made point was that people's attributes can change, but their natures can't, or at least are unlikely to. Haynes's sure to be well-made point will likely be that, for the sake of masking our insecurities and functioning in society, we need to pretend our natures (or "identities," to use the word that's always bound to come up in a discussion of Haynes) are much more fixed than they could ever possibly be, and that the differences between a man and a woman are not as significant as we make them. I don't imagine most people will feel Bob Dylan's gender is such a significant part of what he is that Haynes's casting will seem like a stunt. The question of the importance of one's chromosomes and genitalia-- or what connection those things should have to our socialized identities, the kind of identity none of us have any choice but to have-- has always been central to Haynes's work, so this idea seems very much like him. I know he believes one's "gender," unlike one's innate biological sex, to be a very mutable and very sociocultural phenomenon. I'm not a huge Dylan fan, but I'm really looking forward to it.

Hope all are well.

found this on the imdb boards

Dylan Biopic
Thursday, May 04, 2006
By Roger Friedman

Colin Out, Heath In For Bob Dylan Film

Here's the big word from the world of film: Colin Farrell is supposedly out and "Brokeback Mountain" star Heath Ledger is in for the Bob Dylan biopic getting ready to shoot this summer called "I'm Not There."

I am told that director Todd Haynes, of "Far from Heaven" fame, was forced to change lead actors at the last minute. The reason for Farrell's departure is unknown, but what is known is that he's been in rehab already this year.

Neither actor was actually going to play Bob Dylan alone in Haynes's imaginative script. Indeed, the screenplay calls for six different people to play the legendary singer-songwriter, including Cate Blanchett, Richard Gere and Christian Bale.

Julianne Moore, also in the film, is set to play another role (not Dylan), sources tell me.

The fact that John Lennon was recently represented by six actors in a failed Broadway musical is of no consequence to Haynes and company. "We had the idea first," an insider told me.

The script also calls for the use of more than a dozen Dylan songs, which will be chosen by Haynes from the songwriters' huge catalogue. Dylan is said to be so enthusiastic about the project that he's given up his half of the publishing income to make the budget work. The other half is owned by Sony/ATV Music Publishing, and they're not giving up anything. After all, some of it will go toward paying Michael Jackson's debt.

And don't worry; the songs will not be sung by the actors. Many well-known acts like The White Stripes and Aimee Mann will get a shot at re-interpreting Dylan's work.

Dylan is my fourth fav. musical artist. (The other three are The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, and Led Zeppelin.) So I have some somewhat expectations for this. I'm extremely interested in how this film will work and Julianne Moore being in this just makes this project even mire exciting. I wonder if she will play Sara. Only time will tell.

A few months ago, there was a really cool interview with Haynes in a magazine called Tokion, in which he divulged some stuff about I'm Not There. I didn't buy the mag 'cause I'm cheap and broke as hell. Nevertheless, I did jot down some highlights from the interview in my blog (http://talktomeharrywinston.blogspot.com/2006/04/todd-haynes-reveals-further-details.html#commentsl).

And oh, rumors are swirling that Haynes outright fired Farrell because he was afraid that Farrell's booze (and maybe drugs?) habits would prove detrimental to production.

Williams, Ledger on Dylan bio
Source: Hollywood Reporter

Oscar-nominated actors Heath Ledger and Michelle Williams are joining the all-star cast of the Bob Dylan biopic "I'm Not There," written and directed by Todd Haynes.

Ledger, who replaces Colin Farrell, is in negotiations to be one of seven actors cast that will represent the different aspects of Dylan's life story and music. Williams will play Coco Rivington, a model with whom an androgynous folk star -- played by the already cast Cate Blanchett -- is taken. Also cast are Christian Bale, Julianne Moore and Richard Gere.

The movie represents an onscreen reunion for Ledger and Williams, who were Oscar-nominated for their performances in Ang Lee's "Brokeback Mountain."

Haynes and Killer Films principal Christine Vachon earlier had persuaded Dylan to assign the filmmakers the rights to his life story and music. The first biographical screenplay about Dylan is set to go before the cameras in July in Montreal and was co-written by Haynes with Oren Moverman.

Vachon is producing with Dylan's business manager, Jeff Rosen. Wells and Goldwyn are exec producing.

Haynes has reteamed with cinematographer Ed Lachman ("Far From Heaven") and hired production designer Jan Roelfs ("World Trade Center") to create period looks for "I'm Not There."

Cate Blanchett to Play Bob Dylan in Biopic

Oscar winner Cate Blanchett, who has portrayed Queen Elizabeth and Katharine Hepburn, will add another legend to her resume: Bob Dylan.

The 37-year-old Australian actress is one of seven actors to play Dylan at various stages of his career in the biopic, "I'm Not There," tentatively scheduled for release next year. She'll portray a specific aspect of Dylan's personality, embodied by an androgynous singer-songwriter character named Jude, according to Killer Films, the movie's production company.

Heath Ledger and his girlfriend and "Brokeback Mountain" co-star Michelle Williams have also joined the cast, along with Christian Bale, Julianne Moore and Richard Gere.

The movie will be directed by Todd Haynes, who helmed 2002 movie "Far from Heaven" and 1998's "Velvet Goldmine," about rock icon David Bowie.

Blanchett will next be seen in the upcoming dramas "Babel," opposite Brad Pitt, and "The Good German," alongside George Clooney.

Production Starts on Haynes' I'm Not There
Source: Killer Films

Principal photography will commence Monday, July 31st on Todd Haynes' new feature film I'm Not There. This production will shoot entirely on location in Montreal, Canada.

The film is a portrait of Bob Dylan that has six actors playing the iconic singer-songwriter in his different life-guises. The different "Dylans" will be portrayed by Christian Bale, Cate Blanchett, Marcus Carl Franklin, Richard Gere, Heath Ledger, and Ben Whishaw.

Also cast in supporting roles are David Cross, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Bruce Greenwood, Julianne Moore and Michelle Williams.

Among Haynes' collaborators on the film crew are cinematographer Ed Lachman (Far From Heaven), production designer Judy Becker (Brokeback Mountain), costume designer John Dunn (Casino) and editor Jay Rabinowitz (The Fountain). The intriguing line-up of musicians for the Dylan soundtrack includes Lee Ranaldo of Sonic Youth, Richie Havens, and the band Calexico.

I'm Not There is being produced by Christine Vachon, through Killer Films, along with John Goldwyn, Jeff Rosen and James D. Stern, through his Endgame Entertainment, which is the primary financier of the film.

John Sloss, Andreas Grosch, Amy J. Kaufman and John Wells all serve as executive producers on the picture. Charles Pugliese is serving as co-producer.

(https://xixax.com/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Freporter.blogs.com%2F.%2Fphotos%2Funcategorized%2Fcate_dylan1.jpg&hash=0f38195f0c7cf21858fd84a7b5c662c3e1a8302f)

That's Not Bob Dylan, That's Cate Blanchett, Baby!
Source: Rolling Stone

You may remember director Todd Haynes: He's the one who used Barbie Dolls to tell the life story of Karen Carpenter some years back. Now he's found a way to top himself: He's currently filming a Bob Dylan biopic called I'm Not There in which seven different actors portray the legendary singer-songwriter. Here are the first shots to emerge from the set: Speaking for ourselves, we're pretty shocked at how well Cate Blanchett manages to pull off Dylan circa 1965 or 1966. Richard Gere, Heath Ledger, Julianne Moore, David Cross, Michelle Williams and Christian Bale are also in the movie - though it's unclear if they all will play Bob as well. Taking bets now: will it be better or worse than Masked And Anonymous?

For once, having a Rolling Stone subscription pays off! On page 38 of the October 19 issue, there's a quite detailed on-set report by Brian Hiatt. Many interesting details are revealed. (Dunno if they count as "spoilers." No plot info is given away, I don't think.)

well, what does it say? :(

SPOILER ALERT!!!!!  POSSIBLE SPOILERS!!!



(Disclaimer: I despise the concept of "spoilers" and feel it gives a ridiculous amount of privilege to the "what" as opposed to the much more relevant and defiantly un-spoilable "how" of films, to use Andrew Sarris's indefatigable categorizations. However, out of deference to  the 'net's rampant spoiler-phobia, I've included the alert above.)

Quote from: Slightly Green on October 06, 2006, 08:16:47 AM
well, what does it say? :(

The standout tidbits:

--"It's so perfect for this person who keeps moving forward and discarding who he was.... The minute he seems in grasp, he's not there anymore." - Haynes, on the title.

--Michelle Williams plays an "Edie Sedgwick like character" who has an affair with Cate Blanchett's "Jude"

--"I don't think Bod Dylan would have allowed anyone to do a regular biopic." - Christine Vachon

--"Haynes will use a distinct visual style for each section of the film, but he says the movie won't feel like a collection of short films. 'Each story reaches a point at which the person can't go on without becoming something else,' he says. 'It solves the problems of the prior story to change into a new thing and discard it.'"

--On the soundtrack: My Morning Jacket's Jim James and Stephen Malkmus.

--"Ultimately, I'm Not There will be a meditation on the 1960s, a decade Haynes feels still hasn't been captured correctly on film. 'It was such an incredibly complex and fascinating period,' he says. 'I want it to be the best film about the Sixties anyone has ever seen."

Source: MTV

Buzz — and bafflement — are already surrounding next year's Bob Dylan biopic, which will find Christian Bale, Heath Ledger, Richard Gere and Cate Blanchett all playing the legendary musician in the same movie. "Perfume: The Story of a Murderer" star Ben Whishaw recently explained how the unique concept of "I'm Not There" will reveal that the actors, they are a changin'. "I'm one of the Bob Dylans," he said. "Seven actors play different versions, or different facets, of Bob Dylan's personality," he said. "[Every segment] is inter-cut, throughout the movie, with the other strands." Whishaw's Dylan picks him up circa 1966, after "Like a Rolling Stone" made him famous, when the singer/songwriter began contemplating his controversial decision to plug in. "I'm sort of a hybrid of Dylan and [19th-century poet] Arthur Rimbaud," Whishaw explained. Directed by Oscar-nominated "Far From Heaven" helmer Todd Haynes, the flick is due in theaters next year.

Haynes' Dylan biopic goes to Weinsteins
TWC gets rights to 'There'
Source: Variety

The Weinstein Co. has scooped up North American and U.K. rights to "I'm Not There," Todd Haynes' sprawling Bob Dylan biopic.

Company plans to release the movie, the first Hollywood dramatization of Dylan's life that the artist has blessed, later this year in the U.S.

Timed with the movie's release will be an ambitious soundtrack featuring dozens of Dylan songs as recorded by other musicians.

Movie, which Haynes co-wrote with Oren Moverman ("Jesus' Son"), takes an unusual approach to the biopic genre. Thesps including Richard Gere, Heath Ledger, Christian Bale and even Cate Blanchett play the singer-songwriter at six stages of his life and music.

"The folk Dylan had very little to do with the rock 'n' roll Dylan, who had little to do with the preacher Dylan," said producer Christine Vachon, describing some of the phases the actors will embody.

Vachon is producing the film via her Killer Films shingle, Jim Stern through his Endgame Entertainment banner. John Goldwyn, Jeff Rosen and John Rosen also produce. Cinetic's John Sloss exec produces.

Pic, which Cinetic sold to TWC, had been shopped in the last few months to distribs, who were shown a portion of the film, currently in post.

Financing was arranged by Sloss. Celluloid has already made a number of foreign pre-sales to overseas distribs, including Happinet for Japan, Tobis for Germany and Bim Distribuzione for Italy.

Michelle Williams, Julianne Moore, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Ben Whishaw, Marcus Carl Franklin, David Cross and Bruce Greenwood are among the ensemble cast.

Randall Poster and Jim Dunbar supervised the soundtrack, which will feature artists as diverse as Willie Nelson and Yo La Tengo playing Dylan songs, as well as songs performed by Dylan himself.

Haynes, for whom "I'm Not There" is a passion project, previously directed another music-themed feature, the glam rock-centric "Velvet Goldmine," which the Weinsteins distribbed at Miramax.

In making the announcement, TWC's Harvey Weinstein said that Dylan has "lived an unbelievable and, at times, an elusive life" and that the movie would offer fans the ability "to really gain insight into his fascinating life."

After year of resisting artistic renditions of his life, Dylan has been more willing in recent years to allow others to interpret him and his music.

In addition to Martin Scorsese's critical fave "No Direction Home," Dylan authorized the short-lived Twyla Tharp legit production "The Times They Are A-Changin'." He also could write two more books to follow up on his bestselling "Chronicles: Volume 1" for Simon & Schuster, which owns the rights to those two tomes.

Although he is at an age when many musicians ease into retirement, Dylan routinely tours hundreds of days each year.

I AM SHOCKED!  i cant believe Haynes is dealing with the Weinsteins again.  :shock:

Time stands still for Dylan-esque rockers

Source:  MONTREAL GAZETTE
August 19, 2006
Alana Coates


Members of the Royal Mountain Band started playing together to pay tribute to the style of music they loved and grew up with in the '70s - the rock 'n' roll of Neil Young, The Band, The Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan.

People at their shows couldn't help but remark how eerily similar the group - guitarist and vocalist Travis Triance, drummer Warren Auld, bassist Frederic Charest, keyboardist Jeff Louch and guitarist Simon Nixon - looked to Dylan's band, with their long sideburns and moustaches.

Now, an unexpected twist of fate has brought them closer to their original goal than they ever thought possible - they're actually appearing in the Bob Dylan movie, I'm Not There, as Dylan's backing band.

"It's almost like we were born to do this," said Triance, 30, with a self-deprecating laugh.

I'm Not There, being filmed in Rawdon, about 75 kilometres north of Montreal, is being directed by Todd Haynes of Velvet Goldmine and Far From Heaven fame. It puts a creative spin on Dylan's life story by having various A-list actors take turns playing the lead role, including Richard Gere, Heath Ledger, Christian Bale and Cate Blanchett.

The Royal Mountain Band heard the producers were auditioning Montreal bands through Dan Seligman, the founder of Pop Montreal. Members of Wolf Parade and Starvin' Hungry also were vying for the part. But when the Royal Mountain Band wowed the casting directors with a rendition of Ballad Of A Thin Man, they didn't have to keep their fingers crossed for long before the phone rang.

Cate Blanchett will be taking on the role of Dylan in two scenes with the Royal Mountain Band as they re-enact the legendary 1965 Newport Folk Festival concert when Dylan was booed for going electric, and the Royal Albert Hall show in 1966. The scenes are being filmed from Monday until Aug. 29.

For a band that has only just began to make its mark on the Montreal music scene, this gig is an unbelievable break.

Although it has been together for only three years, the group has yet to record an album. All the band members have full-time jobs; Triance is a high school English teacher and Charest is a Hydro-Quebec employee. So far, the only city they've played outside of Montreal is Toronto - and even in Montreal, their concerts have been sporadic.

That will soon change. After wrapping the Dylan movie, the band has studio time booked to record its first album. The group also is in touch with a Chicago booking agent who wants to help them get signed to a record label.

"We didn't even think anyone would like our music when we started this band, that rootsy kind of early-'70s cosmic Americana," Triance said. "But our time just might come around."

So, in snooping around, I found these on the I'm Not There Forum (http://www.imnottheremoviesupportsite.com/):

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Props go to Cate!

Quote from: Slightly Green on January 17, 2007, 11:13:55 AM
So, in snooping around, I found these on the I'm Not There Forum (http://www.imnottheremoviesupportsite.com/):

great find. also there is a short behind the scenes (http://imnottheremoviesupportsite.com/gallery/displayimage.php?album=3&pos=0) clip sneakily taken by some dude on his camera phone.

This Will Be The Best Movie Ever!

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http://www.justpressplay.net/movies/im-not-there/news/first-poster-for-im-not-there.html

So this is now about Buddy Holly, Lyle Lovett, Bob Dylan and Hank Williams, Jr?

i thought it was about morgan freeman, the fly, the fonz, and the bonz.

"Oh...my salvation" (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VyWgzUGOliw&NR=1)

Quote from: Just Withnail on July 14, 2007, 11:47:54 AM
"Oh...my salvation" (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VyWgzUGOliw&NR=1)

if the timecode is anything to go by, that could be towards the end. so retroactive spoiler warning to anyone who doesn't want to see the end of the movie.

timecodes are weird though. sometimes the count begins at 1 hour and then goes up. so it's either 2 hours into the movie or 1 hour in.

cate blanchett really channels his weird, kinetic, teenage boy energy. i have no doubt she'll be fantastic, but  (especially after just having watched safe for the thousandth time) i still worry that todd haynes could have been doing better things with his time. i know it's only a clip, but it just looks like any other biopic only with a clever gimmick attached to it. i know this movie will be good, it's just that biopics are so boring to me.

on the other hand, the man has made a career of taking cliched genres and making something completely original out of them, so you never know (even though i think that safe, his most original film that is least reliant on outside materials, is his best).

Haynes hasn't steered me wrong yet. I'm very excited.

I watched that clip twice, the second viewing only to give it the attention it deserves.

Elegant and etherial. If the whole film works in these moods, or at least builds to them deservedly, this is going to be something special.

Blanchett was quite good. I no longer fear her casting being a gimmick and hope everyone else can represent the different periods in Dylan's career with such grace.

David Cross further establishes that he, essentially, plays himself with every role he gets... at least with this and Eternal Sunshine, he's doing it in better films. Actually, to drift off subject for a bit, I think Cross will one day deliver an exceptional performance if a director can find the write a part/script to compliment the personalty he's already crafted for himself. Just to generalize... maybe something by Noah Baumbach. Though his performance as Ronnie Dobbs nears comedic brilliance... too bad the film it was attached to was not.

Anyway... back on track... I forgot how much I should be looking forward to a new Haynes film.

I'm Not There, but the Trailer is here. (http://media.movies.ign.com/media/873/873844/vid_2091237.html)

http://www.filmforum.org/films/imnotthere.html

Wednesday, November 21 – Tuesday, December 4 • On Two Screens
Showtimes: 1:00, 1:15, 3:45, 4:00, 6:30, 7:00, 9:15, 9:30

HOLY CRAP

^agreed.

except for 'HE IS EVERYONE. HE IS NO ONE.' that's lame.

^double agree. w/o that line it's really perfect.

thats a great teaser. 

is the little black boy also playing bob dylan? i like his music but i guess i don't know as much about him as i should.

Dylan Movie to Open Like a Rolling Premiere
Source: New York Times

Imagine you're a film distributor, handling an experimental movie by one of the country's most iconoclastic directors. The subject is an enigmatic occasional recluse who is being portrayed by four actors, an actress and a 13-year-old boy. Where do you open that film?

If you're very lucky, you get to book it at Film Forum, perhaps the most exclusive art-house cinema in Manhattan.

Now what do you do with a movie that stars Cate Blanchett, Richard Gere, Christian Bale and Heath Ledger; whose subject is Bob Dylan; and whose director is the Oscar-nominated Todd Haynes?

Same answer. Same film. Which is what's making the planned Nov. 21 release of "I'm Not There," Mr. Haynes's rumination on Mr. Dylan's lives and times, something of a curiosity.

In addition to Film Forum, the film's distributor, the Weinstein Company, will be opening the movie in just three other theaters, one more in New York and two in Los Angeles, giving it the kind of debut that might be afforded a Mexican documentary. Even "Velvet Goldmine" — the previous Weinstein-Haynes collaboration, about the British glam-rock scene of the 1970s, which starred an unknown Jonathan Rhys Meyers — began in 85 theaters in 1998.

But Harvey Weinstein, the company's co-chairman, said the slow rollout was the best way to nurture an unconventional, nonlinear movie like "I'm Not There," in which the above-mentioned stars play Mr. Dylan at particular stages of his life. Shot in styles that correspond to each Dylan epoch, "I'm Not There" sometimes looks like "A Hard Day's Night," elsewhere like "McCabe and Mrs. Miller," with Mr. Dylan's life being imbued with mythic American qualities.

"With a movie like this you have to build it," said Mr. Weinstein, who founded the company with his brother, Bob, two years ago after an acrimonious split from the Walt Disney Company saw them relinquish control of Miramax. "I don't think you can go out on 500 screens. The reason for Film Forum is you go where the best word of mouth is on the movie. I like the movie; I think it's adventurous. The audience is going to have to work — work in a good way."

Mr. Weinstein said that a similar approach had worked for two of Miramax's biggest successes. "Good Will Hunting" opened in New York and Los Angeles and eventually brought in nearly $140 million at the domestic box office, while "Chicago" began the same way and grossed $170 million. Those films had larger openings, however: "Good Will Hunting" (with the rising stars Ben Affleck and Matt Damon) in 7 theaters, "Chicago" in 77.

"I'm not saying this movie's going to come anywhere near those," Mr. Weinstein said, "but I have a tendency to start small and go big. If we threw this movie out wide, I don't know what it would do. I think we have to start somewhere."

The "somewhere" means Film Forum, "a real cathedral of cinema" according to Mr. Haynes's longtime producer, Christine Vachon, which has presented the premieres of work by Ingmar Bergman, Jean-Luc Godard, Hal Hartley, Claude Chabrol, Spike Lee and Lars von Trier, among many others. But rarely does it get star-laden films like "I'm Not There." And for it to agree to have another theater share a New York premiere is a rare move.

"We did it with 'Saraband,' " said Karen Cooper, Film Forum's director, referring to Mr. Bergman's last American release. "Lincoln Plaza opened it the same day, and I don't think either of us were happy. I thought the same crowd that lined up to see 'Scenes From a Marriage' would want to see 'Scenes From a Divorce.' I was wrong."

Ms. Cooper said that she was offered shared openings all the time and regularly turned them down. But she said that she and Mike Maggiore, Film Forum's programmer and publicist, decided the Haynes film was so remarkable that they would not mind sharing it with Lincoln Plaza. In Los Angeles, "I'm Not There" will open at the Westside Pavilion and ArcLight Cinemas.

Conventional movie-business wisdom says that if a film fails to catch fire at its opening theater, it will not move much farther. But Mr. Weinstein said there was "not a chance" he would not take this film into more theaters and cities, regardless of its fate on the coasts. "I'm going to play every major city in the United States with this movie," he said. "I'll play 100 cities, at least."

He said he also planned to position Ms. Blanchett, who plays Mr. Dylan during his "Blonde on Blonde" phase, for an Oscar. (Mr. Bale corresponds to "The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan," Mr. Ledger to "John Wesley Harding.")

"I may be jumping the gun," Mr. Weinstein said, "but if Cate Blanchett doesn't get nominated, I'll shoot myself."

Films considered Oscar-worthy are released in various ways. Last year, Pedro Almodóvar's "Volver" and its star, Penélope Cruz, were seen as possible contenders, but Sony Pictures Classics opened the film in only six theaters. (It ultimately grossed close to $13 million.) Another nominee-to-be, "Pan's Labyrinth," opened on 17 screens. It has made approximately $37 million. Both those films, however, were in Spanish, and foreign-language films are a hard sell to the American moviegoer.

"I'm Not There," which will play at film festivals in Venice, Toronto and New York, is Mr. Haynes's first movie since "Far From Heaven," his critically acclaimed 2002 homage to the melodramas of Douglas Sirk. The film, which has Mr. Dylan's blessing, is also, according to Ms. Vachon, his most expensive film, although she declined to divulge the amount. ("Far From Heaven" cost $13.5 million, according to boxofficemojo.com.)

Though Mr. Haynes, who was unavailable for this article, has never had a major commercial success except for "Far From Heaven," he has never suffered a lack of critical acclaim. His "Poison," for example, won the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival in 1991, and "Far From Heaven" received four Academy Award nominations, including one for its star, Julianne Moore. But Mr. Weinstein said the decision to pick up "I'm Not There" was not purely about making money but about an obligation to have important movies distributed.

"That's the story of my life," he said. "That's exactly what I believe in. 'I'm Not There' and some of the tougher stuff — it's not going to be 'The Nanny Diaries,' you know. But I've been very fortunate that what I've believed in has worked, and even when it doesn't work, we make money in other areas to cover that. It is my responsibility and, more importantly, it's my passion."

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more pics: http://www.rollingstone.com/photos/gallery/15883457/bob_dylans_im_not_there/1

I'm Not There
Source: Entertainment Weekly

''I wanted to explore Bob Dylan's almost violent need to reject the thing that everybody expected him to be,'' says director Todd Haynes (Far From Heaven) of his approach to the first Dylan feature to be approved by the music legend. ''I figured the strongest way to do that would be to dramatize the changes by depicting him as a series of shifting personas.'' To that end, actors such as Richard Gere, Heath Ledger, Christian Bale, and even Cate Blanchett portray him. ''Of course,'' says Haynes, ''we're dying for him to see it.''

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You Cate believe who is playing Bob Dylan
Source: Daily Mail

As the 'chameleon' of actors Cate Blanchett is used to adopting a number of guises.

From her breakthrough role as Elizabeth I - through to her Oscar-winning turn as Katharine Hepburn in The Aviator - she is as mesmerising playing historical figures as she is modern ones.

However her next role will surely outdo all the others when her performance inspired by legendary folk singer Bob Dylan hits the big screen.

Looking unrecognisable from her usual polished blonde self, Blanchett has donned a wig, shades and leather jacket - all black of course - to rival that of the Mr Tambourine Man's distinctive '60s look.

There is of course the mandatory guitar, harmonica and cigarette close at hand to add to the air of authenticity.

The Australian actress, 38, is one of six actors including Heath Ledger, Richard Gere and up-and-coming British actor Ben Whishaw who will make an appearance as Dylan - each embodying a different aspect of his life story and music.

However Blanchett's casting is by far the most unconventional - and the usually unflappable actress said the prospect of it "terrified" her.

Blanchett told the Guardian: "I have always loved his (Dylan) music, but I'm terrified about this because I am besotted".

"I watched the press conference he gave in San Francisco in 1965, or whenever it was, and just think, 'I love you'.

She added: "The worst thing an actor can do is fall in love with someone they're about to portray, but I'm not playing him - my character is called Jude.

"It's a riff on who Bob Dylan could possibly be. When I saw the script I thought, 'This is so out there I can't run away from this'."

'I'm Not There' will look at Dylan's early days as a struggling folk-singer, his rise to the forefront of the early '60s folk scene, the controversial switch to rock, the motorcycle accident and his subsequent retreat from public view.

As well as his latter day de-emphasis of recording and his concentration on the concert series known as the Never Ending Tour.

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i have seen cate blanchett as bob dylan so many times already that the idea no longer seems weird at all.

this is going to be fantabulous. I love Bob's stuff. I don't care if I have high expectations, I really can't wait.

dylan looked like a fag when he was young anyway, so the idea of a bunch of fags and a woman playing him no longer seems weird at all.

moviegeek dilemma:

this morning i ordered tix to see this at the NYFF in October.

this afternoon i found out i have access to a screener of this film.

the screener will inevitably be timestamped and 'possibly' not the absolute finished version.  i will go see this at the NYFF either way (assuming i even get tickets), but do i have the willpower to save my first viewing for the fest?  or should i just break down and watch it now?

(i also have access to a screener of Control, which i am going to be watching this week.  i heard it's great).

Quote from: modage on August 27, 2007, 02:33:14 PM
moviegeek dilemma:

this morning i ordered tix to see this at the NYFF in October.

this afternoon i found out i have access to a screener of this film.

the screener will inevitably be timestamped and 'possibly' not the absolute finished version.  i will go see this at the NYFF either way (assuming i even get tickets), but do i have the willpower to save my first viewing for the fest?  or should i just break down and watch it now?

(i also have access to a screener of Control, which i am going to be watching this week.  i heard it's great).

for movies i care about, i am emphatically anti-screener. my vote would be to wait.

Christine Vachon and Todd Haynes would want you to wait to watch on the big screen as intended. Harvey Weinstein would want you not to wait in order to get the word out.

You decide.

Quote from: modage on August 27, 2007, 02:33:14 PM
(i also have access to a screener of Control, which i am going to be watching this week.  i heard it's great).

i have seen control (at my local film festival which is not big enuff to warrant its own thread) and the very LEAST anyone can say about it is it's the most visually stunning black and white film of the year. in the sense that every shot is almost distractingly beautiful in composition. DO NOT watch the screener. see it on the biggest screen you can find. the story drags on a bit, but that's another matter.

regarding I'm Not There. Don't Go There.

The many sides of Dylan
In a new biopic, six actors - including Cate Blanchett - portray aspects of the superstar's life
Source: The Observer

In a Hollywood with a reputation for liking things safe and bankable, a bizarrely cast film about the life of one of the most controversial singers of all time, opening in just four cinemas in all of America, would seem unlikely to be at the centre of the biggest Oscar buzz of the year.

Yet I'm Not There - a biopic about Bob Dylan being released in November - is doing exactly that. There is nothing normal about the movie, which delves into the fascinating life of the singer-songwriter and promises to be one of the strangest films of the decade.

It boasts six actors playing Dylan, including a woman and a black boy, so its opening marketing campaign was hardly likely to be conventional. But by any standards, opening in only four cinemas is remarkable. Usually that means that a studio thinks its movie might be a disaster, yet I'm Not There has generated nothing but good news.

Industry figures have been surprised by the move. 'It depends on the film. Sometimes you just start small and build on word of mouth,' said Karen Cooper, director of Manhattan's acclaimed arts cinema Film Forum, which is one of two New York cinemas that will screen the film. The other two are in Los Angeles.

The film is backed by the Weinstein Company, whose founder, Harvey Weinstein, has not been shy of touting the work, despite planning its slow release. He has admitted wanting to generate a slow burn of reaction before taking the film national.

'I'm going to play every major city in the United States with this movie,' he said last week. 'I'll play 100 cities at least.'

It is a tactic that has worked before. When Weinstein opened Good Will Hunting he put it in just seven cinemas. That film went on to make Matt Damon and Ben Affleck famous and clocked up $140m (£70m) at the box office. It seems something similar is being tried with I'm Not There. Certainly those few who have seen the film praise its quality.

'It leaps off the screen. The director has created something here that is just so unusual,' said Cooper.

Director Todd Haynes has come up with one of the most surreal biopics of a musician ever. Though the genre has had huge success recently - with movies such as Ray and Walk the Line - this film is on a wholly different plane.

Instead of telling the straight story of Dylan's life, Haynes has opted to split the movie into separate chunks, each one dealing symbolically with a stage of Dylan's career. In each bit of the film Dylan is played by a character who represents what he stands for rather than an actual human being.

Which is why the greatest buzz around the project centres on Dylan's portrayal by Australian actress Cate Blanchett.

'Blanchett's performance as the mid-Sixties Dylan is amazing,' said Cooper. Weinstein agrees: 'If Cate Blanchett doesn't get nominated [for an Oscar] I'll shoot myself.'

But Blanchett, looking eerily like Dylan, shares the role with other A-listers. Richard Gere plays the Seventies Dylan as a cowboy; Christian Bale plays him as he emerges into fame in the early Sixties; Australian actor Heath Ledger plays him as his music took an overtly Christian turn; British actor Ben Whishaw plays a Dylan fused with the 19th-century poet Arthur Rimbaud. The unknown Dylan who arrived in New York in 1961 is played by Marcus Carl Franklin, a black child actor.

'If they pull it off, then I think it will work. It seems a unique way of looking at him, and that is suitable because he is a unique artist,' said Caroline Schwarz, co-director of the Bob Dylan Fan Club. Though Dylan himself gave the film his blessing, he had no input in it. Perhaps he thought that having six actors playing him was enough.

Quote from: Pubrick on July 14, 2007, 11:59:10 AM

Quote from: Just Withnail on July 14, 2007, 11:47:54 AM
"Oh...my salvation" (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VyWgzUGOliw&NR=1)

if the timecode is anything to go by, that could be towards the end. so retroactive spoiler warning to anyone who doesn't want to see the end of the movie.

its not.  its about halfway through. 

yep, i have no willpower.

Clip:

http://movies.yahoo.com/movie/1808725287/video/3885943/

Richard Gere Thinks Bob Dylan Will Like 'I'm Not There'
Source: MTV

Don't believe the new trailer for Todd Haynes' "I'm Not There." Sure it says Christian Bale, Cate Blanchett, Richard Gere, and Heath Ledger all are Bob Dylan. But at least one of the stars disagrees.

"There is no Dylan in it," Gere told me a couple days ago. And that reason, for one, is why the icon will like it, Gere believes. "I think he'll like it because it's not attempting to be him. It's a fever dream. I think that's probably the only way you could tell the story of an artist that extraordinary."

Gere said he's seen the film and likes it a lot, calling it "a bizarre script" and "much more expressionistic than people are thinking."

Sonic Youth record Bob Dylan cover for film

Sonic Youth have announced that they recently recorded a cover of the Bob Dylan track 'I'm Not There' for the forthcoming film of the same name.

The band recorded the song for the Todd Haynes-directed film at their own studio with John Agnello and Aaron Mullan of Tall Firs.

Sonic Youth guitarist Lee Ranaldo laid down additional tracks for the film with an all-star lineup of guest vocalists including Pearl Jam's Eddie Vedder, Karen O of Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Stephen Malkmus and Tom Verlaine.

'I'm Not There' is due out later this year and features seven different actors portraying Dylan including Christian Bale, Cate Blanchett and Richard Gere. Each actor is meant to embody a different aspect of the legendary musician's life and work.

Blanchett was scared to play Dylan says director

That Cate Blanchett found her latest screen role "very scary" comes as no great surprise. She was playing Bob Dylan.

The unusual casting was made by U.S. director Todd Haynes, whose movie "I'm Not There" is a complex portrayal of the singer-songwriter using six performers to play Dylan, including Australian-born Blanchett, a young black actor and Richard Gere.

In competition at the Venice film festival, where its world premiere is on Tuesday, the biopic seeks to avoid reducing Dylan to an easily definable type, and gives a sense of how difficult the ever-changing musician is to categorize.

"Cate was scared. She told me many times that this was a very scary challenge for her," Haynes told reporters after a press screening of the two-and-a-quarter hour film. Blanchett, 38, was not at the briefing.

"I think it took her a long time to commit to the role and she's a very busy actor and had to balance it with her schedule, but mostly I think it was due to fear, which is completely understandable."

Blanchett, who won an Oscar for her portrayal of Katharine Hepburn in "The Aviator," plays Dylan at a time when he shocked folk followers by embracing amplified rock and struggled with the media which sought to define him as a folk protest singer.

In her black-and-white sequences, Blanchett's hair is dark and frizzy, and she adopts some of the mannerisms of Dylan, although the performance is not meant as a direct mimic.

DYLAN APPROVAL

The open-ended nature of "I'm Not There" meant the film was the first dramatic portrayal of his life Dylan had ever approved, Haynes said.

"I do think it was because of this open structure, something that would keep expanding who he is and what he's about and not reducing it, which I think is the tendency in the traditional biopic to do."

Also playing Dylan are Gere, young black actor Marcus Carl Franklin, Christian Bale, Heath Ledger and Ben Whishaw.

Old-style, black-and-white footage is mixed with color sequences for Gere and Ledger and with real news footage of U.S. protests in the 1960s and scenes from the Vietnam War.

In production notes for the film, Haynes said these were his way of channeling anger he felt over the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

The relatively obscure Dylan track "I'm Not There" was used for the title to portray the singer retreating from public life in the 1960s.

Gere plays Dylan as the fabled outlaw Billy the Kid, who after finding refuge in the town of Riddle is forced to abandon his sanctuary and move on.

"He (Dylan) had been living ... in the world where every step he took, every breath he took was monitored, discussed, debated," Haynes explained.

"Then he had his motorcycle crash ... and he settled in Woodstock, disappeared, raised a family, went into the basement and recorded all this mysterious music with The Band and basically in a weird way he almost never came back again.

"He never reentered that central spotlight again."

Just like a woman: Blanchett's take on Dylan has critics raving
· Surreal biopic wins praise at Venice film festival
· Gere among five other actors portraying singer
Source: The Guardian

With hair teased into the familiar bird's nest of frizz, cigarette dangling from lips or fingers and impenetrably dark shades fixed in place, Cate Blanchett's portrayal of Bob Dylan is already being tipped for Oscar success. Yet as Todd Haynes's surreal biopic I'm Not There was premiered at the Venice film festival yesterday, the director revealed that the Australian actor's decision to take on the role had been far from instant.

The prospect of tackling the legendary singer had, in fact, terrified her.

Critics in Venice have been astonished by Blanchett's performance. She is one of six actors playing characters meant to represent Dylan at different points in his career, and hers is not the only unorthodox casting: a black actor in his early teens, Marcus Carl Franklin, plays the musician as he arrives as an unknown in New York at the age of 20, while 57-year-old Richard Gere represents him at the age of 32. Heath Ledger and British actors Christian Bale and Ben Whishaw take on other periods.

Dylan, 66, has given his blessing to the project. It will initially open in just four cinemas in America.

Yesterday Haynes said "Jude", the representation of Dylan in the mid-60s when he was becoming an international star and shocked folk followers by going electric, was always meant to be played by a woman. "I felt it was the only way to resurrect the true strangeness of Dylan's physical being in 1966, which I felt had lost its historical shock value over the years," he told reporters.

He added: "Cate was scared; she told me many times that this was a very scary challenge for her. It took her a long time to commit to it ... I told her it's good to be terrified, that you're taking a risk and sometimes that's really when the surprises happen. I guess it at least convinced her to give it a shot."

Dylan's approval was perhaps down to the film's open-ended nature, he said. "There have been documentaries but this is the first dramatic film about his life which he has ever given his consent to," Haynes said. "He has a tremendous sense of humour about the way he has been characterised. I think that's a really healthy attitude and he saw something similar in this film."

Gere described the script as "bizarre" but said he jumped at the chance to be involved. "I think Dylan is probably the only artist in our time who will still be considered 200 or 300 years from now. It's not Picasso, it's Bob Dylan," he said. "No one has had more effect on the world of art."

The film, backed by the Weinstein Company, mixes black-and-white footage with colour sequences and real news footage of American protests in the 1960s and scenes from the Vietnam war.

Haynes said of its unusual structure: "The way we look back on our own lives is in fragments. Music is a way that we do time travel, that unlocks moments in our past. The best and most enjoyable way to watch the film is to let it wash over you like a dream."

Cinematical's interview with Tood Haynes:

http://stadium.weblogsinc.com/cinematical/podcasts/Haynes2.mp3

6 Bob Dylans Emerge in `I'm Not There'

Bob Dylan is not at the Toronto International Film Festival. But six shades of Dylan are present with "I'm Not There," a swirling, shifting ramble through the many lives of one of the most enigmatic figures in music history.

Different actors including Richard Gere, Heath Ledger, Christian Bale and Cate Blanchett play incarnations of Dylan at various phases of his public and private life.

Among the personas: an 11-year-old black boy (Marcus Carl Franklin) riding the rails with a guitar and calling himself Woody Guthrie, Dylan's early inspiration; a surrealist sage called Arthur (Ben Whishaw) speaking in symbolic riddles, representing Dylan's fascination with poet Arthur Rimbaud; and old coot Billy the Kid (Gere) traveling the Old West in self-imposed retirement from the modern world, a parallel to Dylan's rootsy sojourn as a reclusive country squire around Woodstock, N.Y., where he hung with the Band and recorded "The Basement Tapes."

Weird and wild as it is, Dylan liked the concept and gave co-writer-director Todd Haynes the rarest of gifts: the rights to use his music in the film, both in his own versions and many covers.

"I still really can't believe it, given who he is and how ornery he can be and how much he doesn't want people to continue to do this to him," Haynes said in an interview at the Toronto festival, where "I'm Not There" played in advance of its November theatrical release.

Haynes, whose films include "Safe" and "Velvet Goldmine," was a Dylan fan as a teen but had not listened much to his music again until his late 30s, when he began the screenplay for his 2002 drama "Far From Heaven."

As he burrowed back into the music, Haynes began reading biographies of Dylan and was struck by the man's transformations.

"The thing I just kept hearing from every account of Dylan was about this life of serial change, in a way far more profound to a culture than David Bowie's different chameleonlike changes or Madonna's that would come decades later. These changes had deep intellectual, cultural, almost physical effects on Dylan's audience," Haynes said.

"He undermines the things you count on, your touchstones. He shakes up the things that people used to build their own selves on. Every time you grab on to him, he's somewhere else. I thought the only way to do anything in a film about him would be to dramatize that fact, to use that as the sort of principle to organize the narrative, or many narratives."

So the formative Dylan is a black kid tramping about the country, insisting he's Guthrie, until a kindly woman tells him, "Live your own time, child. Sing about your own time."

Bale plays a figure named Jack Rollins, exploding onto the folk scene doing early Dylan anthems such as "The Times They Are A-Changin'," then turning his back on his career and re-emerging years later as a singing pastor, representing Dylan's born-again Christian era.

Ledger's a '60s movie star named Robbie Clark who rose to fame playing folk god Rollins, with the actor's fractious personal life and failed marriage tracing Dylan's own faults and missteps.

"It's not a puff piece on Bob Dylan," Haynes said. "There's different characters, and they can be really nasty, misogynistic, and again, because there's no final say, there's no single winner."

Though played by a woman, the musician who goes electric in the mid-1960s presents the closest parallel to the real Dylan, with Blanchett delivering a remarkable personification of Dylan's look and mannerisms as he is challenged by critics and scorned by once-adoring fans.

Blanchett's Jude Quinn, an acoustic hero to folk devotees, plugs in at a New England music fest just as Dylan did at Newport, shocking and even enraging his audience. "I'm Not There" handles the slap in the face to fans with an opening salvo that features Jude and his band blasting the audience not with electric guitars, but machine guns.

Later, a legendary 1966 Dylan show in Britain is recreated faithfully, with a fan shouting "Judas!" Jude responds just as Dylan did, exclaiming, "I don't believe you!"

From the start, Haynes had planned the gender switch for that period of Dylan's life.

"It was really smart of Todd to cast a woman to play it, because I think it increases that break," Blanchett said. "The distance, the enigma of Dylan and the performer.

"It's very mysterious and incredibly poetic, and if the audience is expecting a straight narrative, then they're going to be surprised. It's kind of true in a way to his music, which is what Todd really tried to do."

Haynes has yet to meet Dylan, having worked with him only through intermediaries. Dylan also has not seen the film, which Haynes is sending to him.

"I can't wait. I'm really excited about him seeing it," Haynes said. "Maybe I'm being foolishly naive, but in terms of that sense of humor about himself and in terms of that sense of wanting to stir things up and change the sort of authorized views of himself, I think he will appreciate at least what we tried to do."

Quote from: MacGuffin on September 04, 2007, 09:46:19 AM
Blanchett was scared to play Dylan says director

That Cate Blanchett found her latest screen role "very scary" ...

:therethere:  it's okay cate....if you fuck it up the other 5 dylans will pick up the slack...

rest easy you beautiful sheep


btw- this film looks good

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There You Have It
Reeler Interview: Todd Haynes on Dylan, mythology and the ambition of I'm Not There
By Eric Kohn; The Reeler

Sitting in a hotel room during the Toronto International Film Festival, Todd Haynes looked at ease with himself as he reflected on his experimental Bob Dylan biopic I'm Not There. Despite strong budgetary assistance from The Weinstein Company, Haynes's latest work is no less eccentric than his multilayered debut, Poison. With seven different actors portraying different aspects of Dylan's personality at various times in his life (including Cate Blanchett, who won't see the finished version of the film until it screens this week at the New York Film Festival), I'm Not There raises the discourse on the enigmatic pop culture icon to fresh levels of existential engagement. Which makes the end result at turns brilliant, pretentious, and confounding -- but never less than provocative.

The Reeler talked with Haynes about mythology, identity and the perils of YouTube in anticipation of I'm Not There, which has its NYFF premiere Oct. 4 and opens Nov. 21 at Film Forum and Lincoln Plaza Cinemas.

THE REELER: For younger audiences, most of the events in the film are only familiar through the mythology of Bob Dylan. When you designed the film, did you take the perspective of those viewers into account?

TODD HAYNES: Very much so. With artists as famous and canonized as Dylan or the Beatles, what you forget about is that something happened in their time that made it, at first, like a rupture. Usually, those things are met with some ambivalence, if not opposition. So the challenge with someone like Dylan is trying to reunite those events with their initial shock value -- their fresh sense of being alive. That was one of the reasons why I cast Cate. I always wanted a woman for that role. The physical strangeness of Dylan from 1966 is something we're used to seeing from the images, but it was bizarre at the time. He was strangely androgynous in a way that nobody had seen in popular music before. It was dangerous and queer, but not in the gay way. I think that helps for young people. It makes it exciting and not just somebody already famous and in some record collection.

R: The movie works as a series of symbols, in that each Dylan represents something on a non-literal level. Did you map out the entire conceptual framework of the movie at once, or did you piece it together over time?

TH: I always knew that there would be an interweaving structure to it, and that the stories would engage in a discussion with each other. But I also knew that each story had to have its own linear logic, and have events that would propel it forward, and make you feel satisfied with the events and their repercussions within each story. I also knew that, for a film like this to work, one story had to become the background for another. They had to fill each other in. The western interface toward the end [with Richard Gere] is like an old guy in exile, looking back. He's haunted by memories of a failed relationship. That's still informing him, even if they're in completely different times and spaces. You feel like the past and present are dancing with each other.

R: Was there a point when you decided to make one storyline more prominent than the others?

TH: Maybe Cate's, in a way. We stay in it the longest. It functions as a breakdown of a sense of overload and things reaching the point of critical mass. Most stories need that kind of excess before the break or final change. It functions in that way -- collecting the tensions of the other stories and pushing them to an extreme.

R: Did the actors playing different versions of Dylan have a sense for what the other sections of the film were going to look like?

TH: They were pretty much just in their scenes, since, practically speaking, we had to just shoot the actors [individually]. I remember when Heath [Ledger] had just come on the film. The camera crew would love watching dailies in their trucks. They'd work these long hours and watch dailies in their camera trucks. Heath went and joined them, and I remember that he was one of the first of our actors to see the other footage. He got really excited seeing some of the stuff, like Cate and her story.

R: When that scene where Cate's Dylan meets Allen Ginsberg (David Cross) came up, I felt like I'd seen it already -- because I had, when the clip was leaked onto YouTube earlier this year.

TH: I always hate that, man, because that's sort of a surprise in the movie when he comes in like that. I guess it's good, because it stirred up some interest and people wanted to see more.

R: In this movie, you give us plenty of Dylan music, but you never tell us his name, as you do for Ginsberg and several others. Did you ever consider shrouding other characters in anonymity?

TH: It's a good question, because there's Michelle Williams' character, who's clearly a riff on Edie Sedgwick, but we give her a fictional name...

R: Which is ironic, if you compare it to Factory Girl...

TH: Exactly, where Bob Dylan has a fictional name ["The Musician"]. I think it's almost like I had to give the real names to the characters that are so well known, if they had an autonomy outside of the Dylan universe. Whereas those, at least in our story, who are known solely in relation to Dylan characters, became a part of the fictional framework of it. Like "Alice Fabian" is really Joan Baez, since they're completely known and discovered through the "Jack" story [where Christian Bale plays a Dylan-like character named "Jack"]. They don't really have a life outside of it.

R: How do you feel about people seeing this movie without knowing anything about Dylan?

TH: I actually think that it's easier for people who know less about Dylan to go with it, if they're up for something different. Clearly, that's the first thing: Whether you know Dylan or not, you have to surrender to the movie to have a good time at all and get anything out of it. If you have a lot of Dylanisms in your head, it's kind of distracting, because you're sitting there with a whole second movie going on. You're annotating it as you go. It's kind of nice to sit back and let it take you. I think people get it: Even if you don't know which are the true facts and which are the fictional things, and when we're playing with fact and fiction, from the tone of it, you know that it's playing around with real life. In a way, that's what biopics always do. They just don't tell you that they're doing it, and they don't make it part of the fun. You have to follow the Johnny Cash story and just sort of think, "This is what really happened." Of course, you know it's being dramatized, but you're not in on the joke. You're not in on the game of that. In this movie, at least, you get tipped off to it.

R: The Weinstein Company is releasing your movie at Film Forum and Lincoln Plaza Cinemas prior to its national roll-out. What are your feelings about this unique distribution strategy?

TH: I always knew that this was a film that should be platformed. It's not the kind of the movie that you're going to put on a massive number of screens on the first day. In that way, we were always on the same page. We start it small, let people talk about it and generate interest. Now, because of the amount of interest -- some of the awards we've already gotten -- Harvey [Weinstein] and I are thinking, "Is it too small to start this way?" We might make some variations on that plan, but I still think it's the right way to go. Just to start smaller and build it. I love Film Forum. I think it's an amazing institution.

R: Looking back on the last decade, what's your feeling about the way that whole so-called "movement" was perceived?

TH: I never had a problem with it. In fact, I was proud to be a part of it. There were people like Gregg [Araki], myself, and Tom Kalin, with a real diversity of film styles. None of those films looked like each other, and they were all different from mainstream movies like Longtime Companion that were trying to tell stories about the AIDS-era in more traditional ways. There's a place for that, but I felt like at least the New Queer Cinema band of filmmakers and films were experimenting formally and stylistically with the content. By the time I made my second feature, Safe, which challenged the question of content as it pertained to queer directors and their points of view, we had already broken the mold, and it made me think that maybe it's not all about content. Maybe we don't even need to define people as queer in order to have points of view to be queer. I don't know. The ease of categorization became harder. Sexuality and identity are so mysterious that nothing holds in a category. Gregg had a long relationship with a woman since I knew him in those days, and we've never talked about it, but other gay friends would be like, "That's so weird," and I'd just be like, "That's awesome." I mean, sexuality is always a surprise. And so is identity, and...

R: This movie?

TH: And this movie!

i feel like multiple viewings are warranted--it's a very labyrinthine and dense film.

that said, i fucking loved it.

Blanchett plays Dylan and wonders will fans get it?

A new movie about Bob Dylan is the first dramatic portrayal of his life and music that the reclusive performer has approved, but Oscar-winning actress Cate Blanchett says fans may struggle to understand it.

After all, she plays one of six Bob Dylans -- the others are Richard Gere, Christian Bale, Heath Ledger, Ben Whislaw, and young black actor Marcus Carl Franklin in his movie debut.

"It doesn't make sense in terms of it being a non-conventional narrative. I think it definitely makes sense but in a dreamlike musical way. You have to let the film wash over you," the Australian actress said of "I'm Not There."

"The fact that director Todd Haynes fractured Dylan's musical journey and persona into six different characters, none of whom are called Bob Dylan -- it's unusual," the 38-year-old actress said in an interview at the New York Film Festival this week.

While not meant to be a direct mimic of Dylan, Blanchett's hair is dark and frizzy like the singer's and she adopts some of his mannerisms. But the actress said she needed extra help to become more masculine -- by putting socks down her pants.

"There was a scene where I was lounging on the bed and I saw Todd looking a little pensive and my friend who was doing make up, looking a little pensive and they both had the same thought at the same time, that maybe it was a bit too feminine

-- I needed a bit of 'hamburger helper'," she said.

The role has already won her the Venice Film Festival best actress award and is being touted as worthy of another Academy Award nomination. She won a best supporting actress Oscar in 2005 for her portrayal as Katharine Hepburn in "The Aviator."

While her decision to play Dylan may seem unusual, Blanchett said there was no way she could turn it down.

"It's such a wild and crazy idea," she said. "You don't get offered that kind of stuff every day."

So just one week after finishing starring as England's 16th century queen in "Elizabeth: The Golden Age," Blanchett took on the character of Jude -- a depiction of Dylan in the mid-1960s when he first played electric guitar and drew ire from some fans who wanted him to remain a folk protest singer.

"I'm Not There" has garnered mixed reviews. The Hollywood Reporter said, "It's a curiosity that could delight or turn off loyal Dylan fans and may prove too oddball to draw in younger and mainstream audiences."

But Blanchett has won praise. Variety called her performance "a daring coup."

While most critics see the Dylan film as too high concept and esoteric for most Americans, Blanchett's next project will likely draw a bigger audience.

The actress has just finished filming Steven Spielberg's "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull," with actor Harrison Ford, which she described as "a riot."

"It was like revisiting my childhood. I ate that series of films alive," said Blanchett, who has two young sons. "My children had a fantastic time. And Steven, being a father of seven, was so embracing of the kids."

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This is Not a Bob Dylan Movie
By ROBERT SULLIVAN; New York Times

You could begin the story of Todd Haynes's Dylan movie at the very beginning, about seven years ago, while Haynes was driving cross-country in his beat-up old Honda. But since Todd Haynes's film about Dylan is as much about Todd Haynes as it is about Dylan (or maybe even more); and since Haynes is a filmmaker who, in midcareer at age 46, is doing his best to take the experimental into the multiplex; and, further, since those who don't like the film are likely to consider it a kind of gorgeous indulgence, a bizarre experiment, the temptation is to skip the ordinary narrative introduction and begin at the end, or very near the end, in this case in the last few days of filming, on the outskirts of Montreal, where, way in the back of a dark and cavernous and disused factory, there was a white glowing light, like something in a dream. We begin then with an image — an image that is all about, believe it or not, the relationship between Haynes and his film, between Dylan and Haynes, between the artist and the subject he is trying to portray.

Todd Haynes's Dylan project is a biopic starring six people as Bob Dylan, or different incarnations of Bob Dylan, including a 13-year-old African-American boy, Marcus Carl Franklin, and an Australian woman, Cate Blanchett. It's a biopic with a title that takes it name from one of the most obscure titles in the Dylan canon, a song available only as a bootleg, called "I'm Not There." As I arrived at the set outside Montreal and pulled into a mud-swamped parking lot, disembarking and moving toward the great white light, I passed through the recreated past — namely the '60s and '70s. There was a sign for Folk City, for instance, and a fake cover for "Bringing It All Back Home," a mock-up with the actress Cate Blanchett on it. There was a part of a bedroom from the '70s and, on a nearby stand, a copy of "Les Illuminations," by Arthur Rimbaud, the artist who seems to have inspired Dylan in his early days nearly as much as he inspired Todd Haynes. The book, the filmgoer will learn, shows up in a scene involving the '70s superstar Dylan, a kind of jerk Dylan, played by Heath Ledger, who was just leaving the old factory: it was like a Grand Central Station of movie stars, as Ledger was on his way back to the Montreal apartment that he and the actress Michelle Williams had been staying in together for the past few weeks. Williams plays Coco Rivington, socialite, love interest of Blanchett's Dylan, who is known in the film as Jude Quinn, the electric, rebellious Dylan.

The bright light, it turned out, was the set — a quasi-governmental interrogation scene that was, like a lot of other things in the film, never really explained — and Christian Bale was just stepping off. Bale's Dylan is a slow-speaking folk-singer Dylan, the Dylan that seems to be searching and pondering. "In the film I'm playing a guy on a kind of fervent quest to find the truth," Bale told me. He is one of the many people working on the film who has collaborated with Haynes before — in Bale's case, in "Velvet Goldmine," Haynes's homage to glam rock. So he was prepared, he said, for the audacity of the script, for so many Dylans, so many different kinds of films within one film. Whereas a lot of people in Hollywood said, "Did you read that script?" and scratched their heads, Bale was ready. "I started reading the script, and I just started to laugh," Bale told me. He also likes the way a Haynes set works, even on this, his last day, where it all feels like the end of a race. "With Todd's films, it's a homegrown affair," Bale says.

But back to the image of Todd Haynes, back to the long day, a rainy day, in a cold dark building, and into the bright blast of white light, where Haynes stepped toward the final Dylan to be filmed, the one dressed like Arthur Rimbaud, the Dylan that Haynes named Arthur, a teenage French symbolist poet, played by Ben Whishaw.

Whishaw was wearing a frayed 19th-century vest, coat and cravat. "white-wall interrogation of a teenage poet," the screenplay explains. "weaves commentary and humor throughout the film." Bale's scenes are shot in 16-millimeter black and white, using old Kodak film stock, in a move for authenticity — Haynes even wanted the film in the film to look as if it were from the '60s. Time is confused, mixed; the chronology is meant to be as it is in a Dylan song. This interrogation of a teenage 19th-century poet is supposed to be taking place around 1966.

Haynes looked intense. Off the set, he is loose, laughing, gesticulating wildly or rolling a cigarette. Here he was quiet and almost preternaturally calm.

Haynes was standing in for the interrogator. He stepped forward to fix the poet Dylan's hair, adjusted his cravat, then read lines that Whishaw repeated. "A poem is like a naked person," Haynes said. "Some call me a poet. . . . A song is something that walks by itself."

Whishaw paused. "O.K., fidget a little," Haynes said. The director read on. "We just wish to make inquiries," he intoned. "Are you an illegal alien?"

"No," the poet replied.

"Are you an enemy combatant?"

"No."

Let's not bother with what it all means. No one on set seemed to know for sure; they all pretty much trust Haynes that it means something. Let's focus on the camera, which Ed Lachman, the cinematographer, had lined up for a final shot of the 19th-century Dylan, a mug-shot view of the head, with the same shot of all the other Dylans, a set of Dylan mug shots accumulated over the month and a half of shooting. Together these head shots will eventually become the opening of the film: all the Dylans presented as a team, a six-actor composite. Flashing on the video monitor in Lachman's wax-pencil-drawn cross hairs were Cate Blanchett, Richard Gere, Heath Ledger, Christian Bale and Marcus Carl Franklin. Whishaw's Dylan was aligned and then filmed, after which the crew broke.

Then Haynes took Whishaw's seat on the empty set and, in the video monitor, happened to perfectly align his head with those of all of his Dylans. When I stepped from the wings to look through the camera itself, I saw, in one semimystical, semirevealing moment, the artist as one with the artist he was trying to artificially reassemble.

Because Todd Haynes's Dylan film isn't about Dylan. That's what's going to be so difficult for people to understand. That's what's going to make "I'm Not There" so trying for the really diehard Dylanists. That's what might upset the non-Dylanists, who may find it hard to figure out why he bothered to make it at all. And that's why it took Haynes so long to get it made. Haynes was trying to make a Dylan film that is, instead, what Dylan is all about, as he sees it, which is changing, transforming, killing off one Dylan and moving to the next, shedding his artistic skin to stay alive. The twist is that to not be about Dylan can also be said to be true to the subject Dylan. "These so-called connoisseurs of Bob Dylan music, I don't feel they know a thing or have any inkling of who I am or what I'm about," Dylan himself told an interviewer in 2001. "It's ludicrous, humorous and sad that such people have spent so much of their time thinking about who? Me? Get a life please. . . . You're wasting you own." It might sound like a parlor game, or like cheating on Haynes's part, but to make sense in a film about Dylan would make no sense. "If I told you what our music is really about, we'd probably all get arrested," Dylan once said.

"I don't know that it does make sense," Cate Blanchett says of the film, "and I don't know whether Dylan's music makes sense. It hits you in kind of some other place. It might make sense when you're half-awake, half-asleep, in the everyday lives in which we live. I don't think the film even strives to make sense, in a way."

Richard Gere, who plays the Dylan of later years, a Billy the Kid Dylan who ran away to some other place, another time, tends to agree. "It has an emotional truth to it, which is what I think modern art is about," he says. "It's not about the narrative. In other words, without narrative, it's kind of, well, cosmic." (Note: Gere, a Dylan fan, considers himself friendly with Dylan. "It's impossible to think of a world without 'Visions of Johanna,' " he told me, kidding only a little.) "And that's obviously what Dylan's work is about," Gere went on to say. "And I think kind of miraculously, Todd was able to tap into that."

Emotional truth is not something that you hear a lot about in Hollywood story meetings. You hear about arcs, you hear about beats and structure. The standard biopic takes a musician and shows his ups and downs, with the happy music in good times, the sad music in bad; it locks him into an identity. With his biopic, Haynes was looking for another way, avoiding straight narrative and leaning toward montage: six short impressionistic pieces almost jury-rigged together. At the most basic level, he has tried to make a film with the power to carry you away, the power of a song, and what he is asking of the audience is to relinquish control, which is, of course, a huge gamble. "You have to give up a certain amount of control when you listen to music," Haynes told me. He wanted to get back to what it meant when Dylan went electric, when he ran away to Woodstock and recorded the oldest, craziest American songs. "What would it be like to be in that moment when it was new and dangerous and different?" Haynes says. "You have to do a kind of trick almost to get people back to where Dylan did what he did or Mozart did what he did." Haynes didn't want to make a movie about anything. He wanted to make a movie that is something.

And what he started with was that emotional truth, in this case, just a feeling, a feeling that he had in the car while escaping New York, a feeling that was messing around with the interior monologue of a New York filmmaker who was leaving his small apartment in Williamsburg for a new life. It was a feeling churned up by song — a Dylan song, "She's Your Lover Now." That's what got him going on Dylan, which could be tough to explain to studio executives.

Which, of course, is why "I'm Not There," took seven years to make. It isn't easy telling the money men that Marcus Carl Franklin, the African-American 13-year-old, will play Woody, Haynes's version of the young Dylan, a kind of teenage hobo as Woody Guthrie, while Christian Bale will play Jack Rollins, Haynes's folk Dylan, the truth-singing protest singer, who transforms into Pastor John, an evangelical preacher. That Cate Blanchett, playing Jude Quinn, will try to capture the 1966 suddenly rock-star Dylan who was Judas to his folk-loving fans. Haynes thought he had earned some artistic capital with the Oscar nominations for his previous film, "Far From Heaven," but it took his producers five years to raise nearly $20 million to make the film — not a huge budget, certainly, but big for an independent film, and big for an independent film that some will argue is one man's obsession, a Dylan-trivia-fueled dream. Haynes is the first nondocumentary filmmaker ever to have secured the rights to Dylan's life and music, what some people would consider a filmmaker's chance for big commercial profit, but his script, rather than a straightforward depiction of a man and his guitar, was a combination of film styles and cosmic nonsequiturs. While he was waiting for cash to come through, actors came and went. Locations were chosen and then abandoned. One studio picked it up and then dropped it three years later. Haynes didn't finally find a distributor until last December, six years in, when the Weinstein Company bought it. Then rumors swirled that he was on the verge of losing that distributor when Harvey Weinstein actually saw the first cut of the film this spring. And really, who could blame the skeptics? Even Haynes himself told me last month, "This film really shouldn't hold up."

In 1987, when Haynes was 26, he began the first film that the public really noticed, though he'd been making films since grade school. It was a film about Karen Carpenter called "Superstar," with Barbie and Ken dolls as Karen and Richard Carpenter, the '70s pop duo. A pseudo-documentary made while Haynes was an M.F.A. student at Bard College (he'd earned his undergraduate degree at Brown, where he studied art and semiotics), "Superstar" is intercut with grainy video images of the Holocaust, the Vietnam War, spankings. To represent Karen's anorexia, Haynes carved away the doll's face as the film unfolded. It's an intellectual exercise about roles and societal pressures, and its reception was characteristic of all Haynes's films. Academics loved it. "It begins as brazen mockery but as its understanding of the social and cultural constructions of Karen's illness widens, it takes on a bitter poignancy," James Morrison wrote recently in the introduction to "The Cinema of Todd Haynes: All That Heaven Allows." "Superstar" was also an underground hit, shown in museums and clubs, until Haynes received a cease-and-desist order from Richard Carpenter, a legal move that helped make it what Entertainment Weekly described as one of the Top 50 cult films of all time.

Around that time, Haynes was living in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and had been a founding member of Gran Fury, the artists' collective of Act Up, the militant AIDS activist group. With Christine Vachon, a Brown classmate, he ran Apparatus Productions, an incubator of short independent films that eventually produced Haynes's first feature film, "Poison." "Poison" established Haynes as a leader of what came to be known as New Queer Cinema, a short-lived movement that was as significant for the gay-themed stories it told as for the way in which it told them — from a gay point of view, for example, or a feminist point of view. "Poison," an art film with three interwoven stories (an AIDS-inspired horror film, a mock TV documentary and a Jean Genet-esque story of a homoerotic experience at a French prison), won the grand jury prize at Sundance. More infamously, because Haynes had received a National Endowment for the Arts grant, it was taken up by Congressional Republicans and conservative commentators, who called it "filth" and gay porn. It proved, among other things, to be a big nail in the coffin of publicly financed art films.

In Haynes's third film, "Safe," Julianne Moore starred as a suburban woman with an undiagnosable environmental illness. It's partly a horrifyingly intense study of suburbia (Wes Craven called it the scariest film of 1995), partly a metaphorical look at the AIDS epidemic. Unlike the multi-narrative "Poison," "Safe" tells a straight-ahead story. But it's suffused with nods to the history of film — the opening, for instance, is an allegorical nod to Fassbinder's "Chinese Roulette," the German filmmaker's study of the bourgeoisie. At the time, Haynes's lover, Jim Lyons, was ill with AIDS, and Haynes visited him in the hospital in the mornings before working on the set. "I know people who wanted to become filmmakers after they saw 'Safe,' " says Oren Moverman, the screenwriter who helped write "I'm Not There." "I can give names."

Then came "Velvet Goldmine," another montage, a love letter to glam rock (the film's title is taken from a David Bowie B-side) that Haynes expected to be both his artistic masterpiece and a commercial success — the melding of smart and popular being Todd Haynes's dream. But it turned out to be neither. The first blow came when David Bowie refused to grant any song rights. Then Haynes faced nine months of script rewrites. And finally, it received mixed reviews — some thought it was maddening, others thought it was brilliant, still others thought it was both — and had a weak showing at the box office. "I just kept thinking I should be having the time of my life making this film, and I wasn't," Haynes recalls.

"Velvet Goldmine" is also significant in that Harvey Weinstein, then at Miramax, was a producer on the film and distributed it. Haynes says that Weinstein told him that the movie had structural problems and was too long. He appealed to Haynes to make changes, but Haynes had already been cutting and making changes for months and resisted. Haynes was also unhappy about the distribution of the film; Weinstein intended to market it as a Cannes winner, but the film didn't win any major prizes at the festival. Haynes and his allies maintain that Weinstein abandoned the film after that. Their relationship strained further during the awards process, when Weinstein upset Haynes by not campaigning for the film's costume designers in the Oscar competition. "When 'Velvet Goldmine' came out, Miramax was behind it in only the most perfunctory way," Christine Vachon wrote in her book, "A Killer Life," named after her production company, Killer Films. "In Harvey's mind there was a commercial movie in there, but Todd refused to unearth it."

After "Velvet Goldmine," Haynes went into a deep funk that lasted a long while. " 'Velvet Goldmine' almost killed him," says his friend Kelly Reichardt, who was a set dresser on "Poison" and won the Los Angeles Film Critics experimental-film award for "Old Joy," for which Haynes served as executive producer.

And this is where the Dylan story begins, when Haynes is down. "I've heard this from other people, that he crops up in life, in times of crisis," Haynes told me. By he, Haynes means Dylan. Haynes had another movie in his head, and he was about to go to Portland, Ore., where his sister lived, to write "Far From Heaven," which would be his first box-office success. The film, which was nominated for four Academy Awards, is a tribute to Douglas Sirk's melodramas, starring Julianne Moore as a picture-perfect 1950s housewife who discovers that her husband, played by Dennis Quaid, is gay; she subsequently falls in love with a black man, played by Dennis Haysbert. Academics saw it as a play on Fassbinder's "Ali: Fear Eats the Soul," a 1974 film that pointed to Sirk's melodramas not as mere entertainments for so-called housewives but as a penetrating critique of the roles that society forces us to play.

This idea of changing identity is also where Haynes hooked into the idea of a Dylan film, one that would not even feature the words Bob or Dylan. It wasn't just the music that got Haynes, though he was loving it. "I just found this refusal to be fixed as a single self in a single voice as a key to his freedom," Haynes told me. "And he somehow escaped this process of being frozen into one fixed person."

The standard kind of biopic bored Haynes. "A biopic is always weaving these overdetermined moments with these moments we don't know," Haynes says. "Ray Charles at the piano, Ray Charles at home." Early on, Haynes ran across this line in the Anthony Scaduto biography of Dylan: "He created a new identity every step of the way in order to create identity." It was the eureka moment for "I'm Not There," a way to build a film with different perspectives, with polyphonic voices. He called Christine Vachon at Killer Films. He needed the rights this time, having been badly burned on rights to music, first with "Superstar" and then with "Velvet Goldmine," even when Harvey Weinstein appealed to David Bowie for the rights to one song. "I don't want to go through that again," Haynes told Vachon. She suggested he wait to write. He busied himself with preproduction for "Far From Heaven."

Creative Artists Agency suggested that Vachon talk to Jesse Dylan, the film director and eldest son of Bob Dylan and his first wife, Sara. Vachon recalls: "What he did was say: 'Look, this is the guy you have to talk to. He is my father's right hand.' " In a few minutes, Jeff Rosen, Bob Dylan's longtime representative, was on speakerphone; in another multi-Dylan biopic, Rosen might be the smart businessman Dylan. Vachon remembers that Rosen was immediately interested (both he and Dylan declined to be interviewed for this article). "He was like: 'You know, that sounds really cool. We're always thinking about a way, something that, you know, kind of collects the music.' "

Haynes was instructed to send all his films to Rosen. Dylan was about to begin a tour. Dylan, he was told, loves watching movies on the bus. Haynes was further instructed to type up his idea. In telling him how to go about writing up his idea, Haynes recalls, both Jesse Dylan and Jeff Rosen mostly told him what not to do. " 'Don't use "genius," ' they said. 'Don't use "voice of a generation," ' they said, and they were sort of like, don't use his name, and don't use music," Haynes remembers. He was told not to write more than one page.

Haynes felt certain that he had an idea of what Dylan liked, as far as films went. "I had heard enough," Haynes said. "I knew he liked Fassbinder." (Martin Scorsese says that in the '70s, Dylan first told him to check out the Fassbinder film "Beware of a Holy Whore.")

Haynes began his one page with a Rimbaud quote, Rimbaud being a subject he figured he and Dylan were both familiar with. It was a quote that if he were pitching a film in Hollywood might have killed the project: "I is another." Then came the Scaduto quote about Dylan creating new identities. Then the pitch, two paragraphs: "If a film were to exist in which the breadth and flux of a creative life could be experienced, a film that could open up as oppose to consolidating what we think we already know walking in, it could never be within the tidy arc of a master narrative. The structure of such a film would have to be a fractured one, with numerous openings and a multitude of voices, with its prime strategy being one of refraction, not condensation. Imagine a film splintered between seven separate faces — old men, young men, women, children — each standing in for spaces in a single life." (A seventh Dylan, Charlie, "the 'little tramp' of Greenwich Village," was eventually cut.)

"It sounds like a thesis statement," Haynes says now, though it also sounds exactly like Todd Haynes. To hang out with Haynes is to hang out with a guy who can drop words like "interiority" and "recontextuality" and maybe even convince someone that he's missing out if he hasn't read Foucault, but who can also enthusiastically recommend the latest hyper-cool band, especially if it has just passed through Portland. "Last night I saw the Blow at Holecene," he said to me once, "and, dude, I totally recommend you check them out."

Haynes sent the pitch off in the summer of 2000. That fall, he heard that Dylan had said yes.

For Todd Haynes, Portland was a tonic. It's a lo-fi town, a do-it-yourselfer's paradise, a place where, in contrast to New York, your career is not necessarily everything. "When I moved to Portland, I was more social and productive than I'd ever been in my entire life," Haynes says. "I remember being at an opening, talking to Gus, and people were just saying, 'Hey Todd!' 'Hey Todd!' I just felt available, and I loved that feeling. In New York, if someone came and knocked on your door without telling you, you'd be like, 'Get out.' " Gus is Gus Van Sant, the director, who also lives in Portland.

"I think he ran into a lot of people he really liked," Van Sant says. "They weren't really encumbered by all the ambition in New York and L.A." Haynes made friends with writers and artists, people like Jon Raymond, an editor of the magazine Plazm and a novelist whom he had asked to assist him on the New York-area set of "Far From Heaven." (For one issue of Plazm, Haynes posed in a Bigfoot suit, no one apparently telling him how dangerous it is to run around in the woods of the Pacific Northwest in a Bigfoot suit with so many armed Bigfoot hunters running around.) He went river-swimming. He hung out at Berlin Inn, a brauhaus on the east side. "He could have been on the chamber of commerce," Van Sant says.

Haynes bought an old Arts and Crafts bungalow. He planted a garden, painted, got out his guitar and played some Dylan songs. "Portland was this green city, this place of resurgence and rebirth," his sister, Wendy, says. Portland was also a cheap city, or cheaper than New York, which is a big weapon in the arsenal Haynes uses to make films. "He lives in a modest way and that is ultimately very powerful, because he's kind of incorruptible," says Randall Poster, the music supervisor on "Velvet Goldmine" and on "I'm Not There" and a classmate of Haynes's from Brown. "And he has people by his side who will kill for him. These movies are very hard, and it's a long road, but it's ultimately very fulfilling."

The nation went to war, and Haynes went to the Oscars, and then all through the fall of 2003, he read everything about Dylan he could find. He read the biographies and the studies. He studied the bootlegs. He read Greil Marcus's story of American culture, "The Old, Weird America," a book rooted in the music Dylan made in Woodstock in 1967 with members of the Band and later released as "The Basement Tapes."

Haynes generally makes films one of two ways: either with a story line or as a collage of ideas; the latter he once compared to painting while high. "I used to love getting stoned, playing music, getting lost in that canvas and not knowing what it was going to be," he has said. The Dylan movie, he determined, would be that kind of film. He clipped photos, painted paintings, made cards filled with quotes from Dylan, from the Old Testament, the New Testament. "I will open my mouth in parables," Haynes copied down from the Gospel of Matthew. "I will utter what has been hidden since the foundation of the world." He copied down pages and pages of quotes from social commentaries, from folk songs, from Dylan songs. In one of his notebooks, under the heading "governing concepts/themes," he wrote: "America obsessed with authenticity/authenticity the perfect costume/America the land of masks, costumes, self-transformation, creativity is artificial, America's about false authenticity and creativity." For Robbie, Heath Ledger's Dylan, whose on-screen marriage (to Charlotte Gainsbourg) fails, he wrote, "A relationship doomed to a long stubborn protraction (not unlike Vietnam, which it parallels)." The notes themselves can seem like a great cache of insider art, printed out with nice fonts, with colors and graphics, reeking of time spent cramming. "I feel like anytime I'll work on a film, it's like a giant dissertation, a gigantic undertaking, and this is probably the biggest one," Haynes told me. "Probably the Ph.D."

In the fall of 2003, when the script was nearly done, Haynes called in Oren Moverman, a screenwriter whom he had consulted early on, to help him finish. Haynes's instructions were Talmudic. "He kept saying, 'We're not writing a screenplay; we're interpreting,' " Moverman recalls. At some point, Haynes wondered whether he could pull it all off, such a wacky montage of Dylans. He called Jeff Rosen, Dylan's right hand, who was watching the deal-making but staying out of the scriptwriting. Rosen, he said, told him not to worry, that it was just his own crazy version of what Dylan is.

Finally, by the beginning of 2004, Haynes's script was ready, but Hollywood wasn't. People wanted to see it, because of Todd Haynes, because of Dylan, but that still wasn't enough. Paramount picked up the film in 2002, before Haynes had even written the script, because of interest in Haynes from John Goldwyn, who was then running the studio. At one point, it was going to be shot in Romania, to save money. Meanwhile, Haynes carried on with life in Portland, flying the three hours to L.A. for meetings, helping Kelly Reichardt with her film "Old Joy," which was based on a short story by his friend Jon Raymond, which featured Tanya Smith, Haynes's assistant. "He gets involved in all his friends' work," Reichardt says.

The Dylan script, meanwhile, was with Laura Rosenthal, who had been his casting director since she approached Haynes after seeing "Safe." "It's an incredibly fulfilling relationship," she says. "He's a control freak but a nice control freak." He called Rosenthal the day after he sent it to her. "I said, 'Give me a second — I need more time,' " Rosenthal says. She was skeptical. "I didn't think it could ever be realized," she says. But she was up for it. She sent it out to actors. "Because it was so cool, the phone didn't stop ringing," she says.

Actors came and went in the years that passed; Colin Farrell and Adrien Brody were on then off because of commitments. Investors seemed to smell niche audience. Goldwyn was replaced as the head of Paramount, which subsequently let the movie go. But by the spring of 2006, his producers finally put together financing for the film with foreign sales and a large stake by Endgame Entertainment, a small but expanding entertainment firm headed by a Dylan fan named Jim Stern. "Because of my vast store of Dylan knowledge, I was able to follow it," Stern says. The foreign sales came after Cate Blanchett met with Haynes, on the morning of the Oscars in 2005, when she won the best supporting actress for "The Aviator."

"He was the reason I wanted to be involved in the project," Blanchett told me. "And it's very rare that you read a script that is as impenetrable as this was, because it was completely and utterly inside Todd's brain. He'd worked out every shot, every juxtaposition of image. It was really like a operatic score, there were so many instruments playing." At breakfast before the Oscars, he showed her pictures. "I think he was really smart in getting a woman to play Dylan," she said. She saw it as relieving pressure on the film. "I think it's the most externally iconic image of Dylan — when he went electric and that tour — and if a guy had been playing, you would have been looking too closely for the Dylanisms," she told me. How did he finally win her over to the role? "We talked about hair a lot," she said.

Richard Gere signed on early, too. When Haynes visited Gere's place in March 2005, Gere had just read about Dylan's favorite version of "Positively Fourth Street," by Johnny Rivers, and he put it on as Haynes came in, the two of them lying on the floor listening to it. Gere gave Haynes a book of pictures by Ralph Eugene Meatyard, a photographer whose mask imagery would make it into the Richard Gere sections. Haynes sent CDs of Dylan songs to the cast members. As James Joyce circulated annotations of the inscrutable "Ulysses" (for his friends to publish under their own names), so Haynes, on the production team's behalf, put together a key to all the Dylans, to the films within the film.

If you were visiting the set of "I'm Not There" and it had not yet hit you that each Dylan would have his own film, filmed in a thematically appropriate style, then it would probably have become clear the day you saw Cate Blanchett looking more like Dylan than Dylan himself, standing alongside one of those swan-shaped Italian modern chairs that graced the famous spa set of Fellini's "8 1/2." If you wanted to feel a little Felliniesque to boot, you could note that Blanchett spent her breaks staring into a book of Dylan interviews, the cover of which looked just like her looking like him. "She's embodied this creature," Haynes told me later. "She blew everybody away."

At some point, Haynes would sit you down and show you that Blanchett's Dylan was filmed in a Fellini-style black and white (slow motion sequences to be added later on); that Richard Gere's Billy the Kid Dylan would be shot like a late-'60s, early-'70s Western ("Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid" or "McCabe and Mrs. Miller"); that Bale's born-again Dylan would be filmed in the bad-TV video that befits a Sacramento, Calif., church basement; that Ledger's rock-star Dylan would feature the wide shots and close ups of objects that characterize Godard. As Dylan stole song and lyric styles — from the Clancy Brothers, from Civil War poets — so the film cops different Dylan-era directorial styles.

"I said to Todd before we started filming, 'What's the "8 1/2" stuff?' " Blanchett told me. " 'Is it part Dylan, part Mastroianni?' And he said, 'No, no, it's just a film that I thought of for each section.' I mean, he had a film for each sort of leaping-off point. I mean, that's what I love, the structure of the film, it dips out of the present and the past, of fantasy and reality, but in that particular sequence, within seconds, within one story."

Like Blanchett, Lachman, the cinematographer (who has worked with Robert Altman, Steven Soderbergh and Wim Wenders, among others), quizzed Haynes about his choice of film styles. "He said that the obvious thing would have been to use the style of D. A. Pennebaker's 'Don't Look Back,' but if you listen to what Dylan was saying at the time, it wasn't about being in rooms with bandmembers; he was being Felliniesque with his prose," Lachman says. "It's all this imagery. So what better filmmaker than Fellini? What better film than '8 1/2,' which is about a filmmaker being hounded?"

It's probably not a bad analogy for how Blanchett felt on the set. For one thing, she was negotiating the fact that sometimes she was speaking composed dialogue, other times reciting actual interviews, especially a 1966 interview Dylan did with Nat Hentoff in Playboy. "That's why it was so tricky to play that scene, because it is from an interview," Blanchett says. "But Dylan's obviously riffing, finding that stuff in the moment. And it's the difference between doing that, and also knowing that this is a reference to something that has already been said. So it was very difficult to play because you were constantly aware that you were in the immediacy of the moment but yet referencing primary, tertiary and secondary sources — the whole Dewey system was crashing in on me."

And then there were the constant logistical strains. The cast and all its stars raced around from place to place — 70 locations in Montreal in 49 days, an insane schedule, money always a looming question. "It was touch and go pretty much the whole time we were filming," Blanchett says. "Films like this just don't get made all the time. That in itself is extraordinary. You know, I've seen a couple of really amazing Thai films shot in video that don't really get a release. But for a film to have Heath Ledger in it and Christian Bale and Richard Gere and to be verging on mainstream cinema — I mean, that's kind of a major achievement in and of itself."

When filming was finally over, Haynes went to Hawaii for 10 days, and then to his house in Portland, to the TV room, just off the living room, where he sat on the floor in front of a flat-screen TV, which was also sitting on the floor, with glasses, a box of tissues, tea and lots of crystallized ginger, for the immune system. He had the stacks of dailies beside him. "I'm just trying to see what I have," he told me at the time. He made page after page of notes, which were then carried by Tanya Smith, his assistant, to the editor, Jay Rabinowitz, on the other side of Portland. All previous films by Haynes had been edited by his former boyfriend, Jim Lyons, an AIDS activist and screenwriter who was still in New York. Rabinowitz, who had met Haynes through Oren Moverman, is the editor on most of Jim Jarmusch's films, including "Night on Earth" and "Broken Flowers." He is also a Dylan fan. In the back of the ramshackle room where he edited the film, Rabinowitz kept a mini-Dylan shrine, part jest, part talisman. The centerpiece was a painting by Haynes of Dylan. Nearby, Rabinowitz kept track of the daily set list when Dylan was on tour. "You know, I love to edit with music anyway, and I have worked on films with Neil Young, with Tom Waits, with Joe Strummer," Rabinowitz told me. "But to go to work every day and to edit, which I love, and to listen to Bob Dylan's music — I mean, it's the best job I ever had in my life."

One night in early December last year, Haynes went out to dinner at Bluehour, a bright star in the Portland food constellation. Killer Films had sent out a reel to distributors, just a sampling of scenes, a few days before. That night, Harvey Weinstein bought it. Now, once the rough cut was ready, it would go to Weinstein; it was clear that Haynes was a little nervous about it. They had argued over "Velvet Goldmine," and Haynes knew that Weinstein wanted the film soon, to take it to Cannes in May. "I will not be rushed at this point," Haynes told me that night.

Still, for the next three months, Haynes hibernated with his film, Rabinowitz editing by day, Haynes coming in at night. By Valentine's Day, they had a rough cut. Haynes knew the film was long at nearly three hours, but he thought he was close. He was thinking about the final edits on "Velvet Goldmine." "My only regret is that I was too brutal about it," he told me. " 'Make it tighter. Make it flow,' they were saying. And I should have just let it go."

He started to see parallels between his battle and Dylan's, the battle to be uncompromising in your art yet still find commercial success, to make the world bend to your vision. "He maintained an incredible popularity, and he made popular culture come to him," Haynes told me. "He did. He raised the bar, and I have tried to do that."

In the early spring, Harvey Weinstein would see the cut for the first time, in New York. When it was over, Weinstein had a lot of problems. Basically, he didn't seem to get the film. According to Haynes, Weinstein did not think the Billy the Kid Dylan, played by Richard Gere, worked — in fact, most people told Haynes that — and said that the movie was confusing in general. Rumors circulated that Weinstein planned to drop the movie altogether. "I think that in this movie there are scenes and episodes that are amongst the best filmmaking that has taken place in American film — I mean you can go that singular on it," Weinstein told me recently. "That's how accomplished Todd is as a director. I think there are sections of this that flow easily. There are other sections that are going to be a little bit bumpy." But at that moment, Haynes says, Weinstein wanted a lot of those sections changed or, as in the case of the Richard Gere parts, cut.

Their contract gave Haynes control over the final cut, but over the next few weeks he made small changes and cuts, bringing the film down to two and a half hours. But the essence of the film remained the same. To some extent, Haynes knew what he was getting into with Weinstein, and vice versa. "Harvey told me he didn't want it to get personal, which I respect," Haynes said.

A week later, Haynes had another screening in Portland, inviting his friends. Jon Raymond, the novelist, was there, loving it, while Raymond's father complained about how boring it was. It was generally a positive response; Haynes was hearing the things he'd hoped to hear. He e-mailed me afterward: "Watched the cut Saturday night with Jon Raymond and Tanya, while 7 other friends and colleagues watched it in NY. & based on their reactions and my own ability to sort of see it through 'fresh' eyes, I think for the first time in four years those looming clouds of doubt and catastrophe have parted. . . . I realized that I don't have to 'sell it' anymore, that ultimately the film is what it is — & there's no turning it into something else. And what it is is like nothing else: both intimate and panoramic, the story of a personality and a nation (I think it's a deeply patriotic movie). It's rich & literate but it's very moving and fun. Tanya and Jon and I talked about it for several hours & later Jon wrote: 'Tell them (when they ask you what your movie is "about") that it's no less than a history of American conscience and American soul (at a moment when both those things are in serious question). It's a movie about Bob Dylan as the president of America.' "

Weinstein decided to do a test screening in New York in May. On one side of the aisle sat Harvey Weinstein. On the other side sat Todd Haynes. Laura Rosenthal, the casting director; Oren Moverman, the screenwriter; Jay Rabinowitz, the editor; and Christine Vachon, the producer, sat in the back, along with Jeff Rosen, Dylan's representative. The rest of the place was filled with focus-group attendees. The film, a little shorter, was shown but without effects or credits. At the end, the industry people in the back rows were joking about an Allen Ginsberg scene in which he suggests that Dylan sold out to God. Then came the questioning. It felt like a psychic face-off: Weinstein hunched forward, Haynes leaning back.

"O.K., how many people didn't like the ending?" the screening leader said. Answers ran along the lines of "wasn't very smooth," "neutral," "unclear." The psychic edge went to Weinstein's side of the aisle. Then a phrase caused whispers and nods on the Haynes side: "One of the best biopics ever."

People filled out forms rating the film. "Far From Heaven" had scored 18 out of 100 for good reactions at its test screening, and now "I'm Not There" came in at 45, the highest score Haynes had ever received. Length, confusion and Gere's Billy the Kid Dylan were all "consensus negatives," to use the industry term. Haynes says that Weinstein predicted dire consequences for the film if changes weren't made. (Weinstein denies this.)

Haynes went back to Portland and cut some more, eventually bringing the film down to two hours and 15 minutes. Then he headed out to L.A. for two weeks of sound mixing.

In Los Angeles one morning in June, Haynes, Rabinowitz, Perri Pivovar, the assistant editor, and Tanya Smith, Haynes's assistant, were all putting the final touches on the film — and adding the dedication, to Jim Lyons, Haynes's former boyfriend and film editor, who had died of from AIDS-related illnesses weeks earlier. "We cut this," Haynes said, as he watched a Cate Blanchett scene of hallucinatory spectacle. "Jay and I were ignoring notes about it for three months. But we finally cut it when Cate said we should. Not that I do everything cause Cate says to."

"You kind of do," Smith said.

"No, I don't," Haynes said.

"You kind of do," Rabinowitz said.

That afternoon, they were back in the sound studio. There were details to discuss.

"They want it to say based on the life of Bob Dylan," Smith told Haynes.

"Tell them it's inspired by," Haynes said.

They'd been in Los Angeles for a week. Already that day they fiddled with the basement gospel band as Christian Bale sang "Pressing On," turned up a wind sound effect during a Richard Gere scene and even adjusted the guitar of Dylan himself, playing "Idiot Wind." They had also spent the better part of two hours trying to match Dylan's harmonica in a 1965 Manchester Hall film to a bootleg.

Later in the afternoon, Haynes finally got his hands on the master recording of "I'm Not There." Neil Young's office had e-mailed it over. (Dylan's people had accidentally given it to Young in 1968.)

"We'd been looking for it all this time, if you can believe it," Haynes said.

Haynes was loose, loopy even. At the end of the day, the crew and even his folks came to celebrate with cake. Haynes talked about how tired he was. He looked dead. "I need to get a life," he said.

"It feels strange to be like this," Haynes told me on a summer afternoon in July in Portland. By "this" he meant not working on "I'm Not There." "This" meant a late breakfast at Fuller's, an old Portland breakfast place, or vintage shopping with Tanya Smith to get a suit for the Venice film festival. It meant watching Lifetime movies with his boyfriend, Bryan O'Keefe, who had just returned from China, where he was teaching English. Not making a film is not something Haynes is very good at, of course, and his friends realized that he has an idea for a film brewing, that it has to do with politics and the war. "If I'm lucky enough to get great writers and great resources to show what really happened in the march to war and with domestic spying and torture, then I will," he said. "And if other people beat me to it, that's O.K., but I will take my time."

Two weeks later, he'd broken down, at Smith's urging, and bought a new suit, which he wore to the world premiere in Venice early last month. On a party on a boat the night before the premiere, Haynes was feeling queasy. Harvey Weinstein was excited; he had already announced that he would get Blanchett an Oscar nomination or kill himself. And he had already come up with a distribution plan that would start in small art houses and expand slowly. He was hoping to have Greil Marcus write liner notes to be distributed at viewings. He was still sounding a little nervous. "Whatever people are going to say about this, they're going to have say that it's daring," Weinstein told me just before Venice. "Nothing's ever been attempted like this before."

As the credits rolled after the Venice premiere, the audience gave the film a 10-minute standing ovation. "That's a long time," Christine Vachon said. "Clock it on your watch."

Haynes was overwhelmed. "I was like, 'Who are they clapping for?' "

"I think people don't realize how emotional he is," Julianne Moore, who plays the Joan Baez figure in "I'm Not There," had told me earlier. "He's really trying to work out what it means to be a human being and what it means to live in the world."

That night, living in the world meant a dinner party at the hotel that went late, and everyone, for one brief moment, loved the film that they used to think couldn't be made, maybe every confounding aspect.

The next day, Haynes went to the ocean and came back with a scene description that was less like an experimental film and more like one of those Lifetime movies. "I just dove into the waves and I came up in the sea and the sky was half-light and half-cloudy and it was just amazing," he told me. He was elated. "I can take all the I don't really get its now," he went on. For a moment, anyway, it was a real Hollywood ending.

New Trailer here. (http://www.apple.com/trailers/weinstein/imnotthere/trailer2/)

Quote from: Pubrick on October 16, 2007, 09:52:21 PM
2007 = 1999

Don't Look Back Trailer here. (http://media.filmweb.no/trailere/scanbox/SBX20070634/pyexbdu13.mov)

Brilliant!

Each new trailer for this only raises my expectations.

I hope that's not a bad thing.

Awesome Awesome Awesome!

So good.

Dylan bootlegs drive Haynes' film
'I'm Not There' celebrated with N.Y. concert
Source: Variety

Bootlegs, not studio recordings, and unreleased film footage of performances were the driving force behind the creation of the soundtrack for "I'm Not There," Todd Haynes' Bob Dylan biopic.

Haynes went into the film with detailed ideas of how the pic should sound, down to particular verses from specific performances -- "Basement Tapes" outtakes, the Newport Folk Festival performances, the England tour of 1966 and even a bit from his Christian period in the 1980s. The director-writer began with the idea of all new recordings and progressively added actual Dylan recordings to replace new works until he had a blend of the vintage and the fresh, much of which still sounds like it was recorded with equipment using tubes and tape.

"Todd would be so particular, noting second set, third night. He wanted it to feel like it did then," said soundtrack co-producer Jim Dunbar. The script "was so structured, not only all the songs but the sections of the songs that he wanted in the film. He provided very direct guidance and was open to collaborating. We began to have input and it became a process of discovery," Dunbar said.

Only one Dylan track appears on the soundtrack -- his version of the never-before-released title track recorded during his "Basement Tapes" era of 1968-69. The rest are interpretations by artists such as Sonic Youth, Cat Power, Mason Jennings, Eddie Vedder and Jeff Tweedy; one back-up band includes Sonic Youth's Lee Ranaldo, Television's Tom Verlaine and Dylan drummer Tony Garnier and elsewhere it's the band Calexico. Ranaldo and Joe Henry, two significant Dylan fans, handled much of the production.

"We're mining identity through a flirtation with Dylan, with the iconic voice," said soundtrack producer Randall Poster. "To shy away from that would have drained energy from the music."

Most of the acts on the Columbia Records soundtrack will perform Wednesday at the "I'm Not There" celebration concert at the Beacon Theater in New York. On the bill are Jim James & Calexico ("Goin' to Acapulco"), Cat Power ("Stuck Inside of Mobile With the Memphis Blues Again"), Yo La Tengo w/Buckwheat Zydeco ("Fourth Time Around"), Jennings ("Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll"), John Doe "Pressing On," "I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine Last Night"), Mark Lanegan ("Man in the Long Black Coat") and Ranaldo ("Can't Leave Her Behind" plus "I'm Not There" with Sonic Youth).

Also on the bill are Terry Adams Rock & Roll Quartet, My Morning Jacket, Joe Henry, Michelle Shocked & Jimmy LeFave, the Roots, Ian Ball & Olly Peacock of Gomez, J Mascis, Al Kooper & Funky Faculty, Dan Hicks and the Hot Licks and more.

Ranaldo had the plum assignment -- or the daunting one, depending on your perspective -- of capturing electric Dylan in the 1960s. He had to secure performance pieces of "Maggie's Farm" and "Ballad of a Thin Man" that would synch up with the filmed sequences, but other than that he was left to his druthers.

"There was a slippery, sliding band feel during those years and we wanted to invest that feel (in the new recordings)," Ranaldo recounted, noting that he watched unreleased footage from D.A. Pennebaker films of the electric period. "That unreleased footage is a knockout. And the songs from that period -- the lyrics are astounding and the music is free-flowing. It's got so much to it."

Ranaldo's relationship with Haynes dates back to 1990 when the helmer did a video for the Sonic Youth tune "Disappearer" from the album "Goo." Haynes and Poster were college friends who first collaborated on "Velvet Goldmine," a project that was at the opposite end of this experience.

"Very early in the process, David Bowie wasn't allowing us to use his music," Poster said of the 1998 glam-rock pic. "This film was fully embraced by the Dylan camp very early. For 'Velvet Goldmine,' with Bowie out, it liberated us. In this case, though, we wanted to be chained to Dylan. At every turn we tried to follow the connection and logic to Dylan."

Todd Haynes retools Dylan dogma
'I'm Not There' takes poetic license with the singer's story, which seems only fitting.
By Lisa Rosen, Los Angeles Times

TO fully grasp every nuance of "I'm Not There," Todd Haynes' film that's not quite about Bob Dylan, it might help to be well versed in 1960s art, music, culture, counterculture, Federico Fellini, Woody Guthrie, Arthur Rimbaud and, of course, the entire oeuvre and history of Bob Dylan.

Short of that, an open mind will suffice. 

The film's working title was "I'm Not There: Suppositions on a Film Concerning Dylan," the subheading seeming to warn onlookers not to expect a traditional biopic, or even a direct look at the subject. Instead, Haynes ("Far From Heaven," "Safe") uses six characters to portray facets of Dylan at different stages in his life and career. That Cate Blanchett is playing the "electric" Dylan garnered attention even before the film made the festival rounds earlier this year. Her performance as "Jude" earned her best actress honors at the Venice Film Festival, with early reviews out of Telluride and Toronto describing her work -- and Haynes' distinct visual gifts and imagination -- as exemplary.

Blanchett's performance is worth the hype, but what's even more telling is that her section of the film is probably the most conservative, or at least most closely hews to the facts as people know them. Other stories that intercut with hers include that of a black child, Woody (Marcus Carl Franklin), who's riding the rails; a disheveled poet named Arthur (Ben Whishaw) sitting through an interrogation; an aging renegade (Richard Gere) watching as his rural way of life is destroyed; a movie star (Heath Ledger) whose marriage dissolves; and a folk singer (Christian Bale) who is later born again into yet another character. Together, they make up a portrait of Dylan that is as mercurial and at times impenetrable as the artist himself.

"I decided I would throw out everything I thought I knew and start over," said Haynes of how he approached his subject. (He directed the film from a script he co-wrote with Oren Moverman.) Speaking by phone from his home in Portland, Ore., he sounds as passionate as if he just started working on the project yesterday, rather than seven years ago. "I began with Dylan's music and biography and all of his influences." That list includes Dylan's contemporaries as well as Woody Guthrie, the Beats, French symbolist poetry and Bertolt Brecht. "There was such a cross-pollination of ideas and an incredible hunger for them, particularly in the Greenwich Village scene of the early '60s."

That era informed the way the '60s scenes were shot. Haynes took delight in the radical artistic experimentation of the period. Said Haynes, "Even if you look at Life magazine layouts throughout the decade, there's an ad in 1966 that literally looks like a Godard poster, but it's for lipstick." His reference material included "The Conquest of Cool," Thomas Frank's book on the advertising campaigns of the period. "That intelligence, that sophistication was actually on Life magazine pages way before it was the way Dylan was being photographed on the covers of his new cutting-edge record," he said. "It's not that counterculture changed the society -- that's really the thesis of that book -- it's that the society was changing and it was hitting every single sector, and sometimes it was hitting the commercial sectors before it was hitting the artistic sectors."

Haynes' extensive research found its way to the screen in myriad ways, resulting in an adherence to the spirit of Dylan more than to the letter of his experiences. Even so, "Everything in the film comes from something that was said, that was written, an account, an interview, or lyrics of a song or published writings of his," Haynes said. "It all comes from the universe of Dylan, and of course that universe is constantly changing and debating and bickering." The resulting refractions are often contradictory. "They basically all unwrite each other as much as they are writing themselves, and so, unlike a standard biopic, which gives you the single truth about people, this one doesn't do that or claim to," he explained.

Long before Haynes immersed himself in the '60s, the era made its impression on him. "I remember going to see '2001' with my dad," he said. "I felt I was taking a trip, and that that's all that mattered. When I finally saw '[A] Clockwork Orange,' I didn't really understand it all, but it didn't matter. The sheer force of the images and the rhythms and the music and what was disturbing and what was funny and what was ironic about these films was why you went." Haynes decries the digestibility of much of today's films -- they demand nothing from the audience. "And that wasn't true for a lot of films from this era, and it's not true for Dylan's music."

It's certainly not true of this film about Dylan's music, but then, Haynes has never taken the easy route in his filmmaking. His first project to gain attention -- or perhaps more accurately, notoriety -- was 1987's short film "Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story," another not-quite-biography, used Barbie and Ken dolls to tell the tale of a star's rise and fall to surprisingly heartbreaking effect. His first feature, 1991's "Poison," incurred the wrath of conservatives and the National Endowment for the Arts for its unabashed portrayal of a homosexual love story. "Safe," in 1995, was a subtly terrifying look at suburban life through the eyes of a woman slowly being poisoned by everything she encounters. 2002's "Far From Heaven" might appear to be his most accessible effort, until one remembers that period melodramas centered on race, gender and sexual identity aren't exactly mainstream fare.

Anticipating fan reaction

HAYNES realizes that die-hard Dylan fans in particular may have trouble watching the film; the commentary tracks in their heads won't match the events as they unspool on screen -- Allen Ginsberg and Dylan really met in 1963, not 1966, that kind of thing. But as Haynes noted, all biopics combine fact with fiction. The difference is that instead of adhering to a convention that is implicitly false, his film invites the audience into the process. "And it's a joke sometimes," Haynes pointed out, "like [Dylan] as a little black boy called Woody Guthrie and everyone is so swept away by his personality and his performance and they don't even mention his color, as everyone was persuaded to never question Dylan's middle-class Jewish background when he was performing his grass-roots persona."

For those viewers who aren't steeped in Dylan lore, Haynes gives words of comfort, if not necessarily guidance. "Yes, there's tons of references, and it seems complex and intellectual," he acknowledged, "but really, it should be enjoyed like a Dylan song, where you don't necessarily understand every lyric or every word, but it doesn't matter." For all its facets and Fellini nods, "I'm Not There" is, first and last, a trip.

Who does Bob think he is?
There are six - or is it seven? - 'Dylans' in Todd Haynes's I'm Not There. The director talks exclusively to Sean O'Hagan about the weirdest rock biopic ever
Source: The Observer

'People see me all the time and they just can't remember how to act/Their minds are filled with big ideas, images and distorted facts...'
'Idiot Wind' by Bob Dylan

I'm Not There is a film filled with big ideas, images and distorted facts. It plays so fast and loose with the facts - and the myths - of Dylan's shape-shifting life that it could just as easily have been called 'Mixed Up Confusion'. Or even, 'Just Like a Woman'.

Directed by Todd Haynes, one of whose early films told the tragic tale of Karen Carpenter using glove puppets, I'm Not There is the first cinematic attempt to tackle the epic landscape that is Dylan's life and work. It is a wildly experimental film whose extravagantly staged, but often determinedly confusing, approach is as far away from the tired terrain of the traditional biopic as it is possible to go. Perhaps it is for this very reason that it initially received Dylan's blessing back when it was only a one-page treatment. Dylan's son, Jesse, has now been sent a DVD copy of I'm Not There, which has been passed on to the great man. Thus far, Haynes has heard nothing back. Given Dylan's famed reticence, we may never get to know what he thinks of a film that plays havoc with the very idea of Bob Dylan.

The director is a mercurial talent whose previous films have included Velvet Goldmine, which was set in the glam rock era, and Far From Heaven, a homage to the great Hollywood melodramatist Douglas Sirk. Nothing he has done previously, though, quite prepares you for this roller coaster ride.

It begins brilliantly and provocatively with that now legendary motorcycle crash in 1966, the metaphorical death that allowed the late Sixties, surrealist, strung-out Dylan the downtime he needed to be born again as a family man, recluse and rabbinical storyteller. In I'm Not There, though, Dylan actually dies in the crash.

'I thought that was kind of neat', says Haynes, an affable, animated 46-year-old American in check shirt, faded black jeans and sneakers, 'because the crash was a death of sorts. The counterculture was actually mourning Dylan at the time, even more so when he was reborn as a rootsy country singer. So, in a way, it's a really good place to start a movie that deals with the idea of artistic reinvention and that, for the most part, combines fact and fiction pretty openly.'

In I'm Not There, there are seven different Dylans, or, as Haynes puts it, 'seven core characters each representing a pivotal time in Dylan's life and work'. There's the young Dylan who wanted to be Woody Guthrie, the slightly older Dylan who almost became Pete Seeger, and the slightly stoned Dylan who summoned up the ghost of Rimbaud. The film really becomes - there's no other word for it - Dylanesque, when the wild mercury Dylan shows up, followed by the backwoods Basement Tapes Dylan, the Blood on the Tracks Dylan and the born-again, Bible-thumping Dylan.

The seven narratives - and I use the word in its loosest sense - unfold in a kaleidoscopic way that, according to the director, echoes Dylan's urge to 'constantly multiply the confusions and toy with the desire that people have to try and pin him down'.

To multiply the confusions even more, Haynes has cast six actors to portray the seven Dylans, one of whom, Christian Bale, plays both Dylan the folk prophet and Dylan the God botherer. It's an inspired conceit, but, inevitably, some Bobs work better than others. The funniest Bob is a 13-year-old African-American boy (Marcus Carl Franklin), the most believable Bob is a woman (Cate Blanchett), and the most allegorical Bob is a Buddhist (Richard Gere). None of the seven is actually called Bob, mind. One is called Arthur, as in Arthur Rimbaud, another Billy, as in Billy the Kid, and yet another Jude, as in - I guess - Judas Iscariot. You get the picture? And even if you don't, you can kind of see why the real Dylan went for it. I'm Not There may not quite be as out-there as his own skewed cinematic take on identity and performance, Renaldo and Clara, but it's pretty damn close.

'I wasn't that interested in, you know, the truth,' elaborates Haynes, sounding for a moment like his subject, 'nor in taking the straight biopic approach. Instead, I wanted to track Dylan's creative imagination and where it took him and how his life mirrored that imagination, or propelled it, or followed it. It's essentially my take on those moments in Dylan's development where his music and the events of his life intersected.'

Thus Haynes gleefully explodes or exaggerates all the received wisdom about Dylan, allowing characters from songs to come to life and characters from real life to appear as hallucinations. The ghosts of Guthrie, Ginsberg, and Edie Sedgwick are summoned up, the old weird America of The Basement Tapes is recreated, and Pete Seeger finally gets to wield that infamous, but, alas, apocryphal, axe over the electric cables at Newport.

Haynes's wilful blurring of fact, fiction and myth will probably annoy the crap out of the Bob bores, the very people who possess the deep knowledge of Dylan lore to be able to pick up on, and decode, all the in-jokes and references.

'Oh, they'll be panicking, I suspect,' grins Haynes, 'but it'll do them good. To me, it's like the ultimate misunderstanding of Dylan to try and pin him down by collecting and endlessly analysing everything he does. The one thing you have to acknowledge about Dylan right off is that he's never there when you reach out to claim him. He's already gone, three steps down the road.'

Does it worry him, though, that anyone with only a passing interest in Dylan's music, or, indeed, no interest at all, may well be baffled by a film whose every scene assumes a certain level of prior knowledge on behalf of the viewer?

'Oh, I really hope not,' he says, looking pained at the very thought. 'From the very start, when I conceived the idea of the multiple Dylans, I never thought that this was a film that would stand or fail on whether or not you got all the references. If it doesn't have a visceral life of its own as a film, it doesn't work. That's been the really gratifying thing about the reaction so far.' (The film received a 10-minute standing ovation at the Venice Film Festival.) 'It seems to be exciting people as a new way of looking at an artist's life cinematically.'

It certainly is that. Thus far, most reviewers have picked up on Blanchett's performance as the strung-out, dandyfied, mid-Sixties' Dylan, but it left me more irritated than inspired. She gets the walk, but not the talk. The tics and mannerisms are all in place, but the performance is too mannered, too actorly, to entirely convince.

Nevertheless, in casting Blanchett, Haynes highlights something long overlooked, ignored, or not even noticed, by Dylan scholars: the sense of sexual indeterminacy that he adopted, and played around with, at that intensely creative time. The dandyism, the exaggerated drawl, the effete and extravagant stage gestures, the bitchy, spiteful tone of both 'Positively 4th Street' and 'Like a Rolling Stone' - all suggest that Dylan may have borrowed more from the Warhol camp (ouch!) than he ever admitted, even as he was sneering at them in song. Let's hear it, finally, for Queen Bob Approximately .

'Oh absolutely,' says Haynes. 'Male, white heterosexuality has been imposed on Dylan in all these ways that have contributed to reducing the risks and the adventures that he was undertaking at the time. I mean, "Like a Rolling Stone" is all the things they say it is - the anthem, the roar of infinite possibility, of courage and hope - but it's also a taunt, a big put-down. The tone of superiority is incredible. Almost queeny. The critics just don't go there, though. They don't explore the psychosexual thing, all those hard rock songs that are also feminine. Even with all the praise and worship, they box him in.'

Todd Haynes, as you may have guessed, is not your regular Dylan fan. He has vague memories of 'singing "Blowin' in the Wind" at Hebrew school as a toddler', and discovered Blonde on Blonde at the same time as he was hanging out at hardcore punk gigs in Los Angeles in the late Seventies. It was much later, though, during a time of emotional and creative crisis, that he began delving deeply into the canon.

'It was around the end of my thirties, when I was having a big personal and creative crisis. I had just finished making Velvet Goldmine, which had been so damn hard to get made, and I was feeling a bit lost, really. I suddenly looked around me and all my friends were having babies or had bought that little bit of real estate in New York. I had none of that in my life. All I had was my films. It was really the emotional fallout from that time that sent me running towards Dylan's music.'

His journey began when he bought The Columbia Bootleg Series Volume 1, and simultaneously began reading Greil Marcus's book, Invisible Republic, which delves deep onto the musical and mystical roots of The Basement Tapes. 'It was like I just suddenly couldn't get enough of Bob Dylan,' he says now, laughing.

Having managed to find all five volumes of The Basement Tapes, which, unlike the official double album, includes the strange and startling song that gives his film its title, he then tracked down a copy of Eat the Document (DA Pennebaker's unreleased tour documentary from 1966). Then, on a road trip from New York to Portland to begin writing his 2002 film, Far From Heaven, Haynes bought Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music box set. 'It was,' he says, 'like all the pieces of this incredible jigsaw were coming together.'

It was only when Haynes started delving into the transcripts of Dylan's interviews and press conferences from the mid-Sixties, though, that the idea for the film began to really take shape.

'I was just mesmerised reading this stuff,' he enthuses, 'I mean, this was improvised performance art at its highest. Dylan was just so ahead of the game back then, and moving at such a momentum. He was playing such extraordinary games with the media, answering their questions at all these other levels through the prism of his amazing imagination and humour and symbolic sensibility. I mean, the answers start to sound like his lyrics. Just incredible. I remember thinking, this has to be re-enacted, and brought to the light of day, and shared.'

Unbelievably, Haynes began writing the script for I'm Not There convinced that the film would never get made. 'I never thought for a moment I'd get the rights to the songs, but I kept returning to the script. The idea just kept pulling me back.'

It was his producer, Christine Vachon, who contacted Jesse Dylan, Bob's eldest son, and a film director himself. Jesse put her on to Jeff Rosen, Dylan's business manager-cum-confidant, who instructed her to tell Haynes to send them a short outline of the idea as well as DVDs of all his films. In the summer of 2000, Haynes duly typed out a one-page treatment that began with the Rimbaud quote 'I is another', and laid out the notion of the multiple Dylans. A few months later, against all the odds, his film was given the green light by Dylan. 'You just can't second-guess him,' laughs Haynes.

Having watched I'm Not There, I'm inclined to say the same of Todd Haynes. Let's just say his whole approach is a lot more referential than reverential, and not just towards Dylan. Stylistically, there are whole sections borrowed from Godard, Fellini and Peckinpah, with nods to Altman, Warhol and even Pennebaker thrown in for good measure.

Sometimes, this magpie approach works brilliantly. The long scene where Blanchett's strung-out Dylan stumbles through a party in Warhol's studio is shot in the harsh, black and white style of Fellini's La Dolce Vita, creating yet another level of heightened unreality that reflects both Dylan's unravelling psyche and the unreal amphetamine-fuelled atmosphere of the Factory.

At other times, though, particularly in the long, allegorical section in which Dylan/Billy the Kid (Richard Gere) wanders through a backwoods landscape populated by strange characters from The Basement Tapes, you feel you are watching an entirely different film, one directed by the late Robert Altman at his most meandering and elliptical. It's a story that goes nowhere, and, like much in the film, makes little sense as allegory unless you make all the connections - to The Basement Tapes album and the lost America it evokes; to Peckinpah's film, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, an ode to the disappearing west that Dylan soundtracked and in which he had a cameo; and to Dylan's own sense of himself as a musical outlaw on the run from the critics and fans who endlessly try to pin him down or unmask him. When I mention my uneasiness with the Dylan/Billy section of the film, Haynes listens carefully and nods almost in agreement.

'Well, it's a leap, I guess,' he says, after some thought, 'and I know a lot of people would have preferred to just watch the Cate Blanchett Dylan the whole way through. But I thought it was important to have the sense of a man on the run in there, a man haunted by the ghosts of his previous selves, and by the fear that he might be somehow found out. There is often that fugitive sense to Dylan in both his music and his life, the urge to keep moving, to not look back, to shed one self in other to create another. That's really what I was getting at.'

For me, though, the bravura set pieces worked better than the tangled allegorical sections. The notorious battle of Newport, 1965, begins with Dylan and cohorts rolling into the festival site like hired hitmen in a fleet of limos with darkened windows, and culminates with them raking the booing audience with machine-gun fire. It's a scene that echoes Sid Vicious's performance of 'My Way' in The Great Rock'n'Roll Swindle, which climaxes with the pantomime punk rocker slaughtering his audience literally as well as metaphorically. Dylan as the godfather of punk, anyone?

'Oh God, yeah,' says Haynes. 'I mean, Newport was pure punk. The volume, the distortion, the aggression. It was an assault on the audience. To me, that's the birth of punk. Then, on the European tour that followed, you can see him actively feeding off the anger and hostility that's coming of the audience, and using that hostility to further fuel the creative process. It's punk. It's exactly what Iggy Pop did later. But, for Dylan, the stakes were even higher. I mean, it's an incredible and frightening thing to be met with that kind of hostility after you've experienced all that adulation. He used the fear as a creative tool as well. That's pretty hardcore.'

As well as playing with the myth of Bob Dylan, Haynes tackles two tricky periods in the singer's life: his break-up with his first wife, Sara, and his late-Eighties born-again Christian period. Haynes dramatises the latter interlude by making Dylan (Christian Bale) an actual church pastor who has turned his back on fame but who still sings sermons to his flock. Absurd, maybe, but back around the time of Slow Train Coming and Saved, when Dylan was using the stage as a pulpit, that same scenario did not seem that far-fetched.

The philandering, mid-Seventies' Dylan, played by Heath Ledger, and re-christened Robbie, is perhaps the most enigmatic, and the most intriguing, presence in the film. This is the Dylan who wrote 'Blood on the Tracks', and the plaintive broken-hearted ballad 'Sara', perhaps the most naked cri de couer he ever wrote. In I'm Not There, Charlotte Gainsbourg plays an artist called Claire, who seems to be an amalgam of both Sara and Dylan's first serious girlfriend, Suze Rotolo. The fact that Gainsbourg is a dead ringer for the young Patti Smith makes the scene in which Bob/ Robbie rails against feminists generally, and women poets in particular, even more surreal. I ask Haynes if the rant, which culminates with the line 'chicks can never be poets', has any basis in fact?

'My research is kind of blurred and from so many sources, but that was actually something Joan Baez recounted.' Baez is played to a tee by Julianne Moore, whose cameo is almost worth the price of admission alone. 'Wasn't she great? She just nailed her. Joan was, like, so proud and still carefree somehow. It wasn't like she had an axe to grind or anything like that, it has to be said, though he did treat her like crap. I love the fact she doesn't come over as the poor pathetic folkie who's been left behind. She just kind of tells it like it is.'

All the same, I can't imagine Dylan being too happy with the Robbie section. 'Oh, I'm not so worried about that,' shrugs Haynes. 'I mean, I was not exactly being historical or literal. If anything, even less so than elsewhere in the film.'

In the end, it is Haynes's freewheeling approach to Dylan's life and work that both makes and breaks I'm Not There. His decision, for instance, to have Christian Bale play two separate incarnations of Dylan works on a conceptual level, but you may find yourself wondering, as I did, why Bob Neuwirth, Dylan's annoyingly ubiquitous sidekick from 1966, suddenly morphs into John Lennon. Or why Mr Jones from 'Ballad of a Thin Man' returns as Sheriff Pat Garrett.

Does it all add up? Not really. Nor, I suspect, was it meant to. It is, after all, a cinematic attempt to capture Dylan's singular creative dynamic. It is also an unapologetically experimental film of the kind that does not tend to make it onto even the art house circuit these days.

'I don't know that it makes sense,' Blanchett told the New York Times recently, 'and I don't know whether Dylan's music makes sense. It hits you in some kind of other place. It might make sense when you are half-awake, half-asleep, in the everyday lives in which we live.'

This is undoubtedly true, but it misses the crucial point that music works on a different, and arguably deeper, emotional and psychological level than film. Ironically, nowhere is this more apparent than when actual Dylan songs are used in the film. Every time this happened, my instinct was to close my eyes and listen, undistracted by images that strove to interpret that song.

When 'Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands' starts rolling and tumbling out of the cinema speakers, you might find yourself wondering, as I did, why anyone would even attempt to get inside Dylan's mind. The song hits you in some other place,, a place that even a film as wildly inventive, utterly infuriating, and relentlessly referential as this one cannot really connect with. In the end, I respect the fact that Todd Haynes tried to, and tried to in a way that somehow reflects the restless, re-inventive spirit of its subject. The film may well be a glorious failure, but I'll say one thing for Todd Haynes - he's got a lot of nerve.

An Exclusive Chat with Todd Haynes on Bob Dylan
Source: Edward Douglas; ComingSoon

Five years after the release of his Douglas Sirk pastiche Far From Heaven, indie filmmaker Todd Haynes returns to the world of music for the first time since Velvet Goldmine in 1998. This time, he's taken on an even loftier topic, that of the musical icon Bob Dylan, exploring his life and music from his early days as a Woody Guthrie wannabe through his days toying with Hollywood and the Wild West. Because Dylan is such an enigmatic chameleon, Haynes required six actors to pull off this musical menagerie, from the youngest, Marcus Carl Franklin as young "Woody" to Richard Gere as Billy, based on Dylan's fascination with the West, especially Billy the Kid. In between, there's some amazing Dylan impressions (though calling them that does a disservice to their performances) from the likes of Cate Blanchett, Christian Bale, Heath Ledger and Ben Whishaw. Although this is by no means your typical, traditional biopic, because it manages to combine Haynes' auteur tendencies with a highly entertaining overview of Dylan's music.

When we sat down with Haynes, he was in the process of signing dozens of vinyl double albums of the just released soundtrack album, an exceptional piece of work in its own right with versions of Dylan tunes by Sonic Youth, Cat Power, Stephen Malkmus, John Doe, Calexico and many more.

ComingSoon.net: I've attended a few press conferences about the movie so I know the basic story behind how you got the rights to Dylan's music, but did you have anything written at the point where you approached him?
Todd Haynes: At the point I approached Dylan? No, there was no treatment per se. But I had the characters in mind, plus this additional character Charlie at the very first incarnation that I gave to Dylan, but no, there was nothing that I was writing from when I first gave it to him, but the key characters were all in my mind.

CS: Had you done a lot of research over the years or did you just know a lot of about Dylan beforehand?
Haynes: No, no. In this renewed phase, which was all in 2000, I really didn't even listen to Dylan that much for twenty years between high school and this period, then it all kind of came back to me. That was when I was listening to all this stuff that I had and I already knew and then it just kept kind of opening up. Little crevices would open, or doors would open, and I could enter into these much deeper avenues of material that I had never encountered before, almost all it from the past. The key things that really got my mind spinning were--and I don't even really remember the order of them, probably the Columbia "Bootleg Series." The first three discs was the first eye-opener and the song "She's Your Lover Now" from the "Blonde on Blonde" period on that was just so amazing that it took me some time to even really start paying a lot of attention to disc three that had "Blind Willie McTell" and amazing stuff like that. Then I got my hands on the five discs of "The Basement Tapes," that was astounding. Read Greil Marcus' books about the "The Basement Tapes." This was all 2000. Encountered the interviews from 1965 and 1966, which was just incredible, like live performance art pieces that were captured in dialogue, and then the movie "Eat the Document," an experimental documentary that was shot in '66. And then I read I think the Tony Scaduto biography. That was just what formed the whole concept.

CS: This was after "Velvet Goldmine" but before "Far From Heaven," so you'd already been thinking about doing this before your last movie.
Haynes: I was writing "Far From Heaven" every night and I was doing all this stuff every day. This is when I was in Portland. I had driven across country, and it wasn't really until I landed in Portland that I got all that material that I just described. It was all happening at the same time in this kind of very free, associative, fun way. I did get this idea for a film, but I had no serious expectations that it would ever happen because I was like, "Dylan would never give me the rights. What was I thinking?" It was just fun. It was just a pure obsessional pleasure, and interest, and then we got the rights. At this point I was settled, I wasn't going to leave Portland. I just had fallen in love with this new place and I had lost my apartment in New York that summer and found a house that fall and I was there. Then I had to leave and do "Far From Heaven" and that basically kept me completely busy until Oscars of '03 and that's when I returned to Portland and really started for real. Even though I had done all that dabbling, I was like, "Well, okay, now I'm really going to start doing research in an organized way from beginning to end."

CS: And you already had the rights to do this at that point?
Haynes: Yes, he rights happened also in that first year, in the fall of that first year in 2000. So it all happened in 2000.

CS: At that point, once you had the script, did you start to approach actors for different parts, did you have financing and how did you work on getting others on board?
Haynes: After writing the script, yeah. I finished this and we started showing a script around in 2004, but not until late in 2004. It took a year and a half to research and write the script, and then, somewhere in there, we started to approach some actors, but by '05, we had a solid slate of actors attached to the film. We went to Cannes to try to get presales, so the actors, the leads were pretty much attached. There was one interesting switch, which was Colin Farrell was attached initially instead of Heath. I actually didn't even know Heath's work at that point in '03 and '04. Colin immediately signed on board and then it was around the time where he took a break from acting and was not reachable. And it was exactly at this point that we needed actors to sign off on contracts for the commitments that we got from Cannes, and his agent was like, "He won't even call me back. I haven't talked to him for two months, and he's out of commission." I said, "We're going to have to go to somebody else unless you can get word to him," and I felt really bad because he was so eager to take part initially and we couldn't even have a discussion about it, but we had no choice. We had to be able to commit to a name for that role, for somebody for that role and that's when I went to Heath. That pretty much completed my slate of brilliant actors.

CS: Christian I know you worked with before, but was there ever any question of which Dylan he could play? Because him and Heath and even Colin are kind of the same age range.
Haynes: You know, because of Christian's intensity, I just saw it immediately in his face that he could convey this character of Jack Rollins. I needed somebody who you could see in a poster or in a record album and immediately accept that he had legendary status. I imagine Heath could have done something like that, but I just saw it in Christian's face. Also, I'd seen "The Machinist" and that was so extreme and frightening, but he had hollowed out his whole face and the cheekbones were chiseled and socket of his eyes had gone dark, and I was like, "Oh my god." One fifth of that or one tenth of that would have conveyed this kind of poetic intensity and almost severity that I kind of wanted in that Jack Rollins character. I also thought it would be really fun for Christian to have a transformation like that in the film to Pastor John and I thought that Christian was the one actor in "Velvet Goldmine" who didn't get to sing or perform a song, that he'd get to do it in this one.

CS: That makes sense. How did you approach the actors to do it, though? Were most of them fans of Dylan anyway? I think it would be difficult to explain to premise to most people.
Haynes: I don't know why, but I didn't have to work on any of them. I didn't have to convince any of them. I didn't have to do a big song and dance. I mean, I met with Heath whom I've never met before, I met with Cate whom I've never met before, then Ben Whishaw came.

CS: I'm a big fan of his work actually. He hasn't done much, but he's so good in everything he does.
Haynes: He's just so good, he's just so preternaturally talented. He's just incredible. He kind of introduced himself to me and then he auditioned. He put himself on tape for that role, and my jaw dropped. I felt like I was hearing the lines for the very first time, and I was just immediately listening and thinking about what he was saying, which is such a rare experience when you're hearing it over and over. I met with Richard, but all these guys were just game, and that's saying a lot, given the nature of the script and how dense it was.

CS: I've heard that Dylan hasn't seen the movie, but were you nervous about making this film while he was still alive? Eventually, I think you'll have to just go where he is right now with the movie, and the two of you just sit down and watch it together.
Haynes: No way, man. No way. I'll let you do that.

CS: Well, it's tough since you're essentially making somewhat of a biopic about someone who's still alive.
Haynes: Well, we kill him off in the first scene of the movie, so I thought we could clear the decks that way. No, I didn't really think about it that much because I guess the way that I was approaching it was just not so literal obviously. It just had this different kind of emphasis. Even though I took all the periods that I was drawing from very seriously, and took the commitments Dylan made to them very seriously, and the things he said at the time very seriously, I guess I welcomed and accepted his own almost doctrine that once he's done with something, he's done. I think as a filmmaker, or as a creative person, that much I kind of understood. In a weird way, when you finish your film, it's kind of not yours anymore. It's kind of out in the world and it belongs to everybody. You have an intimacy and relationship with it like nobody else, but it just isn't your own little thing, and yeah, I think I got that. That's why when people say, "Why didn't you want to sit down and talk to him?" I was like, "He'd already given me everything. What did I need to get from him in a room in a chair for half an hour?"

CS: Do you ever go back and watch some of your older movies or are you one of those people who can never see it again after working on it for so long?
Haynes: No, I can watch... it's almost when I sort of have to, like once, I had to do a whole "Haynes on Haynes" series of interviews for a book and I was like, "Oh shit. I better watch some of them." It wasn't so bad. It's fun how some of them are more fun than others to watch.

CS: What would you like people to get out of this movie whether they're Dylan fans or not Dylan fans?
Haynes: I just want them to have a really rich experience, and an experience that is not dissimilar from a musical experience, like listening to a whole record, listening to all of "Blonde on Blonde." Richard Gere told me that he was such a Dylan fan when he was a teenager that when he first got "Blonde on Blonde" he just lied down on the floor and put the two speakers right next to his ears and just listened to the whole record, all four sides, and that's what I'd like people to do with the film. I'd like them to just feel like their traveling into a world and let it lead you into unexpected places. You know, these days we get a CD and we burn it into our iPod and you forget you even have it, and a song comes up three weeks later and you're like, "Oh yeah. I never even listened to that thing all the way through." I think we're maybe missing something in that. I mean, I love the iPod. I love the surprise of it. I love the way it almost seems to anticipate your mood sometimes or where you are and play a string of songs. I think that's a wild part of it, but I think that feeling of entering a space and letting the music define it is a little bit lost.

CS: I want to talk about this great soundtrack you put together--and I'm guilty as charged, since I've had the "Velvet Goldmine" soundtrack on my iPod for years. At what point did you start deciding which group would do which song and getting the bands involved? Obviously, Cate and Christian had to perform to their respective songs.
Haynes: As you point out, all the ones that had to be filmed and put together in advance were the first ones on our agenda to try to figure out, but all of the decisions of what the songs were was part of the script writing process long before. As you can see, a lot of the scenes are completely built around them, even if it's not as literal as in "Ballad of a Thin Man," it definitely is true for the spirit or the mood of the way the storytelling works, the way the songs as they are chosen. Only one sort of important decision of a song that was going to fuel one of the scenes changed in editing and that was from "Wheels on Fire," which is a fantastic song, was supposed to be in the scene where Cate was typewriting with the tarantula, but it didn't have the right tension somehow. That song is a kind of stately tension, a kind of stately, kind of gothic doom to it, and I had encountered this amazing "Iggy and the Stooges" version of that song from their rehearsal sessions in 1973 and its just a early drum machine going, "Ch Ch Ch Ch Ch" and Ron Ashton on guitar. It's a twelve-minute long version of "Ballad of Hollis Brown" and it just blew my mind. We tried it one night and it was just like, "Oh my God!" That scene came alive and that was one of the few real changes of plan, but yeah, I worked with Randy Poster, as I did on "Velvet Goldmine," and it was in close consultation with him that the actual artists were selected.

CS: What was the significance of the extended harmonica solo that ends the movie?
Haynes: That was something I saw in "Eat the Document," being that film I described, and that's what the clip is from. But it's Dylan on stage performing in 1966, and actually nobody in the annals of all of the Dylanists on the internet and everywhere else, and even Jeff Rosen, can tell us where he was for that one harmonica solo which was filmed by Pennebaker, but it's to "Mr. Tambourine Man." I just found it to be beautifully un-resolving and just circular that it just keeps going on and on.

CS: What's going on with the theatrical version of this? I know that was part of your original commission when you got the rights. Would it be the same concept with six different actors playing the different Dylan personas.
Haynes: Oh yeah. That was the whole point which was to use the same whole multiple character concept for the stage, and I only really took it on because I sort of thought, "Wow, there's something that could actually happen on a stage with the characters all even sharing a single space or even sharing a song, that you couldn't do in a film. Except the way they do it in "West Side Story." (Starts to sing a few bars from "Tonight.")

CS: We're going to have to put that on the site as audio. Is that musical something you're still going to be involved in?
Haynes: No, no, no that went away. That became I believe the Twyla Tharp thing that Dylan did get involved in. I'm glad we're talking about it because Jeff Rosen brought it up to me, and that's when I first brought Oren Moverman into the process, was to help me write the theatrical version. I was going to do the script and he was going to do the theatrical version, and then it kind of dissipated, we never really heard anything about Jeff, and then all of a sudden we were hearing rumors about Twyla Tharp and we were like, "Oh. Oh, okay."

no one's seen this?

i loved it. 

Going tonight.

Quote from: JG on November 30, 2007, 12:50:16 PM
i loved it. 

So did I. It takes a while to sink in but it was exactly what I expected. If it was more linear and more straitforward I don't think bob would have put his stamp on the script. I was singing along again in the theatre (the last time was across the universe) and it didn't seem to bother anyone because I was doing it pretty low and in tune with the song. The morte I think about it, the more I can't wait till DVD.

  I think he nailed it pretty close.  I mean compare it to a film like Control that wants to illustrate the domesticity of its artist, which Haynes does, or a film like Ray that wants to explore the magnetism of an individual, which Haynes does, or a film curious about a person's confusion and despair and how he deals with it through art, which Basquiat did and Haynes does here.  All the components of Dylan as a real person and a larger than life personality are present, but Haynes' film doesn't require you to navigate through the differences.  It's a platter with everything mixed up together, much like it feels to be somebody.  If you think it's Haynes' job to provide context or string together a cohesive narrative or give us causation you might be disappointed but it's only because you're lazy, right, I mean Haynes packed everything into his movie that I imagine he could and it possesses this fantastic ability to be constructed and explained by our own ruminations when we leave the theater.  So here Haynes gives us what we can know and says that hell he can't explain it but he does a mighty job of showing it.

  It was a really fun film too, wasn't it.  Like you could think Dylan was somebody nobody ever knew and just enjoy the film's visuals and each scene's gravity.  I love that Haynes took the most revered of musicians and made an adventurous unpretentious film about him.

I've seen this twice now, and am still processing my thoughts on it (I feel like I should watch it again). There are some things about it that I definitely don't like, but overall I think it's good. Maybe even great (formally and theoretically, I think it's great, but I'm not sure the content is up to snuff). Funnily enough, the segment I was expecting the least out of - the Richard Gere story - was the one that stuck with me the most. There's something really, really interesting going on in that sequence, and I don't have a complete grasp of it yet.

One of my big problems was all the scenes with David Cross. Not necessarily with his performance, per se - it's just that some of the worst, the most platitudinal scenes in the movie (for me) happened to have him in it. He's a total dead ringer for Ginsberg, though -- I saw a picture of the real Ginsberg a few days ago and thought it was a still from the movie.

Wow you're right Ghostboy (hope this shows up):

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I'm with Lucid, I was not a fan. To continue a comparison to Control, I did not know anything about Bob Dylan or Joy Division (does this prove that I have no taste? no). With Control, the fact that they have an aura, a legend, that sense is evoked through its absence. I didn't need to know Joy Division to see that film. With I'm Not There, I dunno, it's like I was constantly out of the loop, which shouldn't be the case.

The only parts I enjoyed were Cate Blanchett (immensely, really), Heath Ledger, and the "French poet" as Haynes puts it, the one idle Dylan. However, if these elements were completely removed from the film, I would've liked watching them by themselves. They are self-contained in their quality, but unfortunately the picture is too scattered for its own good. A Gestalt approach to Dylan doesn't really come through here.

I thought it strange that they all had different names, it just kind of caught me off guard and made it harder to get into the film. I'll admit, I didn't quite understand the young black boy being a Dylan, but then maybe I'm not suppose to, or I was and the film didn't do its job. I'm not sure, but I didn't really care. Richard Gere's scenes felt like they were conceived by the Polish brothers. And I agree with Lucid, Bale was pretty boring.

But I will disagree with Cate Blanchett, the film had me half-asleep, and that did not provide insight.

I will say that I LOVED Velvet Goldmine, a great, scattered faux biopic about a star with multiple personalities. Haynes did it right once, why not this time?

Todd Haynes Q&A
IGN talks Dylan with the I'm Not There helmer.
by Chris Tilly, IGN UK

Todd Haynes, director of Safe, Velvet Goldmine, and Far From Heaven, faced the biggest challenge of his career when he decided to shoot a film about song-writing genius Bob Dylan. And rather than play it safe and shoot a linear, Ray/Walk the Line-esque biopic, he instead chose to cast a disparate group of actors to represent different aspects of Dylan's career and personality. The result could have been disastrous, but instead he has produced a wonderfully inventive feature about one of the most important artists of the last century. Here, he tells Chris Tilly how the I'm not There came about.

IGN: Thanks so much for not screwing this up.

Todd Haynes: What the movie? Thanks very much. Thank you for feeling that way.

IGN: It's been said that there comes a time in everyone's life when they realise they love Bob Dylan. When did that happen for you?

Todd Haynes: It happened when I was in high school. But the thing about Dylan is that you can leave him behind for a time, then come back to him and re-discover him. That's what happened to me at the end of my 30s. I found myself coming back to him and needing something from him and his work that I probably didn't need initially when I was young. I returned to Dylan with a greater hunger and curiosity than I did before. And that's what started the interest that became this film.

IGN: As the first person to be given the rights to the songs and the story, did you feel the weight of expectation weighing heavily on you?

Todd Haynes: I felt a responsibility, not to the people who are most into him, the real fanatics, but just to the work itself, and to being the first director being given the privilege to translate his life and what this work means into cinema, which I took really seriously. I feel that films have a unique ability to get past just the life story and the one single arc if there is such a thing in a life, and really explore what makes this artist unique and what contribution his work made to his field, in this case popular music. That was the challenge – to make to a cinematic equivalent, and have the same kind of fun and play and experiments, under the pretence of making something serious out of a popular form. I take that all really seriously.

IGN: Did you shoot the different Dylan sections at different times with different crews?

Todd Haynes: No – we used the same crew, it was all the same creative people – the only way to do it with our budget was to do it extremely quickly and have it all be very tightly scheduled, one story after the next.

IGN: Were the actors you chose for the different incarnations all Dylan fans?

Todd Haynes: It varied. Richard Gere was a huge Dylan fan. Christian Bale was nothing close to a Dylan fan. Cate Blanchett became an intense Dylan fan in the process of getting to know the role and getting into his work. So it varied.

IGN: How did you go about conveying to each actor what aspect of Dylan's persona you wanted them to capture?

Todd Haynes: It began by just sharing with them all the research and materials that I discovered. I separated them into six different containers that were each of the different stories and characters. So that included everything from music, which was obviously the starting point, to the historical and biographical facts from the time. There was also visual material – portfolio books of images of Dylan of the 60s, of art and music and film – that inspired each of the stories and the way that they would look. I made all that stuff available to the actors in little packages that corresponded to their story.

IGN: How did you decide which songs to put where, when to use cover versions, and who to ask to do them?

Todd Haynes: The decisions of what songs are in the film really came at the start of the writing process. In fact, the songs often determined the way the stories would be told and what kind of turns they would take. I would pick the best song that helped aid that, and not necessarily my favourite Dylan songs, sometimes it would be songs that serviced the narrative that would be the final choices. From there it branched out into all these sub-categories, where there were songs that we wanted original Dylan recordings for, songs that we needed to make cover versions for that would be performed in the film, so we needed to get certain artists to appear in the film like Richie Havens and Jim James. Then there were a whole bunch of productions like the Cate Blanchett material that she sings in the film.

We cast creative producers to put together a whole bunch of tracks for us, and they basically put together little super-groups made up of artists from the time and contemporary artists. These little collections would be the bands for these particular songs. Then lastly we'd get bands to do covers themselves. We got more than we could possibly use in the movie, so we ended up with this really rich collection of material that became the soundtrack. And that's really become its own thing in of itself. There's 19 tracks on the soundtrack that aren't even in the film!

IGN: It must be fun making a film that you know is going to have probably the greatest soundtrack of all time.

Todd Haynes: I felt like a kid in a candy store, being able to pick any Dylan song, and almost any band because you could go to almost anyone and say: 'you wanna do a Dylan cover?' - and very few would say 'no'.

IGN: Have you had any feedback from Dylan or his family or the people around him.

Todd Haynes: Well Jeff Rosen, his manager, was very close to the project and he is a fantastic guy – very generous with us. Dylan himself – no – he's been fully occupied doing his own stuff during these years. After he gave approval to the basic concept he just let us go. Jessie, his oldest son, was one of the first people we contacted to get to him and we've kept him abreast of the project along the way.

IGN: How has the feedback been from non-Dylan fans who maybe don't get the many references and in jokes?

Todd Haynes: I think people have to know that's it's alright to not get every reference in this movie. You really have to approach the film like an adventure or a trip. The most fun way is to not worry about that stuff. I don't get all of Dylan's lyrics or references in his words. His songs don't rest on the words or the intellectual command of everything that he writes.

IGN: What's the experience been like taking the film around the festival circuit?

Todd Haynes: It's been amazing. I'm very proud of the film – I can't believe that we pulled it off given the constraints and the challenges that we faced. I was ready for anything. I was ready to feel good and proud of my work given what we'd accomplished, regardless of the response. Or at least you tell yourself that. But the reaction, this quickly, has been better than I expected. It feels like people really are ready for films that are different, films that you haven't seen before, and it just feels like generally, that the films coming out this year have been on a whole other level to the films that I've been seeing coming out in the States for quite some time. Serious films for grown-ups – Michael Clayton, In the Valley of Elah, A Mighty Heart – these are big Hollywood films but they have substance and craft and really beautiful performances.

IGN: It's great seeing you come back to musical film – are there more to come?

Todd Haynes: Not that I know off today, but music will always be a passion of mine so I don't want to say no. I don't really know what's next though.

i wonder when the number of people who have interviewed him about the movie will actually outnumber the number of people who have actually SEEN the movie.  i'm sure at least a tie is nigh.

man i really loved this. so beautiful and inspiring and infused with so much warmth and hope. i'm not a dylan zealot by any means but i am a fan and this film really hit me. god bless todd haynes.

Quote from: Ghostboy on December 10, 2007, 09:27:34 PMFunnily enough, the segment I was expecting the least out of - the Richard Gere story - was the one that stuck with me the most. There's something really, really interesting going on in that sequence, and I don't have a complete grasp of it yet.

yeah i thought that one funeral scene with gere was quite remarkable, and i too don't have a completely grasp of it. but honestly i thought gere's performance was somewhat of a yawn compared to the others, particularly the young black kid and ledger. in fact i thought it was ledger, not blanchett, who stole the show. i'm probably the odd man out here but cate kind of took me out of the movie at times. i kept thinking "ok this is cate blanchett doing a great dylan impersonation for yet another oscar." heath was far more telling and insightful and carried a lot more emotional weight than cate, who didn't seem to dig as deep.

this is the last new 2007 movie i'll see in 2007 and i'm happy about that.

Just thought I should pipe in, being such a rabid Haynes fan. (In fact, I care quite a bit more about Haynes than I ever have about Bob Dylan, to whom I'm kind of indifferent.) Like CMBBRAD, I really fell in love with it. I recently said to someone about Magnolia, "I love that film, ostensible 'imperfections' included, the way you love a spouse or partner--warts and all." Which is to say that I didn't think this movie was perfect, but I did think it was brilliant. I also agree with all those whose expectations were exceeded by the Richard Gere/Billy the Kid section.

It rankles that it's gotten so much more unanimous high praise than Velvet Goldmine when it really is practically the same idea and a not-entirely-dissimilar execution. I think it has a lot to do, especially in this country, to Dylan being more automatically respected than Bowie, et. al., and also with this film's queerness (the Cate Blanchett thing) being so radical that it's invisible to those who may have been uncomfortable with Velvet Goldmine's relatively more familiar and quantifiable (male homosexual) queerness.

Quote from: Lucid on November 30, 2007, 01:42:11 PMI did not.  I saw it last week.  For someone that loves Todd Haynes as much as me, I almost felt guilty for not liking this.  Then I remembered how boring and forgettable it was and honored my original opinion.  To me it was a huge mess; in trying to subvert the approach to your average biopic and convey something about Dylan's protean persona Haynes lost any sense of cohesiveness, and even with a structure like this one, it was desperately needed. There were two good things about I'm Not There: Charlotte Gainsbourg and Cate Blanchett, whose performance is one of the most impressive I've seen recently.  Even so, I found myself put off by Blanchett's Dylan; it was the most familiar of all his incarnations in the movie, but I'm still struggling with the idea that the one woman playing him had to be the most proto-masculine. Christian Bale is a bore, Julianne Moore is a fleeting and pretty much disposable presence. By the time Richard Gere rolled around, I didn't give a shit anymore.  There [was] no there there.  I guess that's the point, but I still didn't like it.

Like Atonement, Lucid and I are on the same page with this one too, although I think I liked and appreciated it just a slightly bit more than her. I didn't find it "boring and foregettable," but as Gamblour said, I think by not being a Dylan fan, I was missing the insight.

Quote from: MacGuffin on February 14, 2008, 10:32:49 AM
I think by not being a Dylan fan, I was missing the insight.

Yes, you were....only half joking

Quote from: SiliasRuby on February 14, 2008, 05:44:18 PM

Quote from: MacGuffin on February 14, 2008, 10:32:49 AM
I think by not being a Dylan fan, I was missing the insight.

Yes, you were....only half joking

And I don't deny it. Haynes's unconventionality is why I'm a big fan, so I would have been completely disappointed if he did a Ray or a Walk The Line type of biopic. But I felt like the new kid in class getting a crash course to keep up with the other students.

I'll also add how difficut it was seeing Ledger in this now, especially when his character was playing with the daughters.

Dylan's Not There
I'm Not There is there in May.

On May 6, 2008, Genius Products and the Weinstein Company will release I'm Not There on Two-Disc DVD. The film stars several megastars such as Christian Bale, Richard Gere, Cate Blanchett, and the belated Heath Ledger as Bob Dylan. Yes, all of them. It will contain bonus materials and extra features, and the DVD will be available for the MSRP of $28.96.

The I'm Not There DVD will feature the following bonus materials:

9 Deleted Scenes with Optional Commentary
Audio Commentary with Director Todd Haynes
Premiere Featurette
Making Of I'm Not There
Subterranean Homesick Blues Music Video
Audition Tapes – Ben Whishaw and Marcus Carl Franklin
Gag Reel
Conversation with Todd Haynes
Making of the Soundrack
Dylan Filmography
Dylan Discography
New York Times Article on the Film Written by Robert Sullivan
On Screen Lyric Stream


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I'm kinda disappointed some releases aren't coming on Blu-ray at the same time.

ive tried watching this three times now and still havnt been able to finish it.

in conclusion, ive seen the movie.   

i know a girl who saw it and said "i don't get it.. like, bob dylan's not in it."

i really didn't get it either. i admire it to a certain extent, but i can't say i enjoyed it. actually i saw it like three weeks ago and i hardly remember anything in it. i liked blanchett, and i liked some things, but overall i couldn't connect with it. i kept thinking that i wanted so much to watch "safe" again for some reason.