I'm Not There - Bob Dylan biopic

[JG]

i loved it. 

[Sunrise]

Going tonight.

[SiliasRuby]

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.

[w/o horse]

  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.

[Ghostboy]

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.

[Gamblour.]

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



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?

[MacGuffin]

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.

[modage]

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.

[©brad]

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.

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.

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.

[godardian]

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.

[MacGuffin]

I 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.

[SiliasRuby]

I think by not being a Dylan fan, I was missing the insight.

Yes, you were....only half joking

[MacGuffin]

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.

[MacGuffin]

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

[last days of gerry the elephant]

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