I'm Not There - Bob Dylan biopic

[MacGuffin]

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!

[samsong]

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

that said, i fucking loved it.

[MacGuffin]

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."

[MacGuffin]

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.

[MacGuffin]

New Trailer here.

[©brad]

2007 = 1999

[MacGuffin]

Don't Look Back Trailer

[The Perineum Falcon]

Brilliant!

Each new trailer for this only raises my expectations.

I hope that's not a bad thing.

[SiliasRuby]

Awesome Awesome Awesome!

[last days of gerry the elephant]

So good.

[MacGuffin]

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."

[MacGuffin]

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.

[MacGuffin]

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.

[MacGuffin]

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."

[samsong]

no one's seen this?