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| Interview: Todd Haynes On "I'm Not There" |
by Peter Sobczynski
The acclaimed director of "Poison," "Safe" and "Far From Heaven" discusses "I'm Not Here," his mind-blowing exploration of the life and work of Bob Dylan.
Over the past 20 years, filmmaker Todd Haynes has given us such iconoclastic sights as a strangely sympathetic biography of Karen Carpenter that he told using Barbie dolls (the sadly unavailable “Superstar”), a film in which he appropriated the basic framework of “Citizen Kane” as a method of exploring the history of the glam-rock movement of the 1970's and a cleverly conceive pastiche that offered a look at what the glossy screen melodramas of the 1950's might have been like if they had been allowed to deal with issues of sex, gender and race that Hollywood couldn’t and wouldn’t deal with back in the day (“Far From Heaven”). However, in terms of sheer audaciousness, nothing that he has done comes close to what he has accomplished in his brilliant new film “I’m Not There,” an examination of the life and work of Bob Dylan I which the name “Bob Dylan” is never uttered once and in which a half-dozen actors (Richard Gere, Heath Ledger, Christian Bale, Ben Whishaw, Marcus Carl Franklin and Cate Blanchett) embody different aspects of his persona from throughout his long career. Like the artist that it celebrates, the film is strange, funny, poetic, hypnotic and absolutely compelling from start to finish and as far as I am concerned, it may well come closer to getting to the bottom of the man, his music and his myth than anything else that I can recall seeing or reading on the subject.
Recently, Haynes sat down to discuss “I’m Not There” and in the interview below, he explains some of the bold artistic choices that he made in what is unquestionably one of the best films of the year.
In your earlier films “Superstar” and “Velvet Goldmine,” you have explored the worlds of music and popular culture and grappled with questions about the importance of image and “I’m Not There” is perhaps your most radical take to date on those issues. What is it about those notions that interests you in general as a filmmaker and specifically in the case of “I’m Not There”?
They all come from fairly different and distinct interests, although popular culture and fame and the ways identities get revealed–sometimes accidentally and sometimes radically through moments in popular culture that almost seem like accidents–have always interested me. “Superstar” is more about what popular image was denying beneath the surface of that music and that sound. “Velvet Goldmine” was this sort of very overt inversion of all kinds of rules and assumptions of masculinity and popular culture. Dylan is a category unto himself but I think that the ways that he challenged the need for mainstream society to kind of be able to define and reduce an artist to a simple definition is really a unique aspect of his total career and was maybe simply a product of his own way to survive his own success–the way he had to keep killing off who he was yesterday and all the pressures and expectations that came along with that. That was my strategy for getting inside something absolutely unique about him at his core in the way that the film is conceived with the multiple characters and different people in one life.
I didn’t really approach it for an audience that knew everything about Dylan or an audience that knew nothing about him. I tried to educate myself about him and his work almost as if I didn’t know anything in my process of research. I felt like it wasn’t necessary to try to dumb him down or create a kind of conventional package entry into his work because I thought that the one thing about him that was so significant was that he never did that. He never did that with a popular song, for instance–he took it into any direction that he fancied and whether that was political or philosophical or poetic–and the amazing thing was that he maintained this mainstream popularity wherever he went. Sometimes at his most obtuse and impenetrable, he was at his most popular and enduring. I felt like I needed to honor that in order to tell the story.
The risk is that we don’t have an audience today that is the same that he had in the 1960's that was hungry to be shown something new and different and see experiments played out in mainstream venues and have their minds blown. Maybe today’s audience isn’t up for that. I definitely had my hunches about that but that wasn’t enough of a reason to not want to try cinematic parallels to what he did in his medium. I find that people who know the most about Dylan have the hardest time with the movie the first time because their heads are just annotating away every choice I made with the craziness that some obsessive fans can bring. Sometimes when people know less and they are open to something different, they can just let it take them on a journey that they have never been on before.
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As a viewer who is probably closer to the more obsessive fan type that you describe, I have to admit that one of the things that I like most about the film was the way that it mixed different eras and songs. In a way, it sort of replicates what Dylan does in his songwriting in the way that he utilizes dense and allusive imagery that doesn’t necessarily explain itself immediately. You utilize famous moments from Dylan’s history but you don’t depict them exactly as they occur in the popular recounting–you include the part where a heckler at the Royal Albert Hall calls Dylan “Judas” for forsaken folk music for rock but instead of showing what actually happened afterwards–Dylan tearing into an epic version of “Like a Rolling Stone”–the scene degenerates into a full-blown riot. In putting the screenplay together, how did you finally decided on what aspects of his life and art you wanted to include and what parts you wanted to embroider upon?
I basically decided that I would give equal weight and focus to the places where his life and work intersected–where things that happened to him for real were being articulated in some way in his work as well. I didn’t really want to privilege one over the other, which means that, compared to most biopics, this gives his creative life and imagination much more weight and validity than a movie that is just about the events of somebody’s life and how they became famous. All that stuff is in his work, or at least the important elements are in his work. All biopics mix fact and fiction and we know that when we go to see them. We know that it is a fictionalization of a famous person’s life and that it is fitting into a form that we have seen before and we go along with the fact that it is a fabrication for narrative purposes that ties up in the end and you feel like you have an understanding of the person’s life and work. This one also mixes fact and fiction but it does it overtly and it sort of brings you into the process.
We all know that Dylan wasn’t a little black kid who called himself Woody but by using that as a recourse for describing the young Dylan, who really did enact this other person his life to such a degree that when none of it added up–when all his crazy tales of his past were obviously constructed–it was the sheer performance and conviction and exuberance that he manifested that made people not care so that they didn’t ask him “Aren’t you from Minnesota? Aren’t you a middle-class Jewish kid?” In this case, they aren’t saying “Aren’t you black?” It just takes things that are real and takes them one step further into the unreal so that audiences can kind of play along with that process.
Did you talk or communicate with Dylan at all during the making of the film and has he seen the finished work?
I did not talk to him. If I wanted to, I could have because I worked closely with his manager throughout the whole film. I didn’t need to and I didn’t want to–I had so much material to work with that the idea of putting him in a chair and sitting him down. . .I don’t even know what I would have asked the guy in a half-hour that I would have needed from him. I don’t know if he has seen it yet. He has a DVD with him right now on his tour but I haven’t heard if he has watched it yet. We needed to get the music rights from the beginning–I wouldn’t have done it without those rights–and that meant that he would have to know what the whole thing was. We basically needed his blessing and we got it.
Wasn’t part of the requirement for getting those musical rights that you had to create a stage version of the film as well? I know that particular project eventually went to Twyla Tharp but how far did you actually get in reconceiving “I’m Not There” in stage terms?
Yeah. That was something that Jeff Rosen brought up to me shortly after the rights were authorized by Dylan for the music and the concept. He just said “Would you be interested in adapting this for the stage?” I couldn’t even believe that I got the rights to the film. I am not a theater guy but when I started to think about it, I found that the idea of having the multiple characters sharing the stage was actually interesting and something that you could do in a live venue that you couldn’t do in a film–maybe there would be a song that the different characters would sing together or take parts of. I was kind of intrigued by it and I began the process of thinking about how we would use theatrical traditions and conventions to distinguish the styles of the stories in the way that the film uses different cinematic styles. Then Jeff didn’t talk about it for a little while and he never said “Actually, Todd, that’s going to Twyla” but that is what happened and that was fine with me because I had plenty on my plate.
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Obviously, there is an enormous amount of Dylan songs featured in the film spanning his entire career–some of them heard in their original versions and some heard in versions sung by other artists. There are two choices that you made that I wanted to ask you about–one because of its surprising presence and the other because of its surprising absence. Although “Like a Rolling Stone” is arguably his most famous and iconic song, it isn’t heard at all in the film except during the end credits. On the other hand, you use “Pressing On,” a throwaway tune from the relatively unheralded album “Saved,” to sort of sum up his entire religious period instead of better-known tunes from that era like “Slow Train Coming” or “Shot Of Love”–what made you select a song that Dylan never really seemed to have much use for himself?
With “Like a Rolling Stone,” I just didn’t have a strong or fresh or new idea about how to use it in the storytelling of the film. In many ways, I wanted to make some unexpected choices in the songs. I was interested in balancing well-known songs with lesser-known songs because there are so many Dylan songs that it sort of gives an opportunity to create new covers of songs that are not well-known in the pantheon. It is true that “Pressing On” is hardly my favorite of Dylan’s gospel songs–there are some gorgeous songs that he wrote during that period–but I picked it purely for the narrative needs of the film at that point. I never really paid much attention to that song until I saw a live performance of it from 1980 that he used as an encore in his show. It started quietly and it kept building and building into this very rousing number. It helped move the story forward because it started quietly and surreptitiously at the end of Christian Bale’s speech and it keeps building and building.
What I like about it is that you think it is a joke and that we are just going to be laughing at this guy because of the way that Christian Bale looks when he appears as Pastor John with the Afro and the paunch and because of his motley collection of hippies and New Age types that is true to the kind of Christian scene that Dylan found himself in during the late 70's Then the song begins to build and grow and ultimately, its power and the power of the performance takes over and you can’t help but be roused by it as it moves us into the other stories.
Almost in every case, I had to make the hard decision to pick songs that were necessary for the narrative over my own personal preferences. But then, you have a song like “Going to Acapulco,” which I have always loved–that is the song that the guy with the white pancake makeup sings at the funeral–and it is also considered a throwaway from “The Basement Tapes” but it has this really poignant, almost melodramatic pain to it as well as this absurdity at the same time. I just thought that it was this gorgeous, overlooked song and I think that we made something really special out of it. Jim James from My Morning Jacket sings it and it ended up, just as a fluke, being one of his favorite Dylan tunes.
Do you see “I’m Not There” as a sort of continuation or companion film to “No Direction Home,” the Martin Scorsese documentary about Dylan’s early years?
“No Direction Home” uses the 1966 concert to bookend the early years of Dylan’s career up until 1966, which this film follows in many ways, but it takes it to two very important steps that aren’t in “No Direction Home.” One of those is one that I feel has a kind of open-endedness and that is the last story, the Billy story, which I don’t see fitting into one year or moment in Dylan’s life. It was spurred by Dylan’s motorcycle accident in 1966 in Woodstock–he settles there, cancelled all of his engagements and basically checked out of public life for years. He also, in my mind sort of checked out of modern life for years and lived the country lifestyle–he raised a family, went to the basement with The Band and recorded “The Basement Tapes” and really got into traditional music and roots music and eventually into country with Johnny Cash in 1968 on “Nashville Skyline.” That source of inspiration for him has never really gone away. He has continued to go back to that kind of music and appeared in Peckinpah’s film “Pat Garrett & Billy The Kid” and channeled the origins of the American popular song in all of its various forms via the two albums of traditional song covers that he did in the early 1990's. Even his current releases sort of sound like a 1920's blues band. He is always going back to the past and so in that last story, I wanted to open up that tradition and fascination that has continued to fuel him as he continues to get back on the train and do his touring throughout the world and his life of songs. The film also includes the Christian period, which is not in the Scorsese documentary. I’d love to see somebody do a “No Direction Home II” and continue because there is so much juicy stuff that followed 1966.
The one aspect of “I’m Not There” that has everyone who sees it talking is the performance by Cate Blanchett as the mid-1960's version of Dylan that is most familiar to us through the famous documentary “Don’t Look Back.” It is an amazing and completely convincing performance on virtually every level and I was curious at what point in the development of the script did you make the leap of thinking of her for the role.
That character, Jude, was always going to be played by an actress because I wanted to bring out the androgyny and physical strangeness of Dylan from 1966. I think that because it is such a famous moment in Dylan’s life, it sort of got frozen in time and you kind of forget how weird and shocking it must have been for people at the time to see him like this. He was half-man, half-woman and while he wasn’t androgynous in the way that David Bowie was five years later, he was almost more like how Patti Smith was androgynous ten years later. To me, it is the first moment of punk rock when Dylan plugged in for the first time–not because the sound was so loud and because of the physical strangeness of his appearance, but because of the physical hostility of the audience that he didn’t reject. He actually welcomed it and used it to fuel him further creatively. That, to me, is pure punk–when you use the sheer hostility and push everything to the next level as a result.
It didn’t take long of thinking of actresses to play the role to think of one of the very best that I could possibly work with, which was Cate. Despite how incredibly brilliant and bright and prepared she is as an actress, she is a really physical and intuitive performer as well and it needed both of those to have a visceral understanding of that moment in Dylan’s life. She was terrified but I urged her that that was a good thing. With all the expectations that the performance brings, because everyone has heard about it and they want to see it, it makes it even harder to get right into it but she does. She makes you forget that you are watching a woman playing the role.
link directly to this feature at http://hollywoodbitchslap.com/feature.php?feature=2303
originally posted: 11/21/07 00:00:55
last updated: 11/21/07 00:21:04
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