Director Todd Haynes is no stranger to making films about musicians. His previous credits include "Velvet Goldmine" (1998), based on the life and career of David Bowie, and "Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story" (1987).
His latest film, "I'm Not There," is an unconventional biopic about folk legend Bob Dylan. The work is notable for using six different actors - including a female (played by Cate Blanchett) and a black teenager (Marcus Carl Franklin) - to play various aspects of Dylan's persona.
Haynes spoke to the Daily in a conference call about some of his goals and rationales for the film.
Question: Were you afraid of people thinking it was gimmicky to have six different people playing Bob Dylan - and also having a female actress playing Bob Dylan?
Todd Haynes: People can think its gimmicky, and then they have to go see the movie ...
The amazing thing about it is whatever kind of cleverness or stunt aspect of it you might have expected, particularly in performances like Cate Blanchett's or Marcus Carl Franklin's - at least from what I continue to hear from people who have seen the film - is that that just disappears, and it suddenly makes complete sense that a woman would be playing Dylan in 1966 and 1967 in his electric period, and that it was actually revealing something that you might have forgotten about his physical state at that time.
It's such a famous moment in Dylan's life that I think we all forget how strange it must have been for people in that era to see this spindly body and this mass of hair and these strange, affected gestures that are definitely androgynous and unusual.
It was always going to be a woman playing Jude. I really wanted to unlock the shock value that I think has faded over time.
Q: Here's a story about Bob Dylan, but you don't really find out very much about Bob Dylan personally, because these are all different characters. Was it conscious to lead us into familiar situations and show a little bit, but not give us a complete picture of Dylan because that's kind of his nature, too?
TH: I feel that each of the places he occupied creatively in his life - that each of these stories tries to evoke - really were complete commitments. They weren't evasive in and of themselves. He would go deep to the core of whatever he was doing at whatever point in time. His music always took precedence over his life.
By letting the music and the creative imagination be the leading directives in my approach - but also paying attention to how his life always followed and in many ways mirrored what he was doing creatively - I felt I really was getting to the core of him. It just isn't a singular story. We as a culture, or just as human beings trying to comprehend things, have a harder time not being able to find a through-line and a kind of single narrative shape to biographies or to lives of artists. Which is why the dramatic tradition of biopics, for instance, finds the need for teleology, like, "This caused this," and "That's why this happened," and something that happened in an artist's childhood has basically determined their entire course. Documentaries about these same artists don't do that, because those things don't really exist. They're constructed by the narrative and fictional need.
I decided I wasn't going to oppose that as a whole in this film - that the individual stories all have their arcs and their peaks and their conflicts that are quite clear - but the way that they change and the overall form that they take is more complex than that and less reducible to a single story.
You kind of just have to go with it. The best way to enjoy it is like it's taking a drug, or having a dream, or getting inside a great Dylan record.
Q: What has Bob Dylan's reaction to this film been?
TH: He hasn't really been involved in any of the details of the film. In the very beginning, I wouldn't even have considered going forward with the concept if I wasn't going to get music rights from Dylan - and he gave us full rights for this project. I think he would only have sanctioned something unorthodox and something that was open, not something closing down or narrowing down what he was about.
I think he's just so tired of being defined and put on a pedestal. And maybe that the film also had a little bit of irreverence in it and wasn't just worshipful; I think that actually is something he finds refreshing.
And all we know now is that Dylan has a copy of the movie on DVD in his suitcase on his tour, but we don't know if he's watched it.
Q: As a director, what were your goals for "I'm Not There," and do you feel you've accomplished them?
TH: My goals for "I'm Not There" were high and mighty, because I had this unbelievably famous, loved, popular American artist, and his massive, beguiling, rich and varied body of work to put into a movie for the first time in a dramatic context.
For me, it's always about trying to get to the core of what these people did creatively and why that creative output made such an impact on their life and times, as opposed to, "Oh, what was his nature as a personality?" and, "What was his romantic story?" So it was really about getting inside not only the music and his imagination, but also the times of the '60s.
That's definitely a tall order, but I made a pact with myself that I was going to allow it to be complex and combustive and kind of explosive. Like the music and like the period, I also wanted it to be fun and full of emotions, desires and experiments that were thrilling [and] dangerous. In that way, I think I did, I made the film I set out to make.
I didn't really know how today's world, which is very different from the '60s, would respond to it. So far, I've been kind of blown away: I just didn't think people would be quite ready for it, but it's been met with a real openness.
