Then Bob Dylan looks at you in the eye and says: “I never had the intention of becoming a folk singer.”
What is that, again?
James Mangold, director, coguionist and co -producer of “a complete unknown”, had several long meetings with the musical icon while working in the script of the film about him. Mangold hoped to confirm some things (yes, “Masters of War” was Written in response to the crisis of Cuban missiles), but mainly to understand the composer of the Hall of Fame in a deeper way than standard research could produce. But sitting with the man himself was a bit discouraging, without knowing what Dylan's reaction would be to his draft.
However, says the director, “I had a great time. It was not a kind of meeting in Yalta. I was very happy to talk about this time. And the questions he was asking were less driven by the agenda than a biographer to obtain that final appointment; I was there to understand. Then, these became extended conversations about this period in their life, which I think had enough distance to be really honest. “
That period in the cinema enters the four years between Dylan's arrival in New York and his epic presentation of the 1965 Newport Folk Festival.
James Mangold sat down with Bob Dylan (played by Timothee Chalamet) to have an idea of the iconic musician before making “a complete stranger.”
(Macall Polay/Searchlight Pictures)
The composer was not beautiful about his own work; For the scene in which the Dylan screen (Timothée Chalamet) presents “Masters of War” in a popular club, “opened to that page [of the script] And he said: “You don't need these verses. ' And he just put XS through them. “
By adapting Elijah Wald's book “Dylan becomes an electric! Newport, Seger, Dylan and the night they divided the sixties”, Mangold and co -guy Jay Cocks rejected what the director calls the focus of the “biography of the cradle to The bioavia “. Mangold believes that Dylan himself wanted to understand that period in his life, especially the anger caused by him playing with a rock band in the Newport Brouhaha. That narrow approach left space for the moments lived.
Mangold says that movies can “give you a palpable feeling of a moment among humans. I really wanted to see their interactions, rivalries, love, fears and the music that occur, all in a way that you [feel] They did not know that history was being made. They did not know the cultural impact that the songs would have. I wanted the audience to feel that, innocence.
“Some people could react if I talk about innocence with a character as hyperintelligent as Dylan. The discussions about him revolve around an idea of him as manipulator or enigma. I think that's half. But I think that much of that is what have retroactively decided. I think those skills, images creation, identity creation, art creation, were acquired in the period we are seeing, instead of arriving with them. “
(Christina House/Los Angeles Times)
That gives dimension to the title of the film, beyond being of Dylan's iconic song, “Like a Rolling Stone” (“How do you feel / be alone / without direction at home / like a stranger / like a rolling stone” ), in itself a key brand in the Dylan Going Electric timeline, beyond what a new child means in the city, entering the business. Mangold places the reinvention of Minnesotan Robert Zimmerman, 19 years old on his arrival in New York in 1961 in one of the movie's posts. His anonymity gave him the freedom to redo to whoever we believe was.
If “a complete stranger” “were a fiction film,” says Mangold, “it would be a very sensible story about a stranger in the city, creating a new name, knowing the sick king and his first lieutenant, entering his world as a Nobody world and then revealing a talent level by which sudden self -invention.
“I think of Dylan's trip in life, which has been a series of reinventions, successful explosions, then exhausting that and reinvention again. So he seemed really happy to focus on a movement of his life that way. “
But what led Dylan to that other pole, to merge people with the upstart rock to the extreme disgust of their guardians? You can find clues in that comment about never with the intention of becoming a folk singer, evoking that classic version of the first Bob Dylan, as when he returned to the festival without his rock band, with only his acoustic guitar, and was applauded in Newport .
“'If I could have arrived in New York and get a band, that would have been incredible,” says Mangold, informing Dylan's words, “but this is what happened. Just like an actor who ends on a television show Or in the movies, this is the concert I got in bankruptcy.
“It's not that I didn't want to be a solo artist; is that it was not conceived as only A solo artist. He said: 'It's really just being a solo act. You come there alone. You are alone in the green room. You are alone on stage. There is no one to look at. He would be jealous of the camaraderie he saw in people who had bands. ”
Mangold shows this through the admiration on the Dylan screen of Johnny Cash and the Tennessee Three, and the way he illuminates when his eventual bandmates transform their sound.
“It means that his decision to become electric or having a band was not purely, 'I'm going to put folk music in his head.' He was a personal yearning, in opposition to an intellectual decision on the direction of his art,” says Mangold.
So what was Dylan's general version about the project?
“He saw my effort as trying to be loyal to the reality of the historical and also loyal situation to the duty to do something good, juicy, attractive and grabbing. Because without the second part, without the fact that it is maintained, you never have the audience. There is a magic that occurs in which you get a greater understanding through the power of history and the drama of how these people felt that if you were only listing the dates and facts. “
