A Complete Unknown is set in New York City in 1961 against the backdrop of a vibrant music scene and tumultuous cultural upheaval. Bob Dylan, an enigmatic 19-year-old from Minnesota arrives with his guitar but little money, and changes the course of American music through his unique songwriting talent.
Directed by James Mangold, the feature stars Timothée Chalamet in the lead role, with Elle Fanning playing his girlfriend Sylvie. Edward Norton plays Pete Seeger, a folk singer who quickly recognizes Dylan's talent and begins introducing him to others in the music community, including rising star Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro). As Dylan's popularity rises and musical style shifts, he finds himself at odds with his own identity and what others expect from him.
Mangold (pictured above), whose credits include Girl Interrupted,
Walk The Line,
Ford V. Ferrari and
Indiana Jones and the Dial Of Destiny, assembled a familiar team that included cinematographer Phedon Papamichael (
Walk the Line,
The Descendants, Nebraska, Ford V. Ferrari) and editor Andrew Buckland, ACE, (
Ford V. Ferrari, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny). Here, the director shares his experience working on the film, the knowledge he brought with him from
Walk the Line, and the challenges this project presented.
This film has the feel of New York and Rhode Island. What did the shoot actually entail?
“We hardly left New Jersey. We were predominantly on location and on stages…The town of Newport was played by Cape May, NJ. The actual bandstand in that was built much closer to home on a baseball field in central New Jersey.”
How long was the shoot?
“Honestly, I think it was about 55 days.”
There are very few scenes without Bob Dylan in it. Did that present a challenge from a shooting standpoint?
“Yes. Although in the beginning of the movie, I saw it as a kind of tapestry. Just to review it: Scene 1 is Bob arriving in town. Scene 2 is Pete at a courthouse. Scene 3 is Bob getting to the hospital alone and then running into Pete. And now those two characters are braided together. Now you've got Bob and Pete going to Pete's cabin, where he lives, and introducing him to his family. And you have Pete taking him to one of his own concerts, and letting Bob stand in the wings and watch. And from there, you cut and meet Joan Baez in a scene on her own. And then you watch her take the stage, and then you reveal that Bob and Pete are in the audience. So now we've kind of braided all three of those principles together. So I saw it as a kind of A/B, A/C, A/B/C kind of pattern.
“But yes, it's the story of Bob Dylan. And Timmy is in almost every scene. That is for damn sure.”
Phedon Papamichael was your cinematographer, and you’ve worked with him before?
“I think on eight movies - not just in the past. We have an extensive collaboration.”
This film is set in the 1960s, but was shot using Sony’s Venice digital cinema camera. Was the look created in-camera or fine tuned in post?
“Well, I don't accept the notion that to make a movie about the ‘60s, you have to literally use ‘60s technology. But, the reality is, we did in many ways. We used the Sony Venice primarily because the chip is so astoundingly sensitive that we could shoot at a fairly high f-stop and get deep focus in scenes, and at the same time, not having to pump the set with light. We could shoot at twilight or even at the fading points of light and get exposure, and have a reasonably great looking shot.
“But we also used entirely ‘60s-era anamorphic lenses, shooting the film as Phedon and I did on Indiana Jones and on Ford V. Ferrari and Walk the Line, and those lenses have a more dominating effect on how the image resolves and how it feels using prime anamorphic lenses. he kinds of flares you get. The kinds of focus deviations you get. The softening and vignetting around the edges. All of it produces much more dramatically. It's the modern kind of computer-built lenses that have that shrill kind of super-sharp feeling that I think fights a period look or feel more than anything else. Also, our digital images were then put on film and then re-scanned back for distribution…So the grain you feel is not simulated grain but for real.”
Was that the reasoning behind it? The fact that you wanted to have authentic grain feel?
“It was a frustration I had on Indiana Jones, which is, we added grain digitally, and I felt like it never felt authentic. I don't think anyone's come up with the kind of box by which you can create grain that is as analog and beautiful as the real thing to be honest.”
Talk about your editing team. You’ve worked with Andrew Buckland in the past to much success. What about Scott Morris?
“Scott was new. I found that they divvied up sequences, so there were a couple reels that were mostly Scott, or reels that were mostly Andrew. They obviously they didn't know each other when it began, so they found their own footing with each other and how they worked, and I think they became quite close and really enjoyed the process together.
“The reasoning for me with two editors is: A - I'm a big believer in getting the best movie as quickly as possible. I love the studio I made the movie for, but nonetheless, proof of concept is your best defense in getting the movie intact out into the world. What I mean by that is getting the cut together as soon as possible is most important. And to me, the idea of kind of having something sloppy by the time I show them a cut is not doable. On other movies, I've had three or more editors. To me, it's just about allowing an editor to lean into a scene so that they can produce a first cut, get notes, investigate further. Then we get to see the whole movie strung together. Now we know what we need to be. What beats are less clear or less cohesive, or less coherent in this in it, and how can we shift the emphasis in the cut to kind of try and lean into the things we feel like we need to say?
“All those things require passes and re-passes and repasses on material. What happens if you have a single editor on a movie is, until that editor has gotten to the end of the entire picture and every scene is cut, they really can't afford to be doubling back and looking at a scene. I also have a very beloved habit of cutting while shooting, because I'm discovering how to best shoot the film when I'm seeing the performances start to come together, and where I'm kind of best serving these actors and where I'm failing them. And that's only revealed when you start to see the pieces put together. So, as much as it was exhausting writing and directing the movie, and producing it along with my producing partners, the part that was most exhausting was that I returned from a full day on the set to a two- or three-hour session with my editors on the links like this.”
How often were you able to check in with them?
“In particularly intense periods, it's daily. Even if it's just for ten minutes to look at something and give them some feedback. It's really important that we find the vernacular of the film and some of that you can discuss in advance, but some of it you can only learn putting the pieces together.”
Did your experience directing Walk the Line make you that much better prepared for a film like this?
“I like to think so. I think I'm always learning, but it definitely gave me the confidence when it came time to talk about the production plan for this movie, which started honestly, six years ago, that that I felt fairly confident about the actors singing. There were people who were nervous about that. And to me, I was much more nervous about the idea of hearing an actor speaking the role in their normal voice, but whenever they sang, that some other disembodied voice (would) be coming out of their mouth. That seemed inconceivable to me, particularly in a movie about a musical form that's entire value is based on its authenticity and its earnestness, and not necessarily on its sonic or pitch perfection. The idea that I'd be hamstringing my actors, who would have to be kind of ventriloquist dummies with a pre-engineered recording seemed wrong…In this movie, it's not only the actors singing, but incredibly, almost all the time, it's the actors singing live on the set of the show.”
It looked like Timothée Chalamet is playing the guitar too?
“Yes, he is!”
Was music licensing a challenge?
“All I can tell you, on a business level, is the common thing, which we did of Walk the Line, and we did again on this one is, on Walk the Line, when you made the life rights deal with Johnny Cash, we made a blanket agreement for access to the music for a really low licensing fee, which I think was like ‘two plus two’ with the Johnny Cash tracks. But we obviously never needed to license the recordings because we weren't doing the recordings. We just need to license the publishing. And then we made our own recordings. It does it does help when your lead musician is, in a sense, taking a very aggressively sympathetic price for their music.
“I'll give you an example: When we made Walk the Line, Johnny gave us the tracks for, you know, $2,000 a song, right? So then we, you know, we had to get the rights to ‘It Ain't Me Babe,’ because of him Joaquin and June, sing that in Walk the Line. The music department at Fox at that time was like, ‘No! There’s no way you're going to afford that song. And we called Bob Dylan's people. I think it was still Jeff Rosen back then, and he asked Bob Dylan whether he'd approve it and how much they should ask for it. The message from Bob Dylan came back: ‘How much is Johnny getting? I'll take whatever Johnny's getting.’ So that meant that we got the Bob Dylan track for two grand, so then (we) could turn around and now approach all the other musicians and songwriters whose songs are in the movie and go, ‘Well, Bob Dylan and Johnny Cash are only asking for two grand a song.’ (It’s) not unlike making deals with actors on movies. It really helps when your leads take a cut and that was very much how we worked on this film. We got all of Bob's music between ‘61 and ‘65 just carte blanche in the deal.”
Just the publishing, not the recordings?
“We didn't need the recordings, but the deal included both, frankly. But we didn't use the recordings because it's Timmy. We can license our recordings, for example, to someone for money now.”
What were the visual effects needs for this film and who handled the work?
“The guys in Australia - Rising Sun Pictures - did nearly everything, and they did a great job. Rising Sun also worked on Indy with me, and they did a lot of the street extensions and crowd replacement in the New York sequences in that movie. They were really aggressive and helpful and creative about this movie, which was obviously a much lower budget…We obviously couldn't afford to have more than 150 to 200 extras on-set any given day, so the crowd extensions - the sense that Newport or Carnegie Hall or wherever where you feel the crowd in the balcony, and as far as the eye can see - that was the very hard-to-spot but beautifully-done work of our visual effects artists.
“Duplicating the key. You just have to fill the first six or seven rows, where you're really going to see the detail of the of the people's faces. But it's not so simple. I mean, when they're cheering and booing and throwing things, and all those people all the way out to the 85th row have to be animated and dressed, so it's a huge effects undertaking, although obviously not an effects picture per se.”
Did the film come together as you had imagined?
“Well, you never know quite what the tone in the movie is going to be, but I always felt as I was writing it, that the story was really warm and sweet. I don't think this is what people would expect. I think they think a movie about Bob Dylan is going to be nothing but attitude and kind of a distance or chilliness in a way. And it wasn't like I was trying to inject it into the movie. I felt like telling this story of this vagabond arriving in New York, creating a new identity for himself, $10 in his pocket in a moleskin notebook with some songs written in it, and a guitar case. There was a real romance to the way he ascends and his genius asserts itself in this world. I really felt once we started rehearsing and shooting, that that kind of emotionality, kind of sweetness that these characters all had. They have attitude, they have egos, but they don't know that they're making history. They have no idea. They just know that they're into music and love it, and it's the only thing that makes them understand themselves in the world. There's a romance and a beauty to that that I think I may fill in some of the shadows that people kind of label the enigmatic or mysterious Bob Dylan. I don't really think he's so enigmatic. I think he's just really gifted artist and that his art is so powerful and his poetry so magnificent that of course we always want more. But he has to protect himself like anyone. He can't give us 24 hours of himself. We view that as some kind of wall, but that's in a modern context. I think the idea that someone opens up as much as he has and then shuts the door and goes back to work is actually normal. What's abnormal to me is the way we conduct ourselves now…Every time we go to the store to buy a melon, it becomes an Instagram post.”
What's next for you James?
“I don't know. This this movie coming into station is the end of my known universe. I have obviously things I'm working on, but I don't know what's next. And I'm excited. I'm excited to have my own enigmatic moment of mystery now.”