The following is a transcript of a telephone conversation I had with director Todd Haynes in 2008 about his movie, I’m Not There, a kind of fantasia about Bob Dylan. It was done for the Asahi Shimbun’s English language edition and, thus, has never been made available online. The article itself was much shorter and contained only a few brief quotes. (I have appended it to the transcript) With the recent release of Haynes’ Velvet Underground documentary, I thought people might be interested in reading what he had to say about Dylan. But, in any case, if you haven’t seen the movie you should. It really is a trip.
-How have you felt about the reception so far?
I’m happy. It’s received good notices amidst a crowded and generally high-quality movie season.
-Was that helped in any way by Dylan’s own resurgence as an artist?
There’s no question. The general interest in Dylan never goes away, but it’s compounded by the quality of work he’s put out recently, starting with his last three releases, and then the book and the radio show. He’s been conveying a crazy generosity in the quality of his work. It’s the radio show and the book to me, indicating the Dylan who is there to stand for the history of American popular music in all its various forms, and as somebody who still wants to act as a link to the earliest traditional music and even contemporary music.
-We can’t hear the radio show in Japan.
That’s too bad. The songs are so great and it’s so cool how much time he’s obviously put in, with a staff of writers, and his own taste, and how much time he’s put into talking between and setting up the songs and sharing really cool kernels of wisdom and stories about each artist. And it’s yet another character: this droll, witty old-timer. [mimics Dylan’s voice introducing Leadbelly and Blur].
-I’m sure he’s riffing on the DJs he listened to as a kid, too.
Exactly.
-What was your first impression of Dylan?
I don’t really remember a first time of actually hearing his voice. Those songs were in the culture of the American Jewish Community Center in Los Angeles where I grew up. I remember “Blowing in the Wind” being played in a circle alongside “Silver and Gold” and falling into that great tradition of American folk songs that became part of the new left of the 60s and was already making its way into places like that. But it was high school where I discovered the singer and the artist, and fell in love with his music and his whole persona and character and style. One of my best friends in high school was Elizabeth McGovern, the actress, and we were soulmates. And I remember her saying once, If you could look like anybody other than yourself, who would it be? And I remember picking Dylan. Because that was a cool look, even in the mid-70s.
-How did your feelings about him change over the years?
I kind of stopped listening to his music for about 20 years. I didn’t stay on top of his releases through the 80s and 90s. I never outright rejected him. I was just moving on to different kinds of music and different genres. It’s what made this strange season at the end of the 90s, at the end of the millennium so interesting and surprising, when I found myself craving him deeply, and needing to hear that music. And I know now how much that was an indicator of changes in my life that would materialize shortly thereafter. A need for a real radical change in my life and a break from my 15 years in New York City. I drove cross-country at the very beginning of 2000 to get away from New York, to go to Portland where my sister lived, just to get away to write. I was writing my last film, Far From Heaven. But my daily, hourly obsession was Dylan, and it kept growing and involving reading biographies again and discovering interviews I’d never read before. And discovering all that amazing music that had never been officially released. And it was in that new climate that I latched on to this idea of him as a shape-shifting artist, and suddenly had this craving to make a film about it, and to address that practice of constant defining change in the concept of these multiple characters.
-How much of that was pure nostalgia?
I don’t think it was nostalgia at all, unless it was nostalgia for my own adolescence. There’s something about Dylan’s fearlessness as an artist and creator that defines even his best studio recordings that there were very few examples of and which condoned a sense of change as a positive thing. And I needed that much more in my later years, when change is no longer simply the definition of your future as a young person but actually as something scary because it’s an uprooting of all that you’ve done to define yourself. I needed an uprooting and I went to somebody who’d been doing it so well for so long.
-When did you come up with the concept of the movie?
It was during that time, but I can’t put my finger on a eureka moment. My conceptual centerpiece of the film is almost banal, this idea of Dylan as someone who is always changing, particularly in the 60s and the 70s. And when you think about it, even the things for those people who don’t know much about him at all, what they do know are these events that are events of radical change and disappointment, like plugging in electric. These are the myths that never die around him, but they come from an actual practice that he was exploring in every possible way. So when you really look at it I don’t feel like I was inventing anything, let alone imposing something on his story or his biography. Just trying to get something core about him as a person.
-It’s interesting in that regard to compare your movie to this whole slew of musical biopics right now, which attempt to provide some verisimilitude.
In fact, the reason those kinds of films receive a lot of criticism, especially from critics and also from filmgoers who still go to see them, like myself, but who groan at the conventions, is that it isn’t verisimilitude at all.
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