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Todd Haynes Takes on Bob Dylan
A moviemaker's long journey to bring the life of legendary musician Bob Dylan to the big screen results in the experimental I'm Not There
Todd Haynes directs Charlotte Gainsbourg on the set of I'm Not There.
After the enormous success of both Ray and Walk the Line, director Todd Haynes (Safe, Far From Heaven) shouldn’t have had any trouble making his Bob Dylan-inspired film, I’m Not There. Especially considering that he had put together a stellar cast that included Cate Blanchett, Christian Bale, Richard Gere and Heath Ledger and (even more amazingly) had secured the rights to all of Dylan’s music. But as anyone who has followed Haynes’ career might have guessed, his vision of how a Dylan film should look varied from what your average studio exec may have had in mind. Not only does the film eschew all conventional characteristics of a Hollywood biopic, but six different actors—Blanchett, Gere, Bale, Ledger, Ben Whishaw and an 11-year-old African American boy named Marcus Carl Franklin—portray Dylan, or some variation of him, during a particular period in his life. Fortunately for fans of adventurous cinema, Haynes eventually found backers who believed in the project, and on November 21st his unique vision finally hits theaters.
Just days after winning a Special Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival, MovieMaker caught up with Haynes at the Toronto International Film Festival to discuss how the experience of making this film was a difficult yet rewarding one.
Jason Matloff (MM): When did you first get the idea for I’m Not There?
Todd Haynes (TH): I started to think about Bob Dylan before leaving New York in 2000 to move to Portland, Oregon. First, I read some esteemed biographies on him, and when I was preparing to drive across the country, I made like a four-tape mix of his music to play on the road. I just wanted to be inside the car with Dylan for a long time.
Then, in Portland, I started to write it down and verbalize it and eventually I called Christine [Vachon, my longtime producer] and said, ‘I have this idea for a movie.’ I was kind of reluctant to even mention it, given our checkered history with music rights. (Haynes was not able to get permission to use The Carpenters’ music for Superstar or David Bowie’s for Velvet Goldmine.)
MM: That must have made you apprehensive about going forward with the script.
TH: Oh, absolutely. I told her, ‘This is like the longest shot we’ve ever taken on anything.’ The first thing she said was, “Don’t write it yet; let’s just see what happens.” We both basically assumed it would just be an exercise. We’d get to meet Jesse Dylan [Bob’s oldest son, whom Haynes and Vachon first approached with the idea] and that would be that.
MM: So there was no Plan B?
TH: No, because there wasn’t any way to do it without the music rights.
MM: Do you think that if you had approached Jesse (who is a moviemaker himself, having directed American Wedding and Kicking & Screaming) with a conventional biopic, we would even be having this conversation right now?
TH: I think he might have said, “Look Todd, you can give it a shot, but all I can tell you is he’s always said ‘No’ before.”
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This story was published in the Fall 2007 MovieMaker Magazine. The headline was:
How Many Roads Must A Man Walk Down
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