‘A Complete Unknown’: Recreating Greenwich Village in the Early ’60s — Including Bob Dylan’s Apartment

In recreating New York’s Greenwich Village in the early ’60s for the Bob Dylan biopic, “A Complete Unknown,” production designer François Audouy adopted as his mantra the fabled line from Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone”: “How does it feel?”

“ I felt a responsibility to get it right, not just copying the photos that I found in the coffee table books and whatever — the surface of it all — but getting below that,” Audouy told IndieWire. “I really wanted it to feel like something…as Bob Dylan says, ‘How does it feel?’ I became obsessed with this idea of Greenwich Village being this artistic community  of all these great artists, sculptors, and musicians in the middle of a metropolis, which was so beautiful because you had a square mile or whatever.”

The production designer explained that director James Mangold wanted to uncover the visceral texture and fixed-in layers that have since been sandblasted and scrubbed clean out of modern New York: “Gritty and grimy with peeling plaster and decaying walls and rust and soot and cigarette butts and trash,” Audouy said. Turns out they found that on the other side of the Hudson River in New Jersey, which looks more like New York than New York.

Production transformed Jersey Avenue in downtown Jersey City into the MacDougal Street of the era: “a main character” teeming with clubs, galleries, and cafes, all packed with poets, painters, and musicians feeding off of each other, with Dylan (Timothée Chalamet) as their pied piper.

‘A Complete Unknown‘Searchlight Pictures

Thus, the MacDougal Street of “A Complete Unknown” was fitted with storefronts and dressed for such legendary hotspots as The Kettle of Fish, Café Reggio, Café Wha, Don and Elsie’s Music Box, Minetta Tavern, and The Gaslight. “We mapped out everything that was there in the early ’60s,” added Audouy, “so that I was imagining the Village as being a petri dish bubbling over with these musical ideas and kind of like growing and infecting the East Coast and then the country.”

However, when the 19-year-old Dylan first arrived in New York in ’61 from Minnesota, the Village still had a ’50s vibe, which Audouy emphasized in a production design note to Mangold. “When you leap into another decade, it takes a while, there’s overlap,” Audouy continued. “But it’s phenomenal how much change happened in the ’60s. And  I think that a lot of designers, who try to recreate the [decade], fall into the trap of generalizing the ’60s and not getting specific to the nuances of what happened from year to year, which we had fun conveying [through the sights and sounds].”

However, in 1965, there’s a palpable change in aesthetic that we notice when Dylan walks down MacDougal Street. “He’s hearing all of these sounds and there’s been a shift that’s happened and it was exciting,” Audouy said. “It’s actually like a cruising altitude. But Bob was in tune with something on another level. I think he was very connected, almost spiritually, to what was happening in America at that time. And we show that in the movie [when he pivots from acoustic folk to electric rock].”

Meanwhile, the center of Dylan’s burgeoning creativity was his first apartment on 4th Street in Manhattan (the interior of which was built on a soundstage). The cramped space featured a small bedroom, a kitchenette, and a living room with a fireplace and two windows. But it was brimming with layers of detail, courtesy of set decorator Regina Graves.

‘A Complete Unknown’Searchlight Pictures

“There are all of these little references from things that are happening all around him,” added Audouy, “and that was really fun to capture with his apartment. I don’t think I’ve ever obsessed about a small set to that dev level in my entire career.”

Fortunately, they had access to photo shoots of Dylan’s apartment (including 200 unpublished photos from famed Dylan photographer Ted Russell). “That was kind of neat seeing photos that had never been seen before,” Audouy said. “ We recreated everything in those photos. The exact wingback chair that he had, we found the same record player [1950s Decca], the right typewriter [954 Olivetti Lettera 22], stuffed animal, the art on the walls, the books, the records.”

 The goal was to create a completely immersive space. Everything was interactive and worked when plugged in, including the stove and plumbing. Audouy said you could even run a bath. “And because we had a backing and we built the neighbor’s buildings, the effect was really transportive when you opened the door into Bob Dylan’s apartment. It was like stepping into a time machine.

“And everything in that space had meaning and nuance,” he added, “speaking to the backstory of this kid who arrived in New York and was living in his first apartment, and didn’t know how to make coffee, and was ordering Chinese food from downstairs. And so this time machine effect was really helpful for Timmy to put on the apartment like a costume and to inhabit it like an extension of himself.”