With ‘A Complete Unknown,’ James Mangold Makes Movie — and Music — Magic Again

Some directors are good with music. James Mangold is one of them. Back in 2006, “Walk the Line” scored five Oscar nods and won Best Actress for Reese Witherspoon as June Carter Cash. (Joaquin as Johnny Cash lost to Philip Seymour Hoffman in “Capote”). A hard-drinking Johnny Cash (Boyd Holbrook) makes a memorable appearance in “A Complete Unknown” (in theaters December 25 from Searchlight), Mangold’s latest music movie, this time focused on the four-year origin myth of Bob Dylan, from his arrival in New York at age 19 in 1961 to his going electric at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965.

Mangold is returning to his bent for more personal filmmaking (Best Picture Oscar nominee “Ford v Ferrari”) after tackling 2023 franchise entry “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny” for Steven Spielberg. The writer/director spoke to me on Zoom during his global press tour for “A Complete Unknown,” which has earned upbeat reviews, especially for Timothée Chalamet.

On the awards circuit, Chalamet could follow his Best Actor Oscar nomination for “Call Me By Your Name” with a second, while Mangold and Jay Cocks are in the running for Adapted Screenplay; Mangold was nominated for Adapted Screenplay for “Logan” but has never made it into the Best Director circle. So far “A Complete Unknown” is landing with awards groups, nabbing the same three Golden Globe and Critics Choice Award nominations for Chalamet, supporting actor Edward Norton, and Best Motion Picture Drama/Picture; Elle Fanning won Best Supporting Actress from the National Board of Review, and the film made it to both the NBR and AFI Top Ten.

This Zoom interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and brevity.

‘A Complete Unknown’©Searchlight Pictures/Courtesy Everett Collection

Anne Thompson: Did you hear Zane Lowe’s unfettered interview with Timothée?

James Mangold: It was remarkable. I love him. He’s a remarkable young man. Our journey on this movie has been five-and-a-half years. We met for the first time in 2019 at the Toronto Film Festival. I had just gotten my hands on the Elijah Wald book and Jay Cocks’ script. And there was a project in turnaround from HBO, and I had heard Timmy was interested in it. That was a home run idea. I had only a week ago just heard about the material, found out Timmy was in Toronto while I was there. So on the day that “Ford v Ferrari” premiered, I met with him there and told him how I saw the movie working in the most abstract sense.

Do you remember that pitch?

The simplest version was using “Amadeus” as a template. The way to structure this was to use the supporting cast to see the effect that genius has on them and to try to understand Bob through each of their eyes, instead of trying to crack him in the classic Freudian sense that he would have some big scene in the third act where he confesses some secret that everyone’s been waiting for, which from all my research, I’m not sure there is one. [Timmy] was excited, and he was thrilled. The fact that I made “Walk the Line” gave him confidence. He’s also a quick decision-maker and an instinctual actor. We decided to do this together, and I went to work revising the script.

How big a Dylan fan were you at that point?

The project didn’t come from me being a Dylan fan. I’ve listened to Dylan all my life, and like many people have gone in and out… listening to him non-stop, and then I have to take a rest, and then a year later, another wave of Dylan comes into my life. I wasn’t walking around going: “I’ve got to make a Bob Dylan movie.” The idea of making a movie about any true-life person, alive or dead, is to know what part of their life you’re making a movie about [before] you start to assemble a birth-to-retirement or death storyline that is so sprawling that it rarely has thematic unity to it at all.

The book Cocks had adapted was focused on the road to the electric breakout?

Jay wrote many scenes that still survive in the movie now. But Jay went into 1965 quickly. And I wanted to watch this ascent, and there wasn’t any folk period in the early 1960s. He did introduce Woody [Guthrie, played by Scoot McNairy], but then you jumped forward. The idea of keeping Woody alive through the movie for visits mid-picture and at the end of the movie was another thing I felt was important, to keep him, literally and figuratively, alive through the movie as a primal touchstone for Bob.

Was Pete Seeger [Edward Norton] supposed to be what Dylan became? He was going to take over the folk mantle and be the popularizer of folk music, and he handed it to Dylan? Do you see it that way?

Edward Norton as Pete Seeger in ‘A Complete Unknown’©Searchlight Pictures/Courtesy Everett Collection

Not exactly. I deeply admire Pete Seeger. I learned to play banjo in high school, inspired mainly by Pete and Steve Martin, but it’s not controversial to say that Pete only wrote a handful of songs and was much more of a missionary and an evangelist for folk music. Then he was an iconic artist whose unique brand of folk music defined and lifted all folk music. His optimism and generosity and sense of lifting all other boats, as he did with Bob and Joan and many others, and his sense of causes, which he would attach himself to all the way to the end of his life with Toshi, his wife, saving the Hudson River, were who Pete was. Look at it this way: Woody Guthrie, singer-songwriter, auteur, prickly, difficult man, salt of the earth; Pete Seeger, more of an evangelist operator, expert communicator, who was lifting Woody’s work and all the others. And then into their world arrives this star that Pete Seeger recognizes, who has some of what Pete doesn’t have, youth and edge, and a songbook that is staggering, and Seeger recognizes the value of an artist like this and immediately embraces him and is rewarded with Dylan becoming the center, holding up the circus tent of folk music.

Did Dylan eventually betray Seeger?

Did Bob ever agree to anything? Did he take a pledge? I don’t think he’s betrayed. Must all marriages, even ones that are unofficiated, last forever? And these are the questions the movie asks. In our movie, in the first scene alone with Pete in a car, Bob is clear that he’s not necessarily drinking the same kind of purity; he doesn’t view things in the same clearly divided way. You know that he doesn’t see things as us vs. them. He admires Little Richard and Hank Williams and Johnny Cash, and these are all influences which he thinks are marvelous, and they play on the pop charts, and they have drums and keyboards and rhythm sections. Bob becomes what Pete suggests and excels at it as a solo artist.

‘A Complete Unknown’©Searchlight Pictures/Courtesy Everett Collection

You spoke with Dylan.

Dylan himself was clear to me that he never envisioned himself being a solitary artist on stage. That was not his kind of dream. So that’s why he came to pay homage to Woody, who also, by the way, played with many string bands and bands in his career. But that didn’t mean that all he wanted was to be the Bob Dylan that he became. Dylan’s break toward electric music or band music was something that he always wanted to do and it was actually a matter of how long he was going to hold himself back to maintain this kind of tribalism that had divided these two camps from each other. Also Johnny Cash played at Newport Folk Festival many times, and had no problem as they brought a complete band on the stage. So obviously their concern about Dylan was that he was a symbol of their music. Johnny was a country music star coming as a special guest, a novelty, but Bob was folk, and if Bob turned to something other than folk, the tent might collapse.

It struck Timothée that who Dylan was and what he represents is the exact opposite of what everything is today. The movie shows us not that he was pure but that he was true to his art.

I agree with Timothée’s observation. [Bob] wanted to paint, but he didn’t want to be the voice in your headphones at MoMA, when you look at the paintings, he didn’t want to have to explain his work. And I think we’ve only gotten worse in that we can’t look at mystery. Art is mystery. The power of art is that it could be read different ways by different people. That it is not journalism. And it is not a Wikipedia entry, and it is not a set of facts or bullet points or simple references, and that to point out what you’re doing is to cheapen your work, and that those of us like Timothée and myself who live in this modern era, we know that’s unavoidable. You have to do it. But Dylan avoided it. But I don’t think it was out of intellectual fortitude or artistic ethics. Dylan was uncomfortable with interviews and with explication of oneself and one’s intentions. It’s easy for one to take what could be the result of a social anxiety and make it an artistic dogmatic position. And I tried to write the script with Jay that tried to depict [Dylan] as someone who loved making, but he didn’t necessarily enjoy or find comfort or even could be unwound by this mass adoration. His goal was never gigantic adoration. His goal was always to send these missives out in the world and let people process them.

Timothée had to find that balance where he’s hooded, enigmatic, and mysterious but is also trying to draw you in while he’s keeping you out. It’s hard to pull off.

Yes, but I don’t think Timmy tried to keep us out. I don’t think that’s a way you can direct an actor. One of the most beautiful touches early in the film that Timothée did in one take that I circled immediately, was Elle Fanning and him are out on a date, and they’re walking by a subway station, and she writes her number on his hand, and then she kisses his cheek, and Timmy has this moment where he flinches as she kisses his cheek, almost like it scares him a little. It was a penetrating moment: What if this character is actually living with an element of fear and anxiety about social interaction and love and connection, that it’s scary for them? I had this theory that the best angle would be to play him so that the outside world and the sensory world is intrusive to him, and it’s a struggle for him to stay present, and that instead of assuming everything is an attitude or an edge, what if there’s social awkwardness and a lack of filter that makes him blurt out things that are resoundingly blunt to the point that they seem impolite? But where he exists is a space of extreme honesty that doesn’t work in our world; it comes off as rudeness.

I tried to find other ways to look at his behavior and encourage Timothée to examine them. For instance, we can call his making stories up about his past a lie, but we can also call it a wish, meaning that he wished he wasn’t a middle-class kid who grew up in comfort, the son of a man who owned a hardware store in Hibbing, Minnesota. He wished he came from the carnival and the rails and the dirt of the alleys like Woody Guthrie. And so those wishes becoming fantasies became legend, and I was trying to understand everything without assuming that he was this puppet master organizing this PR campaign of mystery and subterfuge, which I found slightly hard to believe.

His sexual and professional bond with Joan Baez [Monica Barbaro], who was a bigger star, goes on through the movie until he turns up in her hotel room playing guitar in the middle of the night and she kicks him out!

Joan was the one equal. Yes, they had different talents. Joan had a nightingale’s voice. She was a masterful guitar player. She had a perfection in her execution of her songs, but she only wrote a handful of songs. On the other side you had Bob, who was more of a wild card, who didn’t always sing, even on pitch, he was sloppy and slightly provocative and rambling in his stage presence. And so they’re completely opposite, but completely fascinating to one another, because, of course, the songs are springing from him like a fountain and how annoying that might be for Joan, that somehow this disheveled and semi-rude, rumpled genius, had no problem springing forth.

With songs that she wanted to sing.

They loved each other and were fascinated by one another. But it was unavoidable that there would be a slight competitive nature between them, and that each would covet something that the other had. Bob coveted her beautiful voice, her beautiful visage, her brilliant execution, and admired her stardom and her professionalism. And Joan admired the artistic volcano out of which these songs seem to spring.

You’ve said the movie isn’t political, but weren’t Dylan’s songs political in their time?

All movies are political, either directly or metaphorically. “Ford v Ferrari” is political. I wanted to represent all sides. But does it involve politics? Yes, not even just the obvious politics of the moment, but also the politics of what is music here for? Now, music is almost entirely about the self. We have very little music about our world, we sing entirely about our personal lives.

In preparing the music, you did pre-recordings, but once you were shooting, it became apparent that after years of pandemic and strike delays with time for practice, the live performances were better? Was that scary?

It was less scary for me than it was for my sound team and in the edit room. Recordings are more challenging in these different locations, wherein to get a quality recording of the guitar playing, banjo playing, and singing, you have trucks going by, random creaks and sounds. And I had to convince them I didn’t care, that we could fix them later. But there were myriad technical issues, like, “What if Timmy plays the song at one rhythm in one take and then increases by two rhythm beats the next take?” The truth was, he did; the rhythm does vary slightly, but you don’t feel it because the song is so alive. It was much ado about nothing compared to the gains we got by allowing him to do it. It was a process that was rolling. I let us do the first song live; that worked so well we tried it again with the next. And in a sense, we always held the pre-records back there as a backup, and as we rolled forward, we got better and better. The sound team figured out where to hide mics in [Chalamet’s] hair or his hat, or secret mics inside the guitar. Everyone adapted and suddenly developed a brilliant technique to make it all happen.

And you somehow got the period right. I grew up in New York in the ’60s and ’70s.

I was born in ’63 but I remember those streets, the smell of them, the pickle barrels, the wonderful collection of humanity. That later period, 1969, is harder because you could look like a road production of “Hair” if you don’t watch yourself. But this period, as Bob himself said, the early ’60s were an extension of the ’50s, and the late ’60s were the beginning of the ’70s. And the ’60s, according to Bob, didn’t really exist. There was a dividing line at ’65 and everything onward was a prologue to the ’70s. The big change occurred somewhere around the Newport concert, and the arrival of the Beatles and The Stones, and the worsening of the Vietnam War, and the assassinations, and Woodstock, became demarcations of of a dramatic cultural shift.

‘A Complete Unknown’Macall Polay

You recreated Greenwich Village in New Jersey?

One of the advantages we had by landing in New Jersey: for a lot of the street scenes, we found blocks that were still pretty much exactly as they were 60 years ago, and they just required a bit of dressing. If you tried to shoot this in New York, there’s not a single block we could even afford to shut down, given the five-star restaurants and businesses that would never agree to anything that didn’t give them each $100,000 a night to close. We shot a few days in New York, obviously, outside the Chelsea Hotel and the Supreme Court courthouse. But most of it was in New Jersey.

This is not a conventional narrative. How did you keep the audience invested in the story, even though it was basically a string of musical performances?

First of all, I viewed the musical performance as part of the scenes. I viewed the songs as part of the scene where the actors were acting, but on pitch. I had the same demands when they were singing as when they were acting without singing, which is that there always had to be a subtext. There always had to be dramatic tension, whether in the wings or between each other on the stage or with someone in the audience, that I never wanted it to just be wholly a recreation of a famous concert. Watching people sing is no different than when you’re doing an action sequence in an action picture: if there isn’t story development inside the action, or if there isn’t story development inside the song, then the song is a commercial break from the drama of the movie, and the movie unwinds.

In the film, Chalamet performs 40 songs, some are guitar or harmonica or radio fragments, including 26 whole songs. He prepared 30 songs, but you had to pick the ones that you put in the movie for a reason.

When I started writing, I was just dropping the songs where they went in. I was conscious of how the songs gained power as explications of his emotional state in the context of what was going on politically and emotionally for him at that time. So him singing “Song for Woody” couldn’t be more intentional. Each one of these songs were revealing another aspect of him, also a different energy.

Many of his songs were talking directly to the audience. Had that been done much before?

Folk music, at that point, existed as a world of covers. All popular music was primarily in [the early ’60s] people singing standards, even Coltrane and Davis, most of their albums were taking Rodgers and Hammerstein tunes, or “My Funny Valentine,” or taking popular melodies and bending them. What happened in the age of Dylan? The power of modern songwriting. Personal songwriting took over, and this idea that we only should sing songs that existed already, that have proven themselves with time, evaporated. And that’s what opened the door for Dylan’s descendants, because he was ready with a portfolio of insanely powerful original music.

This film is an antidote to what is going on in Hollywood. It is the opposite of franchise filmmaking, and while we know Dylan and his songs, this is a modest movie that celebrates a gritty authenticity that we don’t see much anymore.

I move between those worlds, and in some ways, they give me the license to drive and make these movies, and the wherewithal to put them together financially. And otherwise, these are a big risk for studios, especially if they’re going out theatrically. It’s a white elephant at this point that you have mainstream studios making original movies that don’t have a guaranteed audience, that rely upon execution in order to succeed. And I’m grateful to Searchlight and my friends at Disney for supporting me on this movie because it is a risk, and I miss these movies in the theater. And I grew up on 7’0s films, and so my style is, if anything’ more formed from the work of Mike Nichols and Alan Pakula and Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese and Sidney Lumet and William Friedkin and Bogdanovich, these are the movies I grew up on. And these were all extremely versatile filmmakers who moved from comedy to serious to fantasy to adventure, and there wasn’t this demand that we exist in a lane or a box. I feel that the work I do, moving from one to the other, is always additive, that I learned something about making a horror film that I bring to a musical biopic. I learned something making a fantasy film or a Marvel film that then becomes confidence in how to solve a problem in a dramatic scene.

Making a movie like this, finding a bunch of amazing, committed, passionate young actors who are all supporting each other, lifting each other, the environment and the camaraderie on the set was a real joy and we felt purpose, because we felt that this music was about a world in which art could change things, not by directly protesting, but by getting under your skin, by reminding you that we can look within and ask ourselves some of these questions about the direction our world is heading without hitting us over the head with a history lesson or shaming us, so that we could be inspired to think about what our world could be.

“A Complete Unknown” will be released in theaters December 25.