James Mangold Details His ‘Surprising’ Talk With Bob Dylan About ‘A Complete Unknown’: ‘He Didn’t Think That Was Offensive’ | Video

At the first public screening Wednesday for his Bob Dylan biopic “A Complete Unknown,” writer-director James Mangold revealed that despite having written the script, he “hadn’t really boiled it down in my own mind” until he finally talked about the project face to face with the music legend himself.

Fortunately, Mangold said during a Q&A after the screening, once he figured out how to explain it, Dylan was onboard. “Bob kind of smiled at me and and… I could tell he didn’t think that was offensive to him,” Mangold said.

“I finished this script, and then it kind of freaked out some of the people in Bob’s world, because it was exactly the very things… they told him not to get involved with that I was getting involved into,” Mangold explained. “And it’s not like there was verboten subjects, as much as just it was supposed to be about the music, not about other stuff, and, and I was all interested in the other stuff and how it was braided into the music.”

This was in very early 2020 — just before the COVID-19 pandemic, at which point “the chance of the movie happening suddenly went away, because there’s no way at a kind of mid to low budget we were going to make a movie in COVID.”

“It also happened that Bob Dylan’s tour got canceled. And apparently Bob kind of called this manager and said, you know, let me read this thing that’s got you guys all nervous,” Mangold continued. From there, he arranged to meet up with Dylan in what he described as “a totally locked down Los Angeles,” at “a lockdown coffee shop.”

“After kind of some very surprising, wonderful, charming, just kind of pleasantries he kind of goes, ‘So what is this movie about?” And what was most interesting to me is,” Mangold said, “it’s obviously kind of ironic that someone who’s kind of, the movie’s about their life, is asking what the movie’s about, but it also makes complete sense, like he’s an artist, and he knows you could make any number of six dozen movies about anyone’s life and and what he really want to know is, what are you doing? What are you after? What’s your agenda? Or what are you seeing?”

“At the core of this is what I took it as. And what was interesting is I felt like I had committed a kind of malpractice because I hadn’t really — and I usually had done this on movies — I hadn’t really boiled it down in my own mind until that moment with him looking at me,” Mangold continued.

“A Complete Unknown” tells the story of the controversy in the folk scene and within popular culture in 1965 when Dylan, the biggest star of the early 1960s folk revival, broke with that scene by embracing electric instruments and Rock music. And as Mangold tells it, he explained to Dylan that his concept for the film is that Dylan was a kid “suffocating in Minnesota, and he leaves behind his family and his friends and everything he knows, and goes to New York City and invents himself anew and becomes, blossoms, becomes successful, makes new family and new friends, and starts to suffocate [again].”

“And Bob kind of smiled at me, and I could tell he didn’t think that was offensive to him. And, and I felt hugely relieved, but it also felt like it was one of the ways that the several meetings with him actually helped me crystallize, you know, being able, as a writer and a director, to be able to share, even with your cast, that kind of way of looking at what the project is,” he continued.”

Watch Mangold’s comments below:

Written by Mangold and Jay Cocks, “A Complete Unknown” (the title comes, of course, from Dylan’s classic “Like a Rolling Stone”) stars Timothée Chalamet as Dylan, Edward Norton as Pete Seeger, Elle Fanning as Sylvia Russo and Monica Barbaro as Joan Baez. Based on the book “Dylan Goes Electric!” by Elijah Wald, it hits theaters Dec. 25.

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