Calling Timothee Chalamet "obsessive" pisses A Complete Unknown director James Mangold off

James Mangold, director of A Complete Unknown, has used a new interview with The Hollywood Reporter to rail against one of his major pet peeves. That is, the idea that Timothée Chalamet was "obsessive" when it came to playing Bob Dylan. "Can I say that stuff pisses me off? The whole, 'Did everyone have to call you Bob?' Because it’s not obsessive," Mangold protests. "If I were managing a baseball team, and I had a pitcher and we were in the fucking World Series, do I want him fucking walking down a hallway with a hundred people going, 'Orel!' No, I want him fucking focused. I want him thinking about his fastball. I want him thinking about his job."

The filmmaker continues, "That’s what we’re here to do. We’re not here to sign autographs. We’re not here to entertain. We’re here to make a fucking movie about a character and the shit-ton of judgment going to be leveled on that young man’s shoulders. Any level of focus that he’s asking of himself, to me, should be honored and not called obsessive. It’s called doing your fucking job. That’s just my two cents on that."

Whew! Clearly that had been weighing on Mangold for a while. For his part, Chalamet doesn't even seem to know where the whole "he has to be called Bob" rumor came from, nor was he trying to be a Method actor for A Complete Unknown. However, he does cop to becoming "as deeply obsessed and a fan of and moved by" Dylan's music as he was for his longtime favorite artist, Kid Cudi. Mangold suggests they've "slogged through this" repeated story of Chalamet's obsessive commitment to the role (though certainly there haven't been any Jared Leto-esque stories circulating from the set). Nevertheless, Chalamet does describe his process in pretty fervent fashion. 

"It’s the furthest I’ve stretched myself. And it became so biblical to me in terms of this man’s life and his work that I felt if I let my focus err for a second, that I’d be self-loathing about it for years to come," Chalamet says. "I had three months to play Bob Dylan and the rest of my life I don’t get to be about that, so why not give it my all?"