I had barely stepped out of the first Toronto screening of I'm Not There when I got a call from the film's publicist asking me if I'd like to interview director Todd Haynes. Suffering through a cold, battling insomnia, and with no time to fully digest the film (let alone the meal I was trying to squeeze in), I of course jumped at the chance. Haynes lives in Portland, just a few hours from Seattle - practically a neighbor - but it took a Toronto junket to finally meet and interview the director of such films as Poison, Safe and Far From Heaven.
I'm Not There revisits territory similar to Velvet Goldmine, Haynes's portrait of a Bowie-like glam-rock star, but pushes the exploration of identity and public persona in the cultural landscape even farther by creating seven different characters (played by six different actors) to represent Bob Dylan, or at least different aspects of the singer from different stops along his musical evolution and ever-shifting identity. All of which he was happy to talk about in our too-brief conversation.
I'm Not There is not a literal biography. I guess you could describe it as impressionistic or metaphorical. Why approach Dylan in this way rather than with a literal historical biography?
I don't know if I believe there is such a thing as a literal historical biography. I do see that there is a kind of form that has become common to film that we now call the bio-pic, but I don't know that it has any relationship to reality or anything literal or historical. It seems to be a construct of the narrative form that has to find beats in a person's life to dramatize, events of the life that correspond to those moments of high and low and that have a relationship to their work. They are usually required to expose a certain amount of private history or conflict with drugs or philandering or something, and then show how that gets recovered or resolved. So to me, it's a formula, almost more nakedly so than other film genres because whatever the life is has to fit in this one package.
You fill the film with references - direct references to his life, indirect references to his work, cultural references - but I don't always know the referent. I don't know if Keenan Jones represents someone specific who made it his business to "out" the reality behind the persona that Dylan had created for himself, or if he stands in for the idea of the culture itself trying to tear him down after building him up.
I'm Not ThereProbably somewhere in between. He's not a specific person, but there was certainly a feeling from the press that I think Dylan began to personify in songs and in a sort of regard for the press that he started to feel was out to get him. And there is the famous Newsweek article that came out, earlier than it does in chronology where the Jude story lies, that did expose his middle-class Jewish upbringing before he was prepared for it. Although it's amazing that it wasn't exposed by the point of his very first release, because the evidence surrounding the guy is enormous.
And that's something you explore in with the film, that people were so taken with his persona that they never questioned it. It was at the moment that he defied their expectation that they start looking for reasons...
... To tear him down. Exactly! You're so right. It's so much about that sheer force of performance and self-projection into a new realm that's so fascinating and so startling that you go with it and you accept it at face value. And why not? We're always doing that anyway. What's more interesting is the way we attribute such markers of utter authenticity onto things that are so unbelievably constructed. I think authenticity can only exist after the fact, after you know what the signs of authenticity are. Bowie said: "It doesn't matter who did it first. What matters is who did it second." Because that's when you've collected the cues for what authenticity or what anything is and then you can identify it.
You make the point when Jude comes along and makes his switch to electric and the fans turn on him. They're so caught up in the form that they're not paying any attention to the content. They think that it's such a betrayal that they won't even admit that what he's singing about means anything.
Exactly. And yet, the thing that I love about that moment is how much meaning was ascribed to form. You know what I mean? In a way, I almost miss how much form connoted, how much acoustic meant "this," and any rock and roll music whatsoever meant commercial. Just to have such faith in those designations, to believe so intensely about them, just meant that people had such a need to believe in things and to find meaning in things. It's an extreme case, but I worry sometimes about that kind of leveling of all meaning, where anything is everything and nothing can rouse a concern. When you watch the Bush administration take our entire progressive culture away from us, or our ethical culture away from us, or the culture of checks and balances or habeas corpus or things that you never thought you'd have to defend in your life, what's at stake is sometimes diminished. People don't even know how to react anymore when something that fundamental is stripped.
You recreate the "Judas" moment with a character named Jude. Did you choose the name for that echo?
[Laughs] Yes, there is that echo there.
Why Cate Blanchett in the role?
Oh, she's just the best, she's just one of the great actresses working today who would have been able to play this Jude at this particular moment in Dylan's evolution. I knew I wanted a woman to play the role and there are a lot of great actresses out there, but I've been watching her work and been so impressed by what I've seen. She's also an incredibly physical actress. Of course she's so smart and has so many intellectual ways of approaching a role, but there's a physical, visceral kind of understanding of the part she plays that comes first and is perfect for this kind of role.
Why specifically a woman for that period in Dylan's life?
Because that period in Dylan's life is so bizarre to behold. Did you watch No Direction Home, the Scorsese documentary? There's a lot of footage from 1966 that Pennebaker had shot for the Eat the Document documentary that never really saw the light of day, sort of an experimental documentary that came from that time, and you see this absolutely extreme Dylan, totally skinny, riddled on amphetamines, his hair turning into this wild cloud, and these unbelievably bizarre, dandified gestures while performing, while talking, while doing anything. And yet that's one of the most famous Bob Dylan moments, the most canonized, which means the most stripped of its genuine shock value. I felt that it needed to get that shock value put back into it and I had to do something extra to remember how strange that really would have been back in 1965 and 1966.
I went into the film with a description, "Six different actors playing different parts of his life," but they're really playing different dimensions of his persona or personality, represented partly by different periods, but also partly by different concerns, and in your film they all exist in the same universe. You could all come to a party and be together in the same room.
They could, they could. In one case, one of them plays another in a movie, so there is a strange kind of replacement and diffusion and multiplicity... I'm sure there's Freudian terms for all the things we're talking about that are eluding me at the moment. But yeah, they are not literally all phases of Dylan. Although they belong to periods that were manifest by phases of his life or instincts that came out of periods of his life. Robbie's story spans a whole decade and exists as the private side to a public life that some of the other characters occupy, and Billy, in a weird way, goes all the way back to the beginning of American folklore and collects those images.
Why Billy the Kid? There's obviously that echo of Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, which Dylan was in, although he played Alias.
[Impersonating Dylan] "Can of beans, can of pinto beans, can of…" [Laughs] There are so many ways I could have skinned that cat, I guess. Dylan, of course, did occupy a part in the movie but he wanted to play Billy desperately. He told Peckinpah that he actually was Billy the Kid reincarnated but Peckinpah had already given the role to Kristofferson. So I let Dylan play it in my movie.
I'm Not ThereThe other thing that's so funny is it's just one myth being infatuated by another, and these two myths continuing to recycle themselves. There's still this insane American obsession with the idea that Billy the Kid never did get killed by Pat Garrett and actually lived on in hiding. And his body was literally exhumed about three or four years ago from his grave so people could prove the fact that it wasn't really Billy the Kid's body and that the real Billy the Kid has lived on and survived that period. So this idea of Billy the Kid surviving his moment became a beautiful way to parallel Dylan, the outlaw living in hiding and continuing to exist in the world while Vietnam and Woodstock was raging right over the hills, or however other many ways Dylan has continued to live a semi-mysterious and not completely disclosed existence, almost since he ducked out in 1966 after his motorcycle crash. I feel like he never really returned to that intense focus that he occupied almost minute to minute in the 60s.
Is that why you begin with his death?
Yes. And his autopsy.
Why do you never use the name "Bob Dylan" even once in this film?
Because wouldn't it just have destroyed the illusion that all of these other Dylans, whether they exist separately or together, occupy? Wouldn't your whole imaginary relationship have just collapsed at that moment?
I don't know, I haven't really had a chance to think it through yet, but...
[Laughs] Just chew on that for a while.
Before I leave, I'd like to tell you that you are, at least partially, responsible for one of my favorite films of 2005: Kelly Reichardt's Old Joy. I knew that you were a producer on the film, but when I interviewed her last year, she told me that she discovered the short story that it was based on when she came out to visit you in Portland.
Totally! I introduced her to Jon Raymond, who wrote the original short story, and she's had a love affair with Portland for several years now, as a result of me. And you know, she just finished shooting her next feature, that Jon Raymond wrote, starring Michelle Williams, all shot in Portland. And I'm an executive producer on it.
I look forward to it. I love Old Joy. I've seen it three times and I have a completely different take on it each time.
That's so cool. I'm so proud of her and that film. It does the soul good to see that kind of filmmaking happening.
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