Johanna Schneller of Premiere Magazine visited the Montreal set during the 2006 filming and interviewed the actors & director. October/November 2007
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Director Todd Haynes gathers an eclectic cast and a veritable mixed tape of movie homages for this unconventional biopic of music legend Bob Dylan.
In an alley behind Montreal's Musee des Beaux Arts, Christian Bale leans against a wall that's plastered with artfully distressed music posters; he's posing for a mock album cover. Heath Ledger and Charlotte Gainsbourg sit on a low wall across the street, smoking cigarettes. Julianne Moore emerges from a minivan balancing a plateful of salad; she's just had a wig fitting, and sports the hair long, straight, brown, middle-parted of mid-1960's Joan Baez.
Though all the actors are shooting the same film I'm Not There, written and directed by Todd Haynes (Safe, Far From Heaven) it's appropriate that they're intensely engaged in separate pursuits. I'm Not There is nominally the story of Bob Dylan's rise to and rejection of fame, but it's a rarified, fractured biopic: Some of the events depicted come from Dylan's life, while others are metaphorical; six different actors play aspects of his character, and none of them are called Bob.
Newcomer Marcus Carl Franklin plays Woody, the youngest Dylan persona, who invents himself by way of emulating Woody Guthrie. Ben Whishaw is Arthur, a teenage poet. Christian Bale is Jack, a folksinger who later turns Pentecostal Christian. Moore plays Alice, a fellow folksinger that Jack loves and abandons. Heath Ledger is Robbie, a movie actor who personifies Jack. He's married to Claire (Gainsbourg), a French painter who is a version of Sara Lownds, Dylan's first wife (from 1965 to 1977) and the mother of four of his children, including the singer Jakob Dylan. Cate Blanchett plays Jude, the character who most resembles Dylan, and whose story most literally parallels his, as he trades folk music for electric and resists being vilified and deified in equal measure. Finally, Richard Gere is Billy, an aging outlaw who escapes to find peace in pastoral anonymity.
"It's comforting knowing how detached we are [from a literal biography], and free because of that," says Ledger, whose costume this afternoon is a green turtleneck and a corduroy suit so tan and wide-waled it looks like corrugated cardboard. "In conventional biopics, no matter how hard you try or how good the performances are, you're always defaming that person. You're always taking a little bit away from them and not giving them anything. So I think this film is attempting to honor Dylan in some way, as opposed to capture him."
Shooting resumes inside the museum, which is standing in for New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art for some scenes, and Paris' Louvre for others. (Making the film in Quebec, Canada kept the budget under $20 million.) Haynes, who resembles a boyish Mark Hamill, sits in a high director's chair, chatting animatedly with Ledger, who sits in a much lower chair, long legs bent so that his knees are level with his shoulders. "This was the hardest location to secure," Haynes says. "We had to pull every string, use every connection. We finally got the okay after Heath posed for a photo with the museum director."
Heath Ledger as Robbie in I'm Not There
Courtesy of The Weinstein Company
Ledger himself only signed on after his then-girlfriend Michelle Williams had been hired to play Coco, the Edie Sedgwicklike lover of Blanchett's Jude. Recalls Ledger, "I said to my agent, 'Is there something I can do on it? I'm going to be there anyway, looking after Matilda'" their daughter, who was 11 months old during the shoot, walking and "babbling as if we should understand her," Ledger says. (What a difference a year makes: Though the couple has now split, during the shoot Ledger calls Williams "so foxy in this movie. And I get to take that image home with me every night.")
"I was nervous [about this film] for many reasons," Ledger admits. "I usually go into a movie thinking that I'm hopeless, and I don't know how to do it anymore, and I've forgotten it." He sighs. "And this time I hadn't worked in a year and a half, so it was worse. But Todd's such a wonderful man, and I was only working 12 days, so I was put to ease pretty quickly."
When the museum corridor is lit, Dylan's song "Visions of Johanna" plays over and over as Robbie walks past copies of the "Mona Lisa" and "Winged Victory." The mood is shadowy, sad, artful. Haynes shoots slowly, taking as many pains with wordless, atmospheric scenes as he does with dialogue. In every scene in which a Dylan tune plays and there are over 30 Haynes wrote the lyrics directly into the script. Each scene is filmed to the music, "even a few takes of scenes with dialogue, so we can have the feeling of it," Gainsbourg says.
Each section of the film revolves around a different Dylan album, and each is shot in a different style. "It was really important to look at the music Dylan was making in each time, and try to find a narrative equivalent," Haynes says. The Woody section recalls leftist, late-1950s cinema such as Meet John Doe and Lonesome Roads (a film Dylan loved). Arthur's section is shot in static black and white, like a taped interrogation. Alice's section is a recreation of Baez's interviews in Martin Scorsese's documentary about Dylan, No Direction Home. "She's pissed, man," Moore says about Baez. "Dylan used her. He used everybody. He was almost kind of a sociopath. But she used people, too. Everyone thinks they [1960s folk stars] were all about goodness, but they were ambitious and selfish, too."
Haynes shot Moore's section in a single day, including some black-and-white, spot-lit concert stills of her singing with Bale. "Julianne actually kicked me out of the room for those, because we crack each other up too much," Haynes says. "But she could still hear me laughing outside. The stills that made it into the movie are the only ones where Julianne could hold a straight face. In all the other shots, Christian's always in character, but Julianne's mouth is wide open, in fits of hysteria."
Blanchett's section, also in black and white, echoes Fellini's 8 ½. "It's such an apt metaphor for what Dylan was experiencing in 1966, the height of the media assault on him, the constant barrage of questions about why he wasn't doing protest songs anymore," Haynes says. "It's exactly what Marcello Mastroianni's character is being assaulted with in 8 ½. It also reflected the surreal collapse of consumer culture into personal life, which is so close to how I feel about "Blonde on Blonde," the record from that time."
For Billy's story, Haynes turned to "those hippie westerns that started to emerge at the end of the '60s, where the genre was invigorated by the counter-culture" such as Sam Peckinpah's Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, in which Dylan appears. "All these long-haired, anti-hero actors playing famous outlaws. And they're shot so beautifully, they use these long lenses Conrad Hall's cinematography in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, or the cinematography of McCabe and Mrs. Miller, which were real advances, so sumptuous, soft and observant, and almost improvisational on where you look."
For the Robbie section this September day, Haynes's inspiration is Jean-Luc Godard. "He favored static shots," Haynes says. "He would intercut long angles that would hold, and let action play within them, with these tight close-ups. His framings are so beautiful, so clean and spare. The sexual politics are apt, too: There's an occasional sexism in Godard's films. They're about women, but women are exempt from the political and critical discourse. And those charges have been laid at Dylan and his songs about romance."
These distinctions weren't immediately clear on the page, however. "The first reading [of the script], I was confused. I had to go back and forth to understand every character," says Gainsbourg (who a year after the shoot ended suffered an aneurysm that required emergency brain surgery; at press time, she was fine). "The script is written in an enigmatic way, and I wasn't sure I was understanding the right things. So I grabbed two hours of Todd's time to have a coffee and go through my questions. I would have loved to have spent much more time with him, to have rehearsed. But with the shooting dates, I didn't even meet him in person until I got here. And we shot the first sex scene on the second day. Todd knows precisely what he wants, but at the same time there's a lot of freedom. It's reassuring to be in his hands. But for me it does take time." She laughs. "I would be ready now to start again."
Each actor received his section of the script bound separately, with a CD of the pertinent Dylan music. "So I've been listening to the Robbie and Clair CD for months," Gainsbourg says. "'Sara,' 'Lay Lady Lay,' 'I'm Not There,' 'Corinna Corinna.' Sad songs. Music is so powerful, it was very, very helpful. I usually listen to music on a shoot, but on this, I really feel I can't listen to anything but Dylan."
Ledger, too, "went back and discovered a whole bunch of his music that I'd never heard," then set to work on Robbie's voice. "As an Australian, I always have to do an accent, so it's the first thing I start with," he says. "Once I have the voice, that's the line, and at the end of the line is a hook, and attached to that is the soul. Then the wardrobe and the fake beards are the icing on the cake." He sighs again. "Apart from Cate, who looked and sounded and breathed and probably smelled like Bob Dylan I was blown away by what she did I think the rest of us are just trying to let him bleed through subtly."
Sighs aside, Ledger is clearly jazzed by working with Haynes. "This is so refreshing. You get a sense that he's really reinventing film," Ledger says. "The crew are working 20-hour days, and they don't complain, and afterward they all meet up in the camera truck for an extra hour to drink beer and watch the dailies, because they're so blown away with what he's doing. They're saying, 'Fellini's been resurrected.' It's really sweet, everyone's trying to pour themselves into it for free because they believe in him. It's feeling like the world's most expensive student film, in the most beautiful possible way. I wish I could work like this every time with a director like Todd. It's amazing he's gotten away with it so far. We have a bondsman on set who's running the show, but even he lets it go 'til 3 or 4 in the morning, because he's loving it as well."
The sun goes down, the shadows in the museum deepen, and the smokers outside now huddle in the cold. But Haynes takes his time, shooting the extras in a party scene chockblock with bell-bottoms and Frye boots, curly perms and moustaches as precisely as he shoots his stars. "I think all biographies are fractured like this," Haynes says. "Don't you look back at who you were as a teenager or young adult, and it's a different person? This film is an invitation to make that not just all right, but something to encourage.
"What's so funny about Dylan is, he's the subject of such an intense desire for identification," Haynes continues. "And that only contributed to him needing to change, to reject that, and disappoint people's need for that. The way he survived as a creative person, I think, is due to his ability to change, to duck out, to deflect."
Heath Ledger on the set of I'm Not There
Courtesy of The Weinstein Company
As if to prove his point, when Haynes and his crew gather with Ledger, Bale, Gainsbourg, and Moore on the museum's steps for the official film photo, not a single passerby recognizes the stars. A hardy photographer scrambles up a ladder and wraps himself around a light pole. Some of the crew wave hand-lettered signs reading GOVERNMENT and PAVEMENT, words from an early Dylan music video; three hold signs reading I'M, NOT, and THERE. There's lots of catcalling, whistling, and cellphone photography, and a small crowd assembles on the street to watch. But so effective are the transformations Bale and Ledger with their wonky Jewfro's, Moore as a brunette, Gainsbourg in a thrift-store suede jacket that they hide in plain sight. "Oh, this is that Bob Dylan movie," one onlooker says. "I guess the actors have all gone."
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