James Mangold Finds Dylan In Timothée Chalamet

EXCLUSIVE: James Mangold is sitting comfortably in a posh London hotel sipping tea. Actually, the seats are disagreeably sunken and the filmmaker jokes that we’re like “six-year-olds” because we’re sitting so low to the ground. “Yes, daddy, I’ll have tea,” he jokes.

The filmmaker has been scooting around town like a rolling stone for London screenings of Searchlight Pictures’ scorchingly realized A Complete Unknown, starring a magnificent Timothée Chalamet as Bob Dylan, circa the early 1960s when the boy from the north country was in the embryonic stage of his career.

Mangold’s screenplay, written with Jay Cocks and based on Elijah Wald’s book Dylan Goes Electric!: Newport, Seeger, Dylan and the Night That Split the Sixties, is like the libretto of a great opera, and it allows Dylan’s early repertoire to emerge organically rather than perfectly fully formed.

We’re able to witness the birth of a phenomenally great artist as he locates the harmonies to pair with his poetic lyrics, and in so doing divorcing himself from the constraints of the high church of folk music; severing links to the likes of Pete Seeger [an extraordinary Edward Norton], and, to a certain extent, Joan Baez [beautifully captured by Monica Barbaro].

 The real Bob Dylan read the script and offered Mangold minimal feedback. How aware was the legendary troubadour of Timothée Chalamet, or ‘Timmy’ as Mangold calls him?

“I think he was aware of who he was,” Mangold says. “It was super simple. He goes, ‘Do you think he can do it?’ And I said, ‘Yeah.’ That was kind of the extent of it. Bob was super direct. He wasn’t like he doubted him. It was just like, ‘What do you think, coach? Is it going to work or not?’”

There was, Mangold reveals, “A little bit of a bump early on when I started to say to everyone, producers that had already been on the project, and Bob’s team, ‘No, we don’t need your recordings, we’re going to do the music. Timmy’s going to sing this himself.’ And they were like, ‘How could you possibly conceive of that?!” I go, ‘Well, I actually did it on another movie already.’” He is, of course, referring to his 2005 film Walk the Line, which won an Academy Award for Reese Witherspoon’s June Carter and a nomination for Joaquin Phoenix’s portrayal of Johnny Cash.

Cash actually makes an appearance in A Complete Unknown, more as a hell-raising elder statesman, portrayed this time by Boyd Holbrook (who worked with Mangold on Logan and Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny). He offers encouragement to the young whippersnapper from Duluth.

Mangold says that he posed a series of questions to those who queried the decision to use Chalamet’s own voice for the songs. He asked the doubters to “actually put it together in your mind on how it would work, because how would you have Timmy speaking in his voice and then singing in that voice Just from a simple technical level, it’s going to seem like he’s a ventriloquist dummy. But then think about all you’re missing out on, because, at least for me, the great danger is that the songs come, the movie stops, and then the songs sing. You learn it making action pictures, which are no different from musicals in a way that the story has to be advancing in the action and the story has to be advancing in the song. And if you stop everything and just watch someone sing in another context, a variety show or a concert, it might be fascinating, but in this context, the story is stopping and the train is slowing down. It’s like, ‘What’s wrong? Are we nearing a tunnel? Why is this happening?’ And you need the undertow of subtext and desire and counter energies.”

The film’s song credits quite rightly proudly state: All Bob Dylan vocals performed by Timothée Chalamet.

I was struck by how each song informs the narrative. Chalamet channels his own interpretation of Bob Dylan warbling Song to Woody, for Woody Guthrie in a poignant scene where he meets the folk legend [played by Scoot McNairy] in a hospital ward where he’s being treated for Huntington’s Chorea, a hereditary degenerative disease.

Mangold smiles and remarks on a conversation he once had with Cash. “Whenever I did the research on these things with Johnny Cash, he’d say, ‘Well, the reason those songs are so simple is because we couldn’t play anything better. I wasn’t a minimalist, I just couldn’t play anything else.’ And similarly, Bob came to New York, he had a song to sing for this guy [Guthrie], but he didn’t necessarily know how everything was going to work out. He didn’t even have an intention in his mind to be a folk singer.”

Mangold says that one intention was to try and examine “the way life sometimes isn’t so dramatically as simple as this kind of big Freudian revelation of pain or trauma from the past, and that it can be a kind of snowball of sh*t that has us trapped and how can you use cinema to trace that undertow?”

Mangold also notes that when he started out on the movie “so many people” would question him about Dylan being “a pr*ck” and that he wanted to present something that challenged that. Mangold is quick to add, “All my experiences with [Dylan] were nothing like that.” However, he was mindful of documentary footage in which Dylan appears to have “all this attitude and arrogance”.

But the young Dylan “is in the center of a hurricane,” Mangold points out. “Beyond all that, I actually just had this feeling, and it came through the process, that you can be good at making music and singing it and writing it, you can be really good, and you can want to give it to people, but you can be also at the same time, not good at being in a crowded room. And Timmy and I played with these ideas of social anxiety and very simple, not secrets, but just a way of Timmy posturing himself and positioning himself so that some of the irritability, or the sense of defensiveness came from something other than just arrogance in and of itself. And I think it produced some really beautiful things in the movie.”

There’s a signature moment when Elle Fanning, breathtaking as Sylvie Russo [based on Dylan’s first New York love, Suze Rotolo—the singer requested that the film not use her real name] first kisses him by the subway station on the cheek. “Timmy almost flinches and it burns, and he was just asking her what she’s doing tomorrow. He’s clearly leaning in to this girl, but it’s a beautiful investigation of the very thing I was saying, which is just that there’s a tremendous amount of stress and anxiety about getting close. 

And when he goes in crowded situations, there’s something about all the people talking around him and he needs a moment to process these things. I think that’s what Timmy did so beautifully is it’s like some of this thing that we see as arrogance is also: what if it’s something he really has a hard time delivering and that that’s the part where he feels empty?” Mangold and Chalamet explore that “empty” feeling later on when audiences are cheering for “The Times They Are a-Changin’”.

“I wanted to find our way to the moment where everyone’s cheering for The Times They Are a-Changin’.” And I wanted Timmy to have carved enough of a path that he could react to that love from the audience with a kind of numbness… so that there’s a kind of, ‘What do I do with this? What does one do with this?’”

I point out to Mangold that I’ve seen such withdrawal behavior in actors too. For example, in Kate Winslet after Titanic. What she had to endure still astounds me. But I think it has given her a super power in her acting—look at how unbelievably striking her performance is in the film Lee. Also it’s there in Chalamet himself to a lesser extent, in that everyone wants a chunk of him now. Mangold nods. “Well, the second you’re a commodity, that’s what happens, it’s the definition of a commodity… He’s been living it, and he’s in the middle of it right now. The ascension and the kind of pressures it brings and the people talking about whether you are horse-race kind of stuff—I don’t mean awards, I mean, is he going to be one of the stars of the decade. Well, let’s see. I also think he had pressure on himself that he wanted to turn the corner on some roles. And this was- I mean, he really was looking forward to doing this movie for years and working toward it.”

The sheer beauty of Chalamet’s performance is that he combines that inner conflict with absolute star power, vulnerability and acting chops. And, as Dylan himself posted on X, ”I’m sure he’s going to be completely believable as me. Or a younger me. Or some other me.”

Over the past five years of working together on A Complete Unknown, Mangold and Chalamet have developed a deep level of “trust and partnership” Mangold says. “We talk almost every night on the phone at the end of the day, after we get home and have dinner. At 11.30pm, 12 o’clock, one of us would text or ring the other and we’d just check in.”

During the shoot, he says, “Sometimes the call would be seven minutes. I’d read the other parts, he’d read his, and we’d just have a moment to go, ‘Is there anything we want to say about this before we have 150 people around us?’” They had a sort of shorthand with each other that Mangold calls “a really beautiful thing”.

I ask Mangold about reports published during the shoot alleging that crew members were unhappy with Chalamet’s behavior on set. “I mean, he was focused,” he says vehemently. “Some of it is just plain ignorance to be honest. Every time I’ve ever had an actor with a known name who’s famous on a movie on the call sheets, they’re referred to as their character. And the ADs call them by the name of their character so that they’re not going, ‘Hey, Tom,’  to Tom Cruise, or ‘Hey, Timmy,’ to Timmy. It’s just then that every extra [background artist] looks… it’s just [for] sheer efficiency. And the reality was, the reason I prickled about it when that happened to him was that he was focused. You want your pitcher in baseball, or you want your athlete on your team to be focused on the game and not about who’s signing whose t-shirts in the locker-room. I want him thinking about delivering the goods. And that’s all he was thinking about. And he was also inhabiting that Bob thing. So that sense of social anxiety and that sense of being, he was actually living in that space.

“Acting is such a fragile act of mind and heart. And it can be that someone from your family can call you or a boyfriend or a girlfriend or a friend, or you could just get a bomb dropped on you on a text. And how do you get your mind back into it? And it’s not like you can just throw it off. It’s like your whole center has gotten moved and there’s a huge part of acting that is what you bring of yourself. And in a way, you must be very protective of yourself.”

Mangold understood early on the importance of giving actors the space to perform. He knows actors. He worked with Sylvester Stallone, Harvey Keitel, Ray Liotta and Robert De Niro on Cop Land, his second movie. Winona Ryder sought him out to direct her and Angelina Jolie [she won an Oscar] in Girl, Interrupted. Mangold’s lineup also incudes Russell Crowe in 3:10 to Yuma, which also starred Christian Bale—with whom he would work with again on Ford v Ferrari. And he’s enjoyed a fruitful association with Hugh Jackman on The Wolverine and Logan.

Mangold’s first feature, 1995’s Heavy, featured the legendary Shelley Winters. The two-time Academy Award winner was 75, but still a formidable force. “Oh, she was a pip,” he recalls. “She was a real character. And we had no money. This was truly taking a lady who lives in the Midtown classic apartment with her help, and bringing her upstate and putting her in this Winnebago. I was unplugging her toilet between shots. But she was hilarious. When she did this one scene, she had a picture of Vittorio Gassman [to whom she was married from 1952 to ’54] she’d be looking at, with headphones of opera playing to make her emotions rise. But she was also just filled with stories,” he marvels. “Here was I just turned 30, making a movie with her, but she had worked with everyone from Stanley Kubrick to Howard Hawks to John Ford, to Roman Polanski to Jane Campion—it’s kind of everybody. She was always up for it, and she was a real actress,” he adds admiringly, pointing out that James Dean, Montgomery Cliff, and Marlon Brando were “people in her life, they were her peers. And Marilyn, of course.”

Would she have known Bob Dylan? Possibly, he suggests. “I think he got to a level of exposure that he was kind of everywhere at a certain point. But yeah, I don’t know. That’s a curious question. I’m always so fascinated when I meet great artists, like in the case of Johnny Cash and Bob Dylan, and you kind of hear all the things they’re watching and listening.”

He tells a story about when Joaquin Phoenix met Johnny Cash for the first time at a party. “This was before he played him, and he was too shy to go up and introduce himself. So as everyone was saying goodnight at the party, there was kind of a receiving line, people shaking Johnny’s hand as they left. And Joaquin did that. And when Johnny Cash took Joaquin’s hand he said, ‘They tell me your son squealed like a girl when they nailed him to the cross, and your wife moaned like a whore.’ He recited this line from Gladiator, this heinous line. And he just said this to Joaquin out of the blue. He knew the line, and it was Joaquin’s line from Gladiator as the villain. And then Johnny’s like, ‘I like that movie.’ Anyway, it’s a beautiful thing to think about all these people, the cross-pollination that occurs.”

I ask Mangold now about how he uses the famous cigarette-sharing scene between Bette Davis and Paul Henreid in 1942 film Now, Voyager as a visual motif for Chalamet’s Dylan and Fanning’s Suze Rotolo in A Complete Unknown. Had Dylan referenced either Bette Davis or Now, Voyager during their conversations about A Complete Unknown? Mangold shakes his head. “I used it as a device, but he knew all the references. I mean, it’s part of his vernacular. All those movies, all that stuff, was part of his vernacular and it was in the script he read. But the reason I chose that movie was it gave me an ability to get the conversation into this identity of becoming a new person, and it kind of forced the conversation between him and Sylvie into a discussion of transformation,” he explains.

“And it’s even better that it’s not a perfect example, but it just got them talking and you could see him getting ruffled by the way she’s describing Bette Davis’s journey [in Now, Voyager] because for me as a writer, it was because in some way he saw himself as kind of a chrysalis or a changeling, a reborn kind of person, and he didn’t like the way, or he was uncomfortable with the way she was phrasing it. I actually don’t find him, as she calls him, a contrarian, but I also think words are very precious to him. When she says Bette Davis as Charlotte [in Now, Voyager] became something better, and he’s like, ‘No, different‘, the absence of the qualitative judgment is super important to him. And writing him, I felt there were things I understood. He was very interested in deep thought, but not interested in judgment. I actually think he resists all categorization. The easy organizing, the putting of things into little boxes is really something that I think he- it’s not that he finds it wrong, but it’s that he finds it stifling. My own way of projecting what that was, is just that he was such a sponge. He was taking and drinking from so many troughs and he didn’t want to be told, ‘You’re out of your lane. You’re a folk musician. You should be doing this or listening to this.’ He was really kind of fascinated by everything, ”Mangold says.

Ever since Vicky, my older foster sister, came home with the album The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan [I was a mere infant] and played it so loud that my foster mother shouted at her to “turn that bloody music down,” I have fascinated by Dylan and how so much of his music has entered our everyday lives. “Hey, Mr. Tambourine Man”, “I Shall be Released” and “Blowin’ in the Wind”, for starters. 

In A Complete Unknown, Edward Norton’s Pete Seeger quotes Woody Guthrie’s line that “a good song can only do good” and it reflects a segment of Dylan’s Nobel Prize in Literature citation which praised him for “having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition.” And the film captures that essence; that struggle for the right word and the right chord.

I now understand why, without warning, my eyes watered as I watched the film. There were a variety of reasons; all deeply personal, but also because I sometimes feel, when I’m watching some movies, as if I’m drowning in a stew of absurdity. Mangold interrupts, “Me too!” I tell him I was just so happy to be watching something that wasn’t… “Condescending”, he says, finishing my sentence. “Sometimes I think it’s just trying to find that magical place where you don’t know where it’s going,” Mangold says. “And I don’t mean plot, I mean just that you fall in. It’s what I’m always looking for in a scene. Drama is anticipation. But you also just want to feel like there’s the messiness of life… you have to put faith that this adds up in some way.”

I ask about the Star Wars movie, Dawn of the Jedi, which he’s signed on to direct, and write with Beau Willimon (House of Cards). ”My partner and I have been writing it. I don’t know what’s next because we haven’t gotten to the end of that process,” he replies, “we’re trying to finish a draft.” Well, one hopes that it turns out as good as the work he put into Logan, the best performance of Hugh Jackman’s career, and a terrific movie. A classic. 

We also chat a little about Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny with Harrison Ford. Mangold’s proud of the movie and loves the cast, but he was hurt by how it was received.

“You have a wonderful, brilliant actor who’s in his eighties. So I’m making a movie about this guy in his eighties, but his audience on one other level doesn’t want to confront their hero at that age. And I am like, I’m good with it. We made the movie. But the question is, how would anything have made the audience happy with that, other than having to start over again with a new guy?”

He says that Ford, Steven Spielberg and Kathleen Kennedy came to him at a time when A Complete Unknown was frozen because of Covid and Chalamet was off making the Dune movies for Denis Villeneuve. “And then here come lifelong heroes from my childhood into my life going, ‘We have something for you to work on.’ It was a “joyous experience, but it hurt,” he admits, “in the sense that I really love Harrison and I wanted audiences to love him as he was and to accept that that’s part of what the movie has to say—that things come to an end, that’s part of life.”

When will he work with Chalamet again?

“God knows,” he chuckles. “But soon. I mean, the reality is I have to work on scripts and he has to work on whatever he’s got lined up. He’s got Dune 3 going, that’s starting. I think we both love Dune, so…”

And then Mangold and I clink our teacups together in a kind of homage to both Now, Voyager and to Bob Dylan, the man himself.