How ‘A Complete Unknown’ found Bob Dylan through his costume

Costume designer Arianne Phillips and director James Mangold have worked together several times since the late 1990s, including on Mangold’s Oscar-winning films “Girl, Interrupted” and “Walk the Line.” But “A Complete Unknown” marks the first time in 14 years that Phillips, a three-time Oscar nominee, and Mangold have been credited together on a project. “The truth is, this was a bit of a journey getting here,” Phillips tells Gold Derby.

Set in the early 1960s, as a young Bob Dylan (played in the film by Timothee Chalamet) comes to New York and enters the nascent stages of superstardom, “A Complete Unknown” is a film Mangold has tried to mount for years. He first spoke to Phillips about the feature in 2019. But the coronavirus pandemic, Mangold’s commitments to “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny” and Chalamet’s role in the “Dune” franchise kept pushing the start date back on the calendar.

“I had a good four years of research,” Phillips says of the delay from that first conversation in 2019 to the final fitting in 2023. “What I learned from working on earlier biopics is that it’s really helpful to find things out about the character through other people’s impressions or experiences with them. And in Bob’s case, that is really the only way. It’s kind of what our story is about, too. You learn about Bob through the people around him. So by the time we started production in 2023, I felt pretty fluent in all things Dylan.

Phillips is no stranger to period pieces and fact-based stories. In her three Oscar-nominated projects – Mangold’s “Walk the Line,” Madonna’s “W.E.,” and Quentin Tarantino’s “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” – the costume designer brought several historical figures to life on the silver screen. But “A Complete Unknown” presented a different challenge for Phillips because of its narrow focus. Rather than a traditional biographical film that charts the life and death of a famous person, Mangold’s film is set in the five years when Dylan went from being an anonymous teenager from Minnesota to one of the biggest stars on the planet.

“I realized very quickly that there is a huge opportunity here. Because you don’t see technology change. You don’t see automobiles change or architecture change [in the time when the film is set]. But what you do see is the evolution of a young artist, of Bob Dylan, and how he changes from showing up in New York City, pretty much in search of Woody Guthrie, to becoming known, and then on his creative journey of finding his artistry and his voice. So that was thrilling to me to break down the script into beats that helped inform the costumes.”

As Phillips found out, while Dylan maybe emulated Guthrie in those early days of his career, by the time he got into the mid-1960s, his fashion sense had shifted with the time.

“The thing that’s so interesting about Bob is that he doesn’t want to be defined by one thing,” Phillips says. “He didn’t want to be limited by being a folk singer. And you see him in 1965 and he’s been to London a couple times, and you see how his silhouette has changed. He’s a fan of The Beatles. He’s hanging out with Donovan. He comes back with this very mod look. So he basically created, along with Mick Jagger and the Beatles, this rock and roll archetype that we know today.”

“I think you really see a hint of what’s to come,” she adds. “The research for me didn’t stop at 1965 because I wanted to see where he was going as well.”

“A Complete Unknown” is out in theaters on Christmas Day.