James Mangold Explains What A Complete Unknown Is Really About
James Mangold isn’t afraid of being thought of as a journeyman director. “People ask me about my versatility or lack of hanging in one genre or whatever,” he says, noting that for him, this refusal to be pinned down is rooted in the movies that inspired him: Mangold was a young, film-crazy teenager for much of the 1970s, when the Movie Brat generation redefined American cinema. But he wanted to meld the influence of those auteurs with directors who’d effectively navigated the Golden Age of Hollywood, like Michael Curtiz, Howard Hawks, and Victor Fleming. His filmography — which really got started after an abortive early stint at Disney, where he co-wrote Oliver & Company — thus runs the gamut from crime epics like Copland to psychological dramas like Girl, Interrupted, to westerns like 3:10 to Yuma, to action rom-coms like Knight and Day, to superhero movies like Logan and The Wolverine, to the most recent Indiana Jones sequel.
And, of course, biographical dramas about musical geniuses. Mangold’s Timothée Chalamet–starring Bob Dylan film, A Complete Unknown, is his second such film to date; the Oscar-winning Walk the Line, starring Joaquin Phoenix as Johnny Cash, was his first. The two movies are quite different, though they bear some distinctly Mangoldian qualities: They’re vivid dives into their milieus (A Complete Unknown’s re-creation of Greenwich Village in the early 1960s is thoroughly transporting), and they’re fundamentally character dramas about the collision of people with different sensibilities. Indeed, while Chalamet’s performance is remarkable, what really comes through in A Complete Unknown — by design — is the effect Dylan’s genius had on the people around him, including folk icon Pete Seeger (Edward Norton) and the singer Joan Baez (a stunning Monica Barbaro), a legend in her own right. The film looks at the period leading up to the 1965 Norfolk Music Festival, when Dylan famously “went electric” and alienated many in the folk community. In other words, it’s about an artist who refused to be boxed in, made by an artist who refuses to be boxed in.
I watched A Complete Unknown with my son the other day. He’s 15 and didn’t know anything about Bob Dylan, but he enjoyed the film greatly. He was really puzzled by the Newport ’65 scenes at the end, however. He was asking, “Why are they throwing things at him?”
It’s still a bit baffling to Bob himself why it was such a big deal. Especially if you consider that Johnny Cash played with the Tennessee Three on that same Newport stage. Bob took tremendous pains to make me understand that when he arrived in New York, ostensibly to become a folk singer, that wasn’t his only goal. It wasn’t like he had a change of heart that made him want to rock; he arrived a fan of Little Richard and Buddy Holly, and these things were moving to him. And on a modern level, what Bob ended up doing would be classified today as soft rock. But they had different standards for different folks, and clearly the issue that the grand pooh-bahs of the folk movement had with Bob going electric was less about the music itself and more about the abstract — the center post holding up their entire circus tent was leaving them.
You show us how important it was to people like Edward Norton’s Pete Seeger that a folk singer had achieved such a level of fame — what it meant to the folk movement culturally and politically. Still, it seems like a challenging thing to portray in a movie today, how dramatic that “betrayal” of his going electric must have felt.
There are so many movies where it’s like, “If we don’t stop them, this is the end of the world.” But no matter how many times studio executives ask for lines like that in a movie, I don’t think it actually makes the stakes any higher — because what you really care about is Will Tom Cruise survive? Or the other characters in that movie that you have affection for. The state of the world is just too abstract. Even in a less action-packed movie like A Complete Unknown, the same remains true: I’m not sure that the stakes of folk music and rock music, in any form, would ever be that powerful or meaningful on their own to an audience without understanding the character issues that were underlying it. So I felt that I was making a movie about a family. Newport ’65 was really a Thanksgiving dinner gone amok, in which the prodigal son and the father and several uncles and others are fighting. And like in many families, nothing is ever the same after that Christmas or Thanksgiving.
I have a theory that this movie isn’t really about Bob Dylan at all but rather the people around him.
You’re right, although to the literal-minded, a sentence like that will sound too extreme — because certainly it is about Bob. One of the biggest things I did when I came on to the film was to bolster the size of the other roles. It was more a pageant of cameos when I came on. But I really wanted to follow these other people as much as I could. Because when exploring Bob, you’re kind of faced with two choices. Do I do the standard “biopic,” where he is the protagonist and he’s carrying some load of pressures and secrets and pain that will get unloaded at some point in the third act in some kind of Tim Hutton–Judd Hirsch–Ordinary People scene? I didn’t think anything resembling that was going to work for this movie. I thought of an old mentor of mine (and Edward’s for that matter), Milos Forman, along with Peter Shaffer, and the structures and strategies around Amadeus. As much as it was about Mozart, that film was about the effect his genius left on others — the wake of broken hearts and disappointments and envy. So I felt that another way to understand Bob would be to understand those who loved him and were at different times inspired, or disappointed, frustrated, or hurt, or loved by him.
Amadeus immediately came to mind when Bob says, “People keep asking me where the songs come from. But they’re not asking where the songs come from. They’re asking why they didn’t come to them.” In Amadeus, Salieri resents Mozart because he’s the one to whom inspiration comes, even though Salieri has been working all his life for it.
Yes, but here it’s Mozart recognizing that people resent him for being good — that being good produces admiration but also a kind of envy that is unspoken, that you have to live with consistently. “Why do you deserve this gift?” Which is the Salieri question. This was also the scene I was most sure Bob was going to have an issue with when he read the script. But there was a loneliness in him that I wanted to find some way to convey. Because that loneliness — which was something Dylan actually talked about with me, using that word — explains a lot.
It’s a very Romantic idea, too, isn’t it — capital-R Romantic — this idea of the lonely poet as a transmission device for inspiration? We don’t see that as much in movies in depictions of creativity.
Well, we’ve gotten very plotty about movies, and we want everything explicated with dialogue to be even more specific. Studios also have gotten very religious about wanting things in the center column, the dialogue column in the script. If a character loves another character, they want someone to go, “I love you.” But when someone says, “I love you” in a movie, it doesn’t mean they love them. It’s just words. It’s still the eyes that are going to tell you whether it’s sincere or not. For all the varying kinds of movies I make, I really love trying to carve out moments where you have to read the actors — these large turning points that aren’t necessarily marked by a piece of dialogue but rather a close-up or a kind of internal moment where you realize something has changed. Once you have that in place with good actors, watching them navigate and extend these things, which are almost wordless, is really exciting. There’s a moment in A Complete Unknown when Timmy and Monica sing “Blowin’ in the Wind.” And when the song ends and the bubble breaks, I just love what’s going on between the two of them: All their other shit vanishes literally when they sing together; it’s almost like a sex scene.
It might be one of the sexiest scenes I’ve seen in a movie this year.
And then they stop singing, and there’s this kind of cigarette moment, and Monica turns to Timmy and goes, “So this is what?” And he looks at her, baffled, and is like, “I don’t know.” I love how beautifully they fulfilled it and extended it. Because when she says, “This is what?” she’s offering herself. So, it hurts when he says, “I don’t know.” Because he’s not taking. And there’s almost no one in town who wouldn’t take that offering, except this scrawny dude. You see Monica wrestling with the ego bruise of the rejection and then you sense the professional in her take over and ask, “So have you recorded that?” She pivots immediately, like, “If I can’t have him, maybe I can have the song.” The practical beauty to each of these characters is that they just keep on chugging, each of them kind of bruising and hurting one another.
I pitched Disney James and the Giant Peach, I pitched them Stuart Little. But I had their mandate wrong.
Something I’ve noticed with your films is that they always turn on two very different characters colliding. Even in a film like this, where we have a multi-character drama, the story largely unfolds as a series of two-character interactions.
Yeah. A series of pairs. I think all politics is local. Some of the most important artistic things to set up in the movie are characters with very opposite points of view, emotional points of view, and what they need from the world.
This is something that runs throughout your work, no matter the genre. 3:10 to Yuma is a great western, but it’s also a movie about the collision of these two characters played by Russell Crowe and Christian Bale.
That one’s also about family or the family structure. There’s a family to Russell’s gang. One thing that Russell and I talked about was just this feeling of wariness he has, leading this pack of wild, savage dogs. He’s wary of feeling powerful and autonomous. And Christian is on the opposite end: He’s felt powerless all his life, and he’s wary of feeling impotent.
Was there a point at which you realized that’s where your strengths lay as a filmmaker or that that’s what you needed to do?
It’s how I solve the problems I’m faced with. The movies I’ve remembered all my life, whether American or international, yes, they’re beautifully composed. Yes, they’re beautifully edited. Yes, they’re visually striking. But if character isn’t part of that, then they are just fashion shows. Red Desert and L’Avventura work not only because of Antonioni’s styling but because of the way that interleaves with Monica Vitti’s unique way of performing, a kind of ambivalence and ennui that works with the visuals.
Do you remember the first movie you saw?
Well, my parents tell me it was Mary Poppins and that I was pulled screaming from the theater because I couldn’t endure it; it was just too scary. But the movie I remember is The Wizard of Oz — Victor Fleming’s original Wizard of Oz.
Isn’t it crazy that we have to qualify that now?
Yeah, right? “The Fleming.” But that had a huge influence on me. Girl, Interrupted is effectively a version of Wizard of Oz. Because that’s a movie that lives mostly in a dream, and a dream from which the hero feels they can’t escape, and discovers they could have the whole time, which means that the entire struggle of the whole picture was redundant or unnecessary. But it’s built on character — the depressed adolescent young woman that is Dorothy and onward.
When did you know you wanted to be a filmmaker?
When I was a kid, in the ’70s, making movies seemed like it’d be the most exciting job in the world. It was no different from a teenager going, “I want to be an astronaut or a football player.” It seemed like an impossible dream, of course, but all things start at the impossible stage. My parents were never particularly aware of whether Taxi Driver was the appropriate thing to take a 12-year-old to at that time, so my dad took me to see all the ’70s movies. All that commingled with Raiders of the Lost Ark and Star Wars and Sugarland Express and Close Encounters and Network and All the President’s Men.
You started your career at Disney, decades ago. How did that come about?
I had made a short film at Cal Arts that got the attention of studio heads and agents and whatever. I ended up graduating in June 1985 and having a writer-director deal at Disney by July. Eisner and Katzenberg had just taken over Disney and wanted to populate their campus with young filmmakers. Chris Carter was there, and Phil Joanou, and others. These weren’t big deals in terms of money, but they gave us all an office and a home and had created this idea that we’d be a farm team for this burgeoning empire. I pitched them James and the Giant Peach, I pitched them Stuart Little. But I had their mandate wrong. They just wanted me to make the kind of movies they had made at Paramount. I mean, you’re talking about a kid. I was under contract at a major studio with these heavy hitters and players around me, and I was 21 years old. It was a wondrous and amazing thing that I gotten myself to this place, but I had no body of work behind me besides a hot short film. So, it was impossible for me to assert a voice. They assigned me to write an animated feature for them, which at that time wasn’t even their focus. It was a glorious experience, but I sensed that it wasn’t going to work.
At that point, you did something surprising — you went back to film school. What made you decide to go back?
It wasn’t a decision to leave. I didn’t have the wherewithal to cut off the first healthy paycheck of my life and a cushy job at a studio just to rediscover myself. I was let go and then banged around for a while writing narration for trailers, and I wrote a Claymation Easter special for Will Vinton. I started to become so disillusioned with the world of filmmaking. I tried to adapt Richard Ford’s The Sportswriter. I tried to write my own novel, but I could find no purchase anywhere. And in the depression of not knowing which way to turn, I decided to drop myself back into the shelter of a film school because it was the last time I remembered being truly happy. I went back East to Columbia University to take myself out and give myself a couple years to develop some scripts.
What was the biggest thing you learned at Columbia?
Screenwriting. I’d gotten involved in filmmaking because I was lonely. Having moved into my high-school town late in junior high, I was un-moored with friendships, and the act of being a filmmaker somehow got me a social structure and also rewarded me with friendships and collaborators. The act of writing was a chore I had to complete to have something to shoot. I’d read all the screenwriting books but was deeply uninspired by the plot-driven way to chart a movie. It felt like a laborious dance class where I was being asked to put my foot on these marks on the floor. I had a master’s class in directing with Milos. He asked me, “Well, what are you going to direct?” I go, “I don’t have anything. I’m going to write a movie.” And because he was eminently cool, he was like, “Okay. Well, what’s the movie about?” I said, “A really fat guy who’s invisible.” And he goes, “Well, that’s not a story, that’s just an idea.” He gave me his address in Connecticut: “Start writing it. Send me 20 pages a week.” So, I would write 20 to 30 pages a week and send them to Connecticut, and he’d come in on a Tuesday and show me how he had marked them up. And about three weeks in, he said, “Right here on page 47, where his mother dies and he doesn’t tell anyone, that’s your movie.” And he added, “Just try and not make it so late. It shouldn’t be on page 47.” It was the first time I had someone sculpting instead of prescribing how a movie could get made. I learned that you could do things this other way, by generating a lot of character material and then sifting through it, and in the process of editing carve out the narrative as a secondary process.
I’ll always remember. There’s a scene in Heavy where Debbie Harry shows Liv Tyler how to run the cash register at the local pizza place where they work. “Don’t press that. Press the red button, then hit this. Then the drawer will open.” And Liv was going, “Okay this.” And she’s like, “No, you have to hit that first.” A whole page of just this lesson on how to use an old cash register. Milos circled the whole page, and he came in and was like, “I love this page. It’s life!” I had never had a screenwriting instructor say anything like that to me: “I don’t care if it’s advancing the story right now. I just feel a slice of human life that I recognize here.” If you write in that space that is real drama will happen. Drama is, of course, already happening. You have a middle-aged waitress and a brand-new, very pretty one who’s arrived to work there. There’s innate tension in the scene.
I don’t think it’s any secret that in the Disney Marvel world, Logan would never have come about. I think even Kevin Feige would say that.
What I am much more ambivalent about is plot. I can’t do an outline. I’ve said this a thousand times, but even when Dylan asked me what A Complete Unknown was about, I was like, “It’s about a guy who’s suffocating in Minnesota and leaves his family and friends behind and crosses half the country, creates a new identity for himself, builds a new family, new friends, blossoms creatively, becomes wildly successful, and starts to suffocate, and leaves.” And he smiled. I’m sure I was describing, to one degree or another, a motif that runs constant throughout his life – these periods of reinvention, creative explosion, and then retreat.
There were several structural things with the beginning and the end that were really crucial for me in figuring the movie out. One was coming upon the Woody Guthrie song, “So Long, It’s Been Good to Know Yuh.” I had this idea that the movie was about good-byes, so it was great to find a song that was about moving on and starting again, one that plays multiple times in the movie and very prominently at the beginning and at the end. But I also felt that the movie should start with an arrival — Bob’s arrival — which of course is a departure from somewhere, and that it should end with his departure.
So, you’re still making westerns, apparently.
Honestly, yes! Why not? I’m not so sure that that’s not what Bob is doing, singing the ballads he does. Genre and real life are not mutually exclusive. Also, it’s just mythos — the western is the samurai film, and the samurai film and the western are kind of brothers of the noir picture. They’re all just fables in a modern context and therefore not all that different than Celtic tales and ancient Chinese tales. So this stranger arriving with a guitar on his back, with very little money and a notebook filled with secrets and magic, is a classical opening to almost any tale, and it’s the real-life opening of this one.
And on top of that, Bob clearly has the impulses of a fabulist who is inventing his story as he lives it. If we think of him as an all-knowing god, then it’s a kind of manipulation and he’s playing with us. But there’s another way to read it, especially when you see it as a 19- or 20-year-old telling us these stories about his life on the rails and at the carnival and learning chords from cowboys: It’s a wish. He doesn’t want to be the son of a middle-class hardware-store owner. This is a young man dreaming that he came from something more romantic and sexy and interesting.
You went from dreaming about Spielberg movies to collaborating on one with him. Were you surprised by the response to Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny?
To me, there was only one way to make the movie, and that was to make Indiana Jones’s age part of the story. You couldn’t ignore it. But also the response was two or threefold. There’s obviously this hot and bothered group who’s angry that there’s any woman in the movie, and I can’t help them. Every Indiana Jones movie features a significant female protagonist who sometimes bails Indy out of trouble. But the audience responses weren’t at all lackluster. It just had a challenging commercial response. It had been so long since the previous installment that maybe there just wasn’t that built-in “want to see” for audiences under 40, which is strictly a business decision. My decision to make the movie was that I had been working on A Complete Unknown, which got shelved because of COVID. There was no way to make a mid- to low-price movie through the pandemic, and Timmy had commitments on Dune. So I was going to have to be off for at least two years from the Dylan project. At that moment, my phone rang, and it was Harrison Ford and Steven Spielberg and Kathy Kennedy asking me if I wanted to join them and do this movie.
What was it that made them call you?
Well, you’d have to ask them, but it was on the heels of Ford v. Ferrari, which I think Steven really admired. Harrison I had actually known for a while, and he’d been following my work. But I suspect that in trying to follow in the footsteps of these heroes of mine, I had developed a fairly diverse body of work. Steven obviously has a style, in the way he blocks and moves actors in the camera, but he also has tremendous versatility. The same filmmaker who made Close Encounters also made Munich and Tintin and Jaws, which is essentially a horror adventure, and Schindler’s List. And George Lucas, too, if you actually look at his full résumé. So, maybe, in some way, they saw that, but I couldn’t begin to say. For me, it was a deeply personal chance for me to collaborate with these heroes of mine.
With Indiana Jones, I wanted it to connect to the other films, but you also have to be saying something new with each picture, as Steven did. Raiders is much more a classic Hollywood adventure with humor — an Errol Flynn movie, if you will, with a more modern sardonic hero. And Temple of Doom is more of a pulpy EC Comics version of Indiana Jones. And then Last Crusade becomes a completely different thing. It’s a father-son movie against the clock and is much more a screwball comedy. And with Crystal Skull, Steven is trying to move Indiana Jones into the ’50s and out of the period that the previous three had existed in, that direct context of World War II. And that shift is tricky, because much of the tone of the Indiana Jones movies is that they exist within the golden age Hollywood period of the ‘30s and ‘40s. The second you take those characters and move them into an age when Jackson Pollock is painting and Elvis is on the radio, there’s a dissonance between the beautiful idealism and old-school heroism of the Indiana Jones mythology and the way the world is changing.
That brings up another thing that people tend to forget, which is that after Raiders, every Indiana Jones movie was met with a heavy dose of skepticism, even though they made money. It’s a cycle: People are disappointed in each new one and then later they realize, Oh, this is actually pretty great.
You have to become immune to that. Raiders is an almost perfect movie. As a pop confection and as a character piece and in a million other ways, it’s just an amazing display of cinematic talent and storytelling and irreverent acting, comedy, panache. You could almost say the same for Star Wars and maybe Empire Strikes Back, viewing them together; everything that follows, there’s complaints about what’s missing. And that goes along with the beloved IP territory. My greatest lesson in that was Logan, in the sense that I had the full confidence of my star and the studio, and I made a major departure in tone from what any previous existing X-Men or Wolverine movies had been like. And there was a certain element of tissue rejection that happened as fans sensed even in trailers where it was going. At the time, there was a great deal of anxiety about it. But either you’re going to enter a known universe and push it to someplace new, or you’re going to enter a known universe and replicate what has existed before. Some people will be upset no matter what. And that’s part of being a fan. I can’t take that away from them.
Do you feel like you were lucky that when you stepped into the Marvel world, you were coming at it via Fox? Did the fact that it wasn’t Disney give you more freedom to do your own thing?
I don’t think it’s any secret that in the Disney Marvel world, Logan would never have come about. I think even Kevin Feige would say that. It’s just the way they make movies over there.
Which brings us back to Dylan. There have been other Bob Dylan movies, some very good ones by some heavy hitters. I imagine it takes a certain amount of bravado to say, “All right, now I’m going to do my version of it.”
Many people have different feelings about what Bob means for them, and in the end, I can’t possibly make something that services them all. There are these cliché observations about Bob: Bob the mysterious enigma, Bob the playful provocateur. They’re not untrue. And because Bob’s cool, that makes you as a filmmaker want to make a really cool, cerebral, artistically positioned movie about such a cool, cerebral, artistically positioned artist. But for me, to make the movie itself as a kind of postulation on his style would be (a) uncomfortable, because I wouldn’t know how to do it, and (b) he’s so cool that I always feel like you’d just look like the dorky friend in the cool hat next to him.
Plus I have to help my partner, my young actor, inhabit this guy, so everything can’t be just mischief. When you’re starting with a 19-year-old who can’t even afford to eat, he doesn’t feel in control — he’s not someone who already has a master plan on how to manipulate the worldwide media machine with enigmatic and confusing stories. This is just what he is. But it worked. So he leaned into it harder. There was a moment that Timothée and I were working our way toward, which was somewhere after he sings “The Times They Are A-Changing.” He’s at a big concert in Newport in 1964, and he unveils this song shortly after Kennedy’s death, and the level of adoration that comes back at him, with the audience singing along and screaming for him and in love with him — how does he process that? It’s not that it is empty, but it doesn’t fill any hole. It isn’t what he was seeking. The song itself, it seemed to me, is what he’s seeking.
This is also an interesting subject to me: Why exactly are we so unsatisfied with how much he’s offered us? It’s not like he’s Howard Hughes or something. Fifty-five records of music entirely written by himself. Even within the context of the movie, I think Timmy sings 26 songs in the movie. These are all, in a sense, monologues. They’re giant expressions of oneself on a most primal level, and attitudes about love, politics, worlds, freedom, enslavement — and yet we feel there’s some elusive thing he’s not offering us. I think it is that he refuses that kind of classic “Here’s my childhood trauma” thing. But he is also less explicit in his lyrics than a lot of others. His songs became so influential not only because they’re quite beautiful but also because they’re extremely inclusive. “The answer, my friend, is blowing in the wind.” Well, that doesn’t exclude anyone’s point of view. He’s not really taking a position like Phil Ochs might. He’s holding open all doors. The answers are up to us.
Related