Bob Dylan Read the Script For 'A Complete Unknown,' Director Reveals What He Thought
Bob Dylan had some consultation on the new movie about his life, A Complete Unknown!
The 83-year-old musician read the script for the movie over COVID and had a meeting with director and co-writer James Mangold.
In a newly released interview, James opened up about his meeting with Bob and what things he thought would get push back and more.
Keep reading to find out more…
“COVID hit, and then I got a call from [manager] Jeff Rosen saying COVID had canceled Bob’s tour. Given he didn’t have anything to do at the moment, [Dylan] said, ‘Let me read this script that’s got you guys worried.’ And then he read it, and he liked it, and that changed everything,” James told Variety. “That then instigated the series of meetings with myself and Bob, and Bob read the movie you saw. I didn’t think he had an issue with how he was being depicted, because I think that he saw it as essentially: I didn’t have an agenda, and I wasn’t picking a side. From what I sense being with him, that’s the most important thing — that there’s a neutrality that lets everyone figure out what they think from the circumstances that happened.”
James added that Bob is the reason why the movie starts where it does.
“It starts with suffocating and then running, and rebirthing or building anew. And any casual observer of Bob Dylan’s life can see that that has been something that’s happened more than once, not even in just the period that I chose to depict in this film,” he said. “But that’s very much the reason, coming from that talk with Bob, that the movie opens with him at the station, hitchhiking into New York, and ends with him on the back of a motorcycle, riding away. The arrival at the opening is a departure from the world he left, and the departure at the end is an arrival to a new world and, in a way, a new period of his life. That to me was really clear, that cyclical, almost musical-ballad-like pattern in his life.”
If you missed it, earlier this month Bob spoke out about Timothee Chalamet portraying him in the movie.
At the NYC premiere of A Complete Unknown, Timothee recreated a Bob Dylan look from over 20 years ago…