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A Complete Unknown Director James Mangold Says Film Is Not 'Pseudo-Documentary'; Discusses Biopic's Facts And Fiction
A Complete Unknown director James Mangold opened up about the film's creative process. He revealed that some of the dialogues were picked verbatim while some were created for dramatic effects!
James Mangold directed the Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown but took a little creative freedom to add drama and edge to the story. Speaking to Entertainment Weekly, the director revealed that the movie starring Timothée Chalamet has some dramatic arcs that the creative team invented.
"We didn't want to make a pseudo-documentary," Mangold said. "We wanted to make a movie, so it wasn't like we're going to run around chasing the actors with handheld cameras,” he added. The director explained that he wanted to deviate from the usual documentary filmmaking and capture some intimate and heartwarming moments between the characters.
Mangold took inspiration from other Dylan documentaries including No Direction Home and Don't Look Back, but he had to imagine dialogue while filming some private and intimate moments from the singer’s life. They turned to the archival footage, letters, and Mangold's own lengthy conversations with the artist as reference for those scenes.
The biopic follows a young Dylan’s journey to success and fame. He comes to New York to meet his hero Woody Guthrie (Scoot McNairy) and gets enticed by folk music after meeting folk legend Pete Seeger (Edward Norton).
The Like A Rolling Stone singer managed to pave his in the music scenes of the city by performing at local spots, most remarkably with his singing partner and ex-girlfriend Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro). But everything changes when he gets propelled towards electric music over the acoustic music used in folk songs which gives him unfathomable fame.
"Bob certainly arrived in New York and went to see Woody Guthrie. That was his whole goal,” the director said while revealing that the was Chalamet who discovered this fact during research.
In the film, Dylan seeks Guthrie to serenade him with a song that impresses both him and Seeger. They saw potential in the young musician and thought Dylan could be a force of nature in folk music. "With a young musician who he saw having such immense talent as a folk singer, he wanted to know whether they were on the same team and saw things the same way," Mangold said about Seeger.
However, as per a 1962 radio interview of Dylan, he never truly labeled himself as a folk singer. “I'm not saying I'm a folk singer. I mean I do sing folk songs, but not exactly” the singer said at the time, something that was verbatim picked to be used as one of the dialogues in the film.
A Complete Unknown is currently in theaters.
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