Timothée Chalamet in his own words on how he became Bob Dylan

Timothée Chalamet in his own words deep dives into Dylan world and talks about becoming Bob Dylan for the soon to be released 'A Complete Unknown'.

It’s official. Timothée is a Dylanologist. I’m very much looking forward to seeing A Complete Unknown. I have every confidence that Timothée, James and all of the cast and crew have worked wonders. I don’t consider myself one who is looking for the sort of accuracy a lot of Dylan fan’s might be looking for, like whether it’s the correct capo for the period, or the exact mic used in Studio B or whether he’s wearing the right boots or coat (yes it helps, but I can suspend my disbelief). Will he have captured and conveyed the spirit of Bob Dylan and the time period? Of that I’m sure. Having read Chalamet’s words and listened to his interviews and comments on the film, this is a guy who’s dug deep and spent a lot of time with his muse. The guy knows his shit and like all Dylan fan’s he takes away his own impressions — Trev

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[This is an edited transcription based on various interviews Chalamet has given, including to Zane Lowe and the Q&A from the first premiere in NYC of A Complete Unknown]

For me it started with the music. This song Ballad of a Thin Man, the live version that's in the Scorsese documentary (No Direction Home). That was my way in. I'm now deep in that church of Bob. I feel like I got this opportunity to be a bridge to this music. Like Bob says at the end of Don't Look Back, “I feel like I went through a thing” and it was like a new guiding light to how I want to feel when I work.

I think the work should speak for itself, all the pretentious reasons actors would have, but this role and this guy Bob Dylan in this movie, the journey I've been on as an actor this is like bringing it all back home, no pun intended. I hope people will consider it worthy.

When I got approached with this project five or six years ago I had just done Call Me By Your Name, Bob Dylan was this name I knew was held in reverence and I knew I was supposed to respect. I didn't know anything about it (him). I could see online the communities that revered him, how deep that reverence was, and I'm happy it took five or six years because I'm now deep in that church of Bob. I feel like that's my mission until the movie comes out. I’m in the church of Bob, I’m a humble disciple.

This was the biggest role I’ve done because this was taking on someone who maybe to my generation isn't impersonated to death, but to a previous generation is one of the most. When we're shooting the movie somebody came up to me, one of the actors, and he said “ah you're doing early ‘60s Bob, I do more of a Rolling Thunder Review Bob.”

The best feedback I got over the course of the shoot was watching this Ed Bradley interview with Bob, the 60 Minutes one. This famous 2004 interview and Bob says his connection to a sense of destiny was fragile, I like that he used that word fragile because I always felt my connection to Bob was fragile. I felt like I came into his music at a time where pop-culturally not a lot of people around me were coming to Bob Dylan. So I felt very connected to it. I had to learn how famous he was in the 60s and 70s. At first I thought he was the the treat I found you know and as I began to work on the movie (and as everyone has an opinion about Bob especially an older fan, I felt like my connection to him became fragile) I had to fiercely protect that. To fiercely protect what as an actor or the kind of actor I am. What is really important is a sense of play. I don't like to go about it mechanically and I felt like that was a learning curve on this too. At some point it was like I need to worry less about how I think Bob Dylan would eat a bagel and more capture the spirit of this guy. You can get in their head at the beginning of the process and go - especially with other music biopics — this is about brushing your teeth the way he would have brushed his teeth etc. All that to say, I got this text from Jeff Rosen (who's Bob's manager) halfway through the shoot. I didn't even know he came to the set, thank God. He said something like “good on you for capturing the spirit…” Jeff was so effusive and positive, Edward Norton and I were jumping up and down. So Bob's manager loves it and then we went, “Oh no, the real Bob's such a contrarian that Jeff's gonna go to him and say this movie looks good and then Bob's gonna say well must it be a piece of shit!”

This movie does not demystify the cult of Bob. It's a challenging story in that way. I made the mistake of watching five minutes of Walk Hard before I started this, I'm like “Oh my God! I'll never be able to do this!”

But this is more of a confusing story structure because his come up was two years basically from when he got to New York in January 1961 to his point of success was like a 2-year run, so there isn't the waiting 10 years to come up. That was a huge thing for me when I came into this music. I felt like self-invention, self creation. You know I grew up 10 blocks from here, I grew up in the most untethered environment and I say that affectionately you know. I grew up in an Arts Building. There's a rapper from my building named Marlin Craft, he's got a New Yorker piece on him. If you want to understand the building I grew up in, like Alicia Keys grew up in my building. It's all like it's an Arts it's like a super untethered, a beautiful place. I culturally came into all the things like Kid Kuti, hip-hop, the things that formed me like any normal kid in that period and then when I was 23 and when I got to LA and it's not like I hit a wall but everything's perspective and I started to see what my perspective was relating to that kind of music or what people's perspective that made that music would be on me as an actor. All of a sudden I was like “oh this was a means to an empowerment” but it's fragile for me to relate to. And then I came into Bob's music and this whole thing of self-invention which isn't the license we necessarily give ourself in this day and age in 2024. I don't want to speaking broad strokes. I don't think it's anti that but it's hard, it's more challenging to get away with. That aspect of self-invention. It was freeing to me at a time where already in my career people want to know me as a certain thing, like being typecast and I'm not saying that as a negative.

Most brutally which I haven't experienced I that's I guess the best example of typ casting would be if you had been on a sitcom that have been hugely popular and you try to make a dramatic film and people people laugh at you on screen because they're only used to laughing at you. In my experience this is where I also felt like I connected to Bob, in humility, so I'm not putting myself in a level with him, and also I've had a life experience, I don’t want to say that it's weird, but I can relate to some of these these things he went through.

Bob wanted to be a rock and roll star. Buddy Holly, Little Richard, Elvis Presley, equally I wanted to be a big movie actor. The feedback was always you don't have the right body or you’ve got to put on weight, but then I found my way into these very personalized movie. For him it was folk music, yhe couldn't keep a rock and roll band because they would all get hired by other kids that had more money, literally, in Minnesota, so for me it was finding a very personal style movie like Call Me By Her name or Beautiful Boy or Ladybird or Little Women, Miss Stevens, Hot Summer Nights

Call Me By Her Name, Ladybird, Hostiles and Beautiful Boy I shot in a 9 month stretch and that's before I did any press related to it, so the window was pure. The way Bob made the first Bob Dylan or Freewheelin’, that's how I look at it, his success was kind of going steady. The turning point for Bob for me and the way I interpret his career, a symbol of the turning point, is the Tom Paine award. He got next to James Baldwin and he was drunk and there's a speech he gave you can read where clearly he's had it with sort of being deified. Now I was never deified but I could equally relate. When Denis Villeneuve knocks on the door about Dune or I got the opportunity to play Willy Wonka, that was like Bob wanting to be in a rock and roll band up top. Like Leonardo DiCaprio, that's who I initially aspired to be, but when that door wasn't open, then I had to go make folk-music

Bob he's not one of these forward-facing musicians in other words it doesn't make sense to match the choreography the exact way it was, because there was no choreography. At some point working with the vocal coach and working on the dialect or movement I thought okay I’ve got to do none of this because this is not my style and Bob did not have a vocal coach, he had two bottles of red wine and four packets of cigarettes, so you know there's no way to impersonate.

His strumming pattern in the early ‘60s was very different. I've heard some people say his guitar playing sort of peaked in the ‘80s and ‘90s, that he was getting better in other words. The two craziest things to me are how some people are hard on his guitar playing or hard on his voice. Blind Willie McTell is a good example. I can give you a million songs, Worried Blues, or where his voice is beautiful and it's got that quality. Inside Llewyn Davis which is a sort of Bob Dylan inspired movie with Oscar Isaac. It makes this great point that Llewyn Davis is the struggling folk singer the whole movie, but he's got this beautiful voice. It's sort of the anti-biopic. He never has his moment of triumph. But the last scene Llewyn Davis gives this beautiful rendition of the song Farewell and then in the background of a shot you see a Bob Dylan figure in shadow singing the song farewell as well, but it's like got this rust this thing that's cutting through, and Oscar makes the perfect expression because all these aspiring folk artists, you couldn't have guess that this weird thing (the phenomena of Dylan) was going to be the thing that that cut through.

For me it started with the music, before there was even a start date for the movie. This started really for me with this song Ballad of a Thin Man, the live version, that was my way in. what did you feel when you heard I just like oh this is rock and roll and and it was this first like wow is this what the album version sounds like and then I went to the original went oh cool he was really just vibing but at a high level. It's acidic, it's like battery acid. Robbie Robertson, I met years later, who was kind of giving me sort of what the vibe was on that tour, when I met Robbie his wife said what do you think about playing Robbie in a biopic and I said well I'm supposed to play Bob in a biopic and he went “Goddamn, Bob's been beating me to the punch for 35 years.”

When covid-19 hit and I was stuck at home I watched Don't Look Back and I started to get into ‘The Times They Are-A Changin’ and I saw this folk music not as necessarily chirpy love ballads but then songs like Ballad of Hollis Brown, North Country Blues or Rocks and Gravel. I was like you know “whoa he's got some edge here” and then there was the Black Lives Matter movement and a social social unrest in America at that time, so I found myself going back not only to Bob's music but Pete Seeger and all these folks that in the 60s had gone through a similar thing. I felt like I was going back to the ‘60s. I went “man a lot of popular music was that, it was topical songwriting,” but the music was the guiding light it was when I found myself just pouring over and pouring into his life and then also admiring that it didn't feel like he was virtue signalling, that it was simply where his art was. That a song like the Death of Emmitt Till he wrote because this was his thing, his juice, you couldn't really define it. And at some point in ‘64 or ‘65 where he felt like he had been pedestaled, he turned his back and that to me is the coolest thing ever. That's my favorite album.

Bob's got a great interview with Martha Quinn, ' 80s MTV journalist where he's describing a German movie that he wanted a music video to be like and she said well what's the movie about and he's like well it's kind of hard to explain you know it's kind of like trying to tell someone what a song is about. He goes did you listen to it, you're like, yeah I listened to it and he’d say well that's what the song's about.

Bob didn’t watch the No Direction Home until about three years ago. Bob has that great quote, where his manager Jeff said [paraphrasing] “why did you leave the folk community, why did you disappear in the ‘60s?”, he goes, “Well I was sick of people like you asking me questions” and he says to his own manager, you know, which is fantastic.

Those kind of artists, I don't know how someone would do it now musically, you know those kind of artists that are sincerely indifferent. Because he's 83 now he's sort of retreated from the public eye. I’ve never met him, never met him. I would love to.

It would be the the least Bob like thing ever [to send me a note etc]. He approved the script, he made modifications in the script. He has lines that are his in the script you know that I relished. There was one I was saying a Jim Mangold, the director/writer and I said “this is good man, when did you come up with this? he goes “Bob put that in.” He has the Bob annotated script, I'm going to ask Jim for it, he won't give it to me but I want it, you know with the annotations. He wouldn’t give me it. There's a song I don't want to say what song, but there's a song like Jim was looking to cut verses because it's really long in the movie and he went to Bob very nervously and said like you know… and Bob was like “third verse, sixth verse, seventh verse, you don't really need those ones.” He's sort of unsentimental about it all. That's the coolest thing ever man. Like he had some instinct to not let people in at the beginning. It's hard because because when people pat you on the back and say hey you did a good job you kind of want to explain why you did a good job you know and he just had some insight to not do that and that's that's where I'm so prideful to get to play Bob in the ‘60s, because you think Paul McCartney and Mick Jagger or Jimmy Hendrix and these sort of larger than life figures, when I look at my older contemporaries my contemporaries now I don't really see myself in the mirror of them I don't say that to put myself down but I just don't. When I watch group interviews for movies I put out whatever and they cut other cast mates I think they're much much better spoken, like they can flip the Hollywood thing on way more than I. I feel I I stumble over my words and I can't really get it across so I get to be Bob. I'm pretending there's a Multiverse that doesn't exist. So the fact that I get to be this guy you know, and that's where I try to be humble too and check my ego at the door. That in process I never wanted to see myself less when I looked at the monitor in the movie, because the guy's so known you know. When I've had to do ADR (the process of re-recording dialogue after filming) coming in and fill lines I've had to divorce myself, you know this is its own thing now and and it's not an ‘impression Olympics’. It's a thing I found early on you know it it it you it's a process you can't you can't do at home. You got to be on set figuring it out and like anything I've always been humble about this, you got to play to the least educated person in the room, not exclusively, but but that's who you're making it for. Someone said to me in Bob's Camp, I'm not going to say who, but they said “don't worry about the Bob Dylan fans not liking this, Bob Dylan fans don't like what Bob Dylan does,” which is a great point. They haven't liked what he's done since 1966 you know what I mean so that was sort of a weight off my shoulders [humour!]. It was the most unique challenge I've taken on, but that’s where my confidence came through, is eventually doing all the music live. Maybe it was the least responsible thing on the actor's part because music exists and the performances exist so maybe I should have been most concerned about getting that right.

This is interpretive this is not definitive this is not fact this is not how it happened this is a fable. Harry Shifman, one of my earliest mentors when I was taking on this role, he said don't worry about being Bob Dylan, because people can go see Bob Dylan, they can watch the early footage or go see him now because he still tours. This is about not only myself interpreting Bob, but Edward Norton interpreting Pete Seeger and Monica interpreting Joan Baez and Boyd Hook interpreting Johnny Cash. In this moment in this ‘60s, where American culture was a kaleidoscope, and Greenwich Village was a kaleidoscope, the way culture still is now too, but without being a history teacher, that was the beginning, you know, personalized music, stuff with intention, stuff with poetry. It all started there.

In the movie we did these pre-records, but I'm not playing the guitar on the pre-records. Nick Baxter, who is a super talented musical supervisor, I would butt heads with Nick a lot, the guitar sounded really friendly. It's hard to get that sound I mean he (Bob Dylan) was playing on a guitar that was basically falling apart you know and I also found my voice had like a baritone, it all sounded too clean and I was doing vocal warm-ups with Eric Vitro who was this vocal coach who help me on Wonka and then on this movie I would listen back and I'm like “man this sounds too clean” and then when we would do it on set it was Song To Woody which is one of my favorite Bob Dylan songs ever. It was the first one we shot in the movie. You couldn't do it to a playback cuz it's such an intimate scene, it's in a hospital room with Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger and I did it live and it clicked. I'm making mistakes on the guitar a little bit here and there, but you can kind of fill those in after. I went home and I wept that night. Not to be dramatic, but it's a song I've been living with for years and something I could relate to deeply and I also felt it was the most dignified work I'd ever done and dignity might be a weird word there but it felt like so dignified and humble. We're just bringing life to a thing that happened 67 years ago.

When I did Song To Woody which is a song I could relate to deeply and it went great then I was like all right I'm going to fight this war until the rest of the movie and Nick Baxter and I were great friends. The metaphor was like I was throwing this delicately made China on the ground each time we didn't use a pre-record, something we had crafted in LA for six months, but there's not a single pre-record in the movie and then Jim would say, to console Nick or myself, “you know treat that as like a work session, you were practicing to do it live.” All of a sudden something clicked in my voice, there was a certain rawness, those microphones, those old school microphones we were using were playing in concert halls, I could get the strum better and I could get how he was singing. I didn't know of another music biopic where somebody was doing it live. Jeremy Kleiner, who was a great producer, he once said to me you act lyrically and I love that, I love that. I don't want to understand myself too much as an actor but it made sense to me you know you know like holding my elbow a different way isn't as interesting to me as capturing like spirit and soul and something and here it was in the music that I could capture the spirit and the soul. I did find my way. It's going to be weird to claim you're Bob Dylan and not doing things that were unique to his behavior.

Joel Coen, before we had Jim Mangold involved, I said hey why don't you direct the Bob Dylan movie and he said it's impossible and I said why is it impossible and he goes because it's not about a singular moment. How do you in a 2-hour movie encompass the the miracle that is the breadth of what he wrote and how much he got out and the fact that it's like watching paint dry because how do you how do you make how do you make lyric writing interesting basically.

The movie is about 1961 and 1965, a young Bob Dylan arriving in New York and how his career took off. It's sort of about the folk community. It's an ensemble movie. A Freewheelin’ Time which is Suze Rotolo's book, and there was another book which the name of which escapes me that was less about Bob and more about Greenwich Village at that time. Greenwich Village was this artistic community where people were bubbling and you had people like Pete Seeger, Dave Van Ronk or Paul Clayton that were folk stars, but through McCarthyism folk-music got blacklisted in the late ‘50s so nobody had cracked through and rock and roll was seen as this kind of thin music, it was like aimed at teenagers, so the Newport Folk Festival was sort of the Coachella of the picket line, of pure music, of Folk Music and so there was sort of an opening for someone, if not literally a young person to sort of take over the folk community.

The structure of the movie is that Woody Guthrie was dying that Pete Seeger was sort of the lieutenant and was like a real bonafide folk artist and politically super on the Left, and of the people, and he was slated to take over the folk community and out of nowhere a prophet shows up that is Bob Dylan who inexplicably takes over everything at once. In Bob's words the songs are coming from God and in the Ed Bradley interview he says, “I can't do that anymore.” So in that period and then at the moment of deification, at the moment where he was on top, he decided to turn his back on the folk community in one interpretive way or another he just wanted to make the music he wanted to make and became a rock and roll star, let's say the first rock and roll star at the Newport Folk Festival and he got booed off stage or like a mixed reaction because he took what was considered pop music or whatever rock and roll is and he played it at what was supposed to be a space of Purity. But then he went over here and he played rock and roll, got rid of his saviour label and people thought he was making not only a bad career decision but a bad artistic decision. The irony is now Like A Rolling Stone or Subterranean Homesick Blues they're generally kind of considered some of his best music. Mid 70s Rolling Thunder review ' 80s Bob; a lot of that has been chronicled. Unlike this period because he wasn't famous yet. But we also don't demystify it, the movie is called A Complete Unknown, so this isn't inventing tragedy to explain a backstory, in fact that was some of the challenge of the movie. You're playing someone whose career rise was rapid.

Interstellar for me, I was signed with the William Morris the agency, that was like Bob having a deal at Columbia and his album flopping it's it's not like nothing flopped but remains my favorite movie I've ever been in you know that's that's at the top of my list that's the one I go back to and watch but I thought it was going to do something for my career.

There's two versions of Bob Dylan movie I think one is a behavioural master class that honors someone who didn't really make a lot of eye contact and then what's the movie about then it's like watching paint dry or something and and to the people that know he's a genius they love it and to people that don't know anything about him they'd rather you know spend their time and money elsewhere. And then there's the other version that's disingenuous to who he actually was and is like a greatest hits thing and he's yeah smooth talking and making eye contact and this is something else where it's still engaging which is why Jim Mangold was the best director, but it doesn't dishonor the fact that this was a strange cat.

What I did for my preparation for Bob that started during covid was learning all the songs. Learning maybe the Bob songs I know how to play, 20% of which are in the movie. So that was the first education. Then I was working with Tim Monich who was a dialect coach and with a harmonica coach for five years and then I worked with Polly Bennett who's a a movement coach that actually we got more out of just working on the script together than anything physicality related. For my own spirit gathering for want of a better metaphor I retraced Bob’s step through Chicago and Madison Wisconsin and I started in Hibbing, in Duluth and I spent about a week where he was from in Minnesota. I did visit the house he lived in, it's a mega-fan named Bill Pagel. He owns the house and he has a piece of paper where Dylan wrote the lyrics to Song To Woody, which has the melody structure of 1913 Massacre, on the record sleeve of 1913 Massacre with a drawing that says “Bob in Chicago” and a drawing of him on the back with a long winding road to New York City and it says “Bound for Glory”. And then a drawing of New York City with Woody and NYC at the top. I went there just to get a sense of it and also because it was sort of mysterious to me and still is mysterious. Hibbing and Duluth, they're like on the edge of the world. I went at the peak of winter, I rented a truck I was racing down the highway and listening to Sun Records, that Johnny Cash and Elvis and all them were on, when they were young and then I skidded on ice because I didn't know the roads well enough. I just wanted to get a sense of where he's from. Obviously Minnesota in 2024 is not the ‘60s but those are good friendly people that don't have the city pretensions that you know sometimes you have living in New York or LA. I could sort of relate to that. My Dad is from the Minnesota of France. He's not from Paris. He's from from Ardeche. I spent my summers in that region. I could relate to that where I was in a tiny town in France and it's not that I resented it, but I went “man there's got to be something out there.

So I drove through Madison and Chicago which is supposed to be what his route was to New York on his first journey there, just me. You got to create those moments of insularity as an actor. I knew my contemporaries that had done biopics had done it. When I was landing in Minneapolis I had tears in my eyes because I thought this is so strange. If you told me I was going to have that journey through my early 20s mid 20s with another artist that I would then be tasked with actually embodying and I didn't know who that artist was yet I would have been stunned you know. So a lot of it was listening to this music that he would have been listening to and listening to his music and just feeling like a humble historian, walking that path.

When I arrived back in New York some insecurity had been solved some curiosity and also knowing people like the lawyer who helped change his name and getting anecdotes, stuff that was tremendously insightful, stuff that hasn't made its way online and that shouldn't make its way online. There were little clues, that drawing on the record sleeve, seeing his basement, seeing how he grew up, seeing how confined his room was, seeing how it wasn't torturous. It was a house on a street, not a bad street.

He understood somewhere in a pure artistic sense that a lot of us don't is it's about what he made, it's not about anything else, that is the least ‘2024 mentality’ of all time. I think his experience the world was so strange, to be deified like that, I think this is another raindrop in the bucket of a strange life of people trying to interpret you or your words or your songs. When people want a piece of that and how do you protect whatever it is that makes it good. That's sort of the structure of the movie too. He leaves Minnesota to get away from whatever is strangling him, holding him back, goes to New York finds a family the folk community that then does the exact same thing, and tries to strangle him, and then he has to break free of that, and then he does that for the rest of his life, in dedication to his art no matter what consequence it was to his personal life.

In our culture now, not only do we look back, we contextualize the back immediately. What happens if you see somebody take a picture and spend 10 minutes editing and putting it back online, that's them contextualizing what happened. Unless you're the rare kind of person that takes a picture and posts, which no one does.

I often ask myself like what would Bob do you, but just in my own in my own day-to-day just leading with your artistic foot first not in a pretentious sense but just doing the stuff that really challenges you. His songs are like the songs of life and you can't describe them and so the if I got anything out of it, it was just the feeling of it you know at a moment I needed it and it was like a new guiding light to how I want to feel when I work.