Trev Gibb interviews Larry Charles on masked and anonymous

In 2003 I spoke with Larry Charles on the telephone for what felt like several hours. At that time I set up a website called the Masked an Anonymous Database.

In 2003 I spoke with Larry Charles on the telephone for what felt like several hours. At that time I set up a website called the Masked an Anonymous Database, collecting press shots, news clippings, behind the scenes stories from the film, early copies of the script and a discussion forum.

Due to this work I was able to get a contact for Larry’s PA, he knew about the website and was more than happy to spend some time talking about the film.

This is the complete unedited interview which features a lengthy and I think very unique critique on Dylan the artist from someone who worked so closely with him and who was willing to go to great lengths to explain the work and the relationship with Dylan. The resulting interview would not have been possible without Larry Charles’ honesty and sincerity.

(Trev Gibb) Have you visited the ‘Masked and Anonymous Database’?

(Larry Charles) Yes I have its amazing!

I’m happy you like it…

Oh I’m very pleased, I’m very touched actually.

I’ve got so much to ask, I’ll try to filter through, but how I’ll approach them I’m not sure… I’ll plunge ahead…

We’ll just riff around and I’m sure that something interesting will come out of it.

I think the movie speaks much truth. Did you intend it to be a social commentary?

Well you know, it’s interesting, we never had any intention at all or any concern about results or consequences. We really started from a very purely organic place, just exchanging ideas thoughts; sometimes a word or an expression in a very almost unconscious, automatic, writing it up technique, without imposing any order on it and letting the order and patterns emerge out of it naturally.

The film is very poetic in feel,  the way phrases are spoken seem philosophical and profound…

I agree, that’s you know… Bob inspires you to reach these heights you didn’t think were possible.

It must’ve been an experience meeting Bob Dylan?

There’s nothing to describe it. It was the most life changing experience of my life…its just meeting your guru, just holding a mirror to you and the world and saying look. That’s what it’s like being with him, just surprising you at all times, confounding you at all times, confusing you. But all with the end result of cracking open your head and just seeing more deeply and more clearly.

Dylan always seems discreet, but his discretion speaks a thousand things at the same time, he seems to evoke and provoke so much…

He does and he’s very enigmatic and very complex and very dense, which is no surprise. And so he will never say, “This is what I think”. He will have something and he will say it and I will say “Wow you really feel strongly about that!” and he’ll say, “Well somebody does”.

The film is so layered; it’s colourful, provocative, like a puzzle…

Yes, the last piece of the puzzle was you. That to me is the key. When I go around the country to these screenings I tell people it is a puzzle and the last piece is you. You have to kind of be involved and interact with it. And wherever you are in your life at that moment you’re gonna see certain things in that movie like you do in a Bob Dylan song. And you may come back a year from now or ten years from now and be in a different place and see the movie in a different light as well.

The film has only really played in America. Is it going to play England any time soon?

Yes it should be opening. I know there’s a film festival in England that it’s gonna open at. BBC films, was one of the financial partners, so it’s definitely meant to open in England. It’s gonna open all over Europe now; over the next couple of months, actually.

There have been rumours of a DVD release coming out soon, is there any plans finalised for what will appear on the DVD?

There is a DVD that’s going to come out I believe in February, with some deleted scenes and some other bonus stuff. But that’s not the definitive version there’s still yet my directors cut somewhere down the line, if we can get the financing together we’ll put that out too, that’s kind of more expensive to put together.

Will there ever be a definitive version? There’s so much going on and so many scenes that didn’t make it.

Well right. By definitive I only mean like… everything, we shot everything that’s in the script. And there is a version of that, that from a historically archival position might be worth having out there as well… I also have hours and hours of bob rehearsing. And I kept a camera rolling while he was doing all the music, never cutting so I have all the between song patter and warm-up stuff, and I feel like there’s a great historical archive there not to be exploited commercially, I think that would be wrong, but at some point down the line, way down the line perhaps, it should have some historical value.

It’s very intimate… Most of those live scenes with the band. The camera perspective creates such an intimate feel.

As far as the music goes, one of our earliest conversations was how to shoot the music. Bob had some very specific ideas about how he thought music should look and what’s gone wrong with music on film and why he has felt that he had never actually been well represented performing on film. And we went back and looked at some things we both liked a lot. Like old Johnny Cash shows, and even Ed Sullivan and The Grand Old Opry shows with Hank Williams and we found they basically used one camera and put you right there and there was an intimacy created between the musician and the home audience And we really responded to that, and nowadays people are afraid to stay on that one shot – and we cut and we cut, and this kind of MTV style – and we made a conscious decision to go back to this more pure version of presenting the music and it wound up being very dramatic.