Danasnje izdanje NY Times Magazina je obiljezeno bogatim portretom amer. redatelja T. Haynesa pred kino-premijeru "I'm Not There". Slijedi serija zanmiljivih isjecaka:(
Because Todd Haynes’s Dylan film isn’t about Dylan. That’s what’s going to be so difficult for people to understand. That’s what’s going to make “I’m Not There” so trying for the really diehard Dylanists. That’s what might upset the non-Dylanists, who may find it hard to figure out why he bothered to make it at all. ...“I don’t know that it does make sense,” Cate Blanchett says of the film, “and I don’t know whether Dylan’s music makes sense. It hits you in kind of some other place. It might make sense when you’re half-awake, half-asleep, in the everyday lives in which we live. I don’t think the film even strives to make sense, in a way.”
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I’m Not There,” took seven years to make. It isn’t easy telling the money men that Marcus Carl Franklin, the African-American 13-year-old, will play Woody, Haynes’s version of the young Dylan, a kind of teenage hobo as Woody Guthrie, while Christian Bale will play Jack Rollins, Haynes’s folk Dylan, the truth-singing protest singer, who transforms into Pastor John, an evangelical preacher. That Cate Blanchett, playing Jude Quinn, will try to capture the 1966 suddenly rock-star Dylan who was Judas to his folk-loving fans. Haynes thought he had earned some artistic capital with the Oscar nominations for his previous film, “Far From Heaven,” but it took his producers five years to raise nearly $20 million to make the film — not a huge budget, certainly, but big for an independent film, and big for an independent film that some will argue is one man’s obsession, a Dylan-trivia-fueled dream. Haynes is the first nondocumentary filmmaker ever to have secured the rights to Dylan’s life and music, what some people would consider a filmmaker’s chance for big commercial profit, but his script, rather than a straightforward depiction of a man and his guitar, was a combination of film styles and cosmic nonsequiturs. While he was waiting for cash to come through, actors came and went. Locations were chosen and then abandoned. One studio picked it up and then dropped it three years later. Haynes didn’t finally find a distributor until last December, six years in, when the Weinstein Company bought it. Then rumors swirled that he was on the verge of losing that distributor when Harvey Weinstein actually saw the first cut of the film this spring. And really, who could blame the skeptics? Even Haynes himself told me last month, “This film really shouldn’t hold up.”
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The standard kind of biopic bored Haynes. “A biopic is always weaving these overdetermined moments with these moments we don’t know,” Haynes says. “Ray Charles at the piano, Ray Charles at home.” Early on, Haynes ran across this line in the Anthony Scaduto biography of Dylan: “He created a new identity every step of the way in order to create identity.” It was the eureka moment for “I’m Not There,” a way to build a film with different perspectives, with polyphonic voices. He called Christine Vachon at Killer Films. He needed the rights this time, having been badly burned on rights to music, first with “Superstar” and then with “Velvet Goldmine,” even when Harvey Weinstein appealed to David Bowie for the rights to one song. “I don’t want to go through that again,” Haynes told Vachon. She suggested he wait to write. He busied himself with preproduction for “Far From Heaven.”
Creative Artists Agency suggested that Vachon talk to Jesse Dylan, the film director and eldest son of Bob Dylan and his first wife, Sara. Vachon recalls: “What he did was say: ‘Look, this is the guy you have to talk to. He is my father’s right hand.’ ” In a few minutes, Jeff Rosen, Bob Dylan’s longtime representative, was on speakerphone; in another multi-Dylan biopic, Rosen might be the smart businessman Dylan. Vachon remembers that Rosen was immediately interested (both he and Dylan declined to be interviewed for this article). “He was like: ‘You know, that sounds really cool. We’re always thinking about a way, something that, you know, kind of collects the music.’ ”
Haynes was instructed to send all his films to Rosen. Dylan was about to begin a tour. Dylan, he was told, loves watching movies on the bus. Haynes was further instructed to type up his idea. In telling him how to go about writing up his idea, Haynes recalls, both Jesse Dylan and Jeff Rosen mostly told him what not to do. “ ‘Don’t use “genius,” ’ they said. ‘Don’t use “voice of a generation,” ’ they said, and they were sort of like, don’t use his name, and don’t use music,” Haynes remembers. He was told not to write more than one page.
Haynes felt certain that he had an idea of what Dylan liked, as far as films went. “I had heard enough,” Haynes said. “I knew he liked Fassbinder.” (Martin Scorsese says that in the ’70s, Dylan first told him to check out the Fassbinder film “Beware of a Holy Whore.”)
Haynes began his one page with a Rimbaud quote, Rimbaud being a subject he figured he and Dylan were both familiar with. It was a quote that if he were pitching a film in Hollywood might have killed the project: “I is another.” Then came the Scaduto quote about Dylan creating new identities. Then the pitch, two paragraphs: “If a film were to exist in which the breadth and flux of a creative life could be experienced, a film that could open up as oppose to consolidating what we think we already know walking in, it could never be within the tidy arc of a master narrative. The structure of such a film would have to be a fractured one, with numerous openings and a multitude of voices, with its prime strategy being one of refraction, not condensation. Imagine a film splintered between seven separate faces — old men, young men, women, children — each standing in for spaces in a single life.”
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The nation went to war, and Haynes went to the Oscars, and then all through the fall of 2003, he read everything about Dylan he could find. He read the biographies and the studies. He studied the bootlegs. He read Greil Marcus’s story of American culture, “The Old, Weird America,” a book rooted in the music Dylan made in Woodstock in 1967 with members of the Band and later released as “The Basement Tapes.”
Haynes generally makes films one of two ways: either with a story line or as a collage of ideas; the latter he once compared to painting while high. “I used to love getting stoned, playing music, getting lost in that canvas and not knowing what it was going to be,” he has said. The Dylan movie, he determined, would be that kind of film. He clipped photos, painted paintings, made cards filled with quotes from Dylan, from the Old Testament, the New Testament. “I will open my mouth in parables,” Haynes copied down from the Gospel of Matthew. “I will utter what has been hidden since the foundation of the world.” He copied down pages and pages of quotes from social commentaries, from folk songs, from Dylan songs. In one of his notebooks, under the heading “governing concepts/themes,” he wrote: “America obsessed with authenticity/authenticity the perfect costume/America the land of masks, costumes, self-transformation, creativity is artificial, America’s about false authenticity and creativity.” For Robbie, Heath Ledger’s Dylan, whose on-screen marriage (to Charlotte Gainsbourg) fails, he wrote, “A relationship doomed to a long stubborn protraction (not unlike Vietnam, which it parallels).” The notes themselves can seem like a great cache of insider art, printed out with nice fonts, with colors and graphics, reeking of time spent cramming. “I feel like anytime I’ll work on a film, it’s like a giant dissertation, a gigantic undertaking, and this is probably the biggest one,” Haynes told me. “Probably the Ph.D.”
In the fall of 2003, when the script was nearly done, Haynes called in Oren Moverman, a screenwriter whom he had consulted early on, to help him finish. Haynes’s instructions were Talmudic. “He kept saying, ‘We’re not writing a screenplay; we’re interpreting,’ ” Moverman recalls. At some point, Haynes wondered whether he could pull it all off, such a wacky montage of Dylans. He called Jeff Rosen, Dylan’s right hand, who was watching the deal-making but staying out of the scriptwriting. Rosen, he said, told him not to worry, that it was just his own crazy version of what Dylan is.
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If you were visiting the set of “I’m Not There” and it had not yet hit you that each Dylan would have his own film, filmed in a thematically appropriate style, then it would probably have become clear the day you saw Cate Blanchett looking more like Dylan than Dylan himself, standing alongside one of those swan-shaped Italian modern chairs that graced the famous spa set of Fellini’s “8 1/2.” If you wanted to feel a little Felliniesque to boot, you could note that Blanchett spent her breaks staring into a book of Dylan interviews, the cover of which looked just like her looking like him. “She’s embodied this creature,” Haynes told me later. “She blew everybody away.”
At some point, Haynes would sit you down and show you that Blanchett’s Dylan was filmed in a Fellini-style black and white (slow motion sequences to be added later on); that Richard Gere’s Billy the Kid Dylan would be shot like a late-’60s, early-’70s Western (“Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” or “McCabe and Mrs. Miller”); that Bale’s born-again Dylan would be filmed in the bad-TV video that befits a Sacramento, Calif., church basement; that Ledger’s rock-star Dylan would feature the wide shots and close ups of objects that characterize Godard. As Dylan stole song and lyric styles — from the Clancy Brothers, from Civil War poets — so the film cops different Dylan-era directorial styles.
“I said to Todd before we started filming, ‘What’s the “8 1/2” stuff?’ ” Blanchett told me. “ ‘Is it part Dylan, part Mastroianni?’ And he said, ‘No, no, it’s just a film that I thought of for each section.’ I mean, he had a film for each sort of leaping-off point. I mean, that’s what I love, the structure of the film, it dips out of the present and the past, of fantasy and reality, but in that particular sequence, within seconds, within one story.”
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When filming was finally over, Haynes went to Hawaii for 10 days, and then to his house in Portland, to the TV room, just off the living room, where he sat on the floor in front of a flat-screen TV, which was also sitting on the floor, with glasses, a box of tissues, tea and lots of crystallized ginger, for the immune system. He had the stacks of dailies beside him. “I’m just trying to see what I have,” he told me at the time. He made page after page of notes, which were then carried by Tanya Smith, his assistant, to the editor, Jay Rabinowitz, on the other side of Portland. All previous films by Haynes had been edited by his former boyfriend, Jim Lyons, an AIDS activist and screenwriter who was still in New York. Rabinowitz, who had met Haynes through Oren Moverman, is the editor on most of Jim Jarmusch’s films, including “Night on Earth” and “Broken Flowers.” He is also a Dylan fan. In the back of the ramshackle room where he edited the film, Rabinowitz kept a mini-Dylan shrine, part jest, part talisman. The centerpiece was a painting by Haynes of Dylan. Nearby, Rabinowitz kept track of the daily set list when Dylan was on tour. “You know, I love to edit with music anyway, and I have worked on films with Neil Young, with Tom Waits, with Joe Strummer,” Rabinowitz told me. “But to go to work every day and to edit, which I love, and to listen to Bob Dylan’s music — I mean, it’s the best job I ever had in my life.”
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A week later, Haynes had another screening in Portland, inviting his friends. Jon Raymond, the novelist, was there, loving it, while Raymond’s father complained about how boring it was. It was generally a positive response; Haynes was hearing the things he’d hoped to hear. He e-mailed me afterward: “Watched the cut Saturday night with Jon Raymond and Tanya, while 7 other friends and colleagues watched it in NY. & based on their reactions and my own ability to sort of see it through ‘fresh’ eyes, I think for the first time in four years those looming clouds of doubt and catastrophe have parted. . . . I realized that I don’t have to ‘sell it’ anymore, that ultimately the film is what it is — & there’s no turning it into something else. And what it is is like nothing else: both intimate and panoramic, the story of a personality and a nation (I think it’s a deeply patriotic movie). It’s rich & literate but it’s very moving and fun. Tanya and Jon and I talked about it for several hours & later Jon wrote: ‘Tell them (when they ask you what your movie is “about”) that it’s no less than a history of American conscience and American soul (at a moment when both those things are in serious question). It’s a movie about Bob Dylan as the president of America.’ ”
