Conversations: Todd Haynes

In this interview and podcast, the director discusses his astonishing new film, "I'm Not There," and that elusive shape-shifter, Bob Dylan.

By Stephanie Zacharek

Read more: Stephanie Zacharek, Movies, Bob Dylan, Arts & Entertainment, Salon Conversations

Nov. 21, 2007 |

Anyone who has ever listened to even three or four random Bob Dylan records knows that the mythical creature we call Dylan couldn't possibly be just one person. So in the ambitious and extraordinary "I'm Not There" -- not a biopic but a dream-world meditation on the idea of Dylan -- Todd Haynes has cast six actors, each of whom plays a different vision of the performer we all only think we know. Among them are Christian Bale, the earnest, righteous protest singer; Ben Whishaw, the mischievous poet who seems to have been whisked in from another era; Marcus Carl Franklin, the 11-year-old drifter who idolizes Woody Guthrie; and, in one of the finest performances of her career to date, Cate Blanchett, the neurotic, sexually charismatic performer who, circa 1965-1966, was only just beginning to realize that the people who claimed to love him so much were also capable of tearing him apart.

With "I'm Not There" (the title says it all) Haynes celebrates Dylan's elusiveness, his refusal to fit into the neat little boxes we try to cram him into. I spoke with Haynes in Toronto in September, where he talked about Dylan as a shape-shifter, a mischief-maker and a perennial source of astonishment. (Listen to a podcast of my interview with Haynes here -- and click here to read my full review of "I'm Not There.")

The idea of Bob Dylan is so outsized that when people talk about him they generally break him down into periods -- "The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan" Bob Dylan, the "Blood on the Tracks" Bob Dylan. And what you've done is broken him into different people, which is such a brilliantly simple idea that I can't believe no one has done it before. How did this idea evolve?

It was just plain on the page. When you really decide to look at the biographies and the accounts of him in the '60s, if you just read a few of them, they all line up in that idea. And you hear testimony of people saying that they hung out with him in August of '63, and then in November of '63 he was a different person. Like he had shape-shifted right in front of their eyes.

And you can hear it in the records, and you can see it much more clearly in these radical breaks, like when he plugged in electric [at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival], or when he became a born-again Christian, or when he had his motorcycle crash and ducked out into the woods for several years. But it felt like the only way to really get to some core truths about this fascinating guy.

As you know, there are a lot of people who are constantly trying to get to that truth, kind of scrabbling at it. There are people who really burrow into Dylan lyrics, thinking, "All the secrets must be in the songs!" And who's that guy who went through his garbage? Like, "The truth will be found in the garbage!"

But then on the other end of the spectrum you have people like Greil Marcus, who realize that the music is finite, it doesn't change, but the context around it is changing constantly. That's kind of the approach that I saw coming through in your movie. The music is the anchor, and everything else is moving around it.

Yeah, the characters are totally committed to their moment, and their ideas, and the world they're in. And the songs they produce are the total and complete products of that commitment. And yet they are completely in dispute with the other selves and the other songs around them. So there's a kind of dialogue going on internally between all of these absolute and total commitments to an idea or a position or a moment.

But the thing is too, what's so crazy about Dylan today is, that he'll go out and take these songs that are absolutely true to their time, perhaps, and to their inspiration and their moment, and he will reinvent the way they sound. So even the associations that you bring to them, and the desire to preserve something and keep something intact, are once again destroyed by him. Because he needs to be invigorated and break out of the Bob Dylanness of himself -- break out of the fixedness that everybody wants to attach to him.

I also think the thing about identity that's so interesting is that we strive to be affirmed somehow by identifying with something else. We strive to be rewarded -- it's like our own completeness is rewarded by identifying with somebody else's completeness. And Dylan is such a strong presence and voice and articulator that a whole generation, and more, have sought that from him.

But he so refuses to give that completeness back. And it only makes the desire for it all the stronger. I posit in the movie that that's what freedom is. Freedom isn't about being fixed, about finding out who you really are and staying put your whole life, finding out that you have a stable self, a completely cohesive being or something. No, we're always shifting and changing and adjusting and altering who we are, all the time. It's a constant state of creation. And Dylan makes that a life practice. He makes that whole idea of rejecting fixity, of rejecting holism, a gorgeous life work. And it's something that throws that whole idea of identity out the window. But at the same time he so frustrates the desire for that [identity] that it keeps regenerating itself.

And, oh man, those Dylan guys!

I know, right?

You go to parties with these guys and they stand around and talk about bootlegs all night, and catalog numbers, and what he was doing on Jan. 14, 1963.

Oh God! [Laughs]

I always wonder, with all that information in their heads, do they have any room for the music?

Exactly. And how opposite that is from him, the person they love and fetishize so completely.

Next page: "This droll old man, with these wisecracks"