Conversations: Todd Haynes

I felt so exhilarated watching this movie, beginning with the credit sequence. Some of Dylan's music is very serious, and people approach it very reverently. But watching that opening, I remembered there's so much joy and pleasure to be had in this music. He plays around a lot. He's always goofing around -- not even just wordplay.

Oh my God, totally. There's a mischievousness, and there's incredible wit and humor. I don't think he thinks of himself as some intensely serious guy who's really heavy and should be analyzed and contemplated, and so highly regarded every step he takes.

I really think that that humor is just something that has been so evident from the very first record, with the talking blues songs that are so witty and funny, to the most recent recordings, where it's a whole other Dylan. It's this droll old man, with these wisecracks.

Aleeeecia Keeeys ...

[Laughs] Exactly! But that's been consistent through his entire career. To me, that's a testament to his brilliance and his intelligence -- his ability to play around and goof around, to be able to throw things up in the air and see how they fall.

Of course, he's had his moments of intense seriousness and righteousness. I kind of put those together in the character of the Christian Bale story, [where there's] this kind of intense commitment to a sort of doctrine, whether it's that of the New Left in the folk era, or that of the born-again Christian in his Christian period, where all of a sudden he had the answer. And he was going to tell us what it was, as beautifully and passionately and emotively as he knew how. In both cases, amazing music came out of those convictions. There was a fixity, there was a righteousness, there was a lack of humor to both those periods of music. But they were very specifically lived. They do not cast oppressive shadows across his career. They were things he went right into, and then right out of.

It struck me that you've chosen one of the most beautiful actresses we've got to play Dylan in the period when he was the most beautiful. I look at him from that period -- '65, '66 -- and he's such a brat. There's a part of me that resists him. I think, Can't you just be a little bit nicer? You don't always have to be an asshole. But, given the chance to sleep with him at the time, I would have. I know millions of people have felt that way. Obviously, you knew you wanted different people to play Dylan. Was there ever a point where you just decided you wanted to cast a beautiful woman?

I do think he's beautiful at that period. But I was really more after the strangeness of what he had become as a man at that moment. How he was androgynous, but not in the way David Bowie would be androgynous a few years later, in the early '70s. It was almost more the way Patti Smith was androgynous. He was just this otherworldly creature. This otherness had crept into him completely by that point.

It's not like he is in [the 1965 D.A. Pennebaker documentary] "Don't Look Back." It had already progressed to this degree where he was really almost disturbingly skinny. And the hair was wildly outsized in proportion to the rest of his body. And his hands would just fly up in these crazy, fingernail-driven gestures while he'd play piano and talk, and how he was just fidgeting. And I was thinking, What would that have possibly been like to an audience in 1965, '66 -- when the Beatles were still sweet, and little Munchkins, you know? This guy was dangerous and fascinating and erotic but in a completely unsoft way. He also drew off the hostility and animosity that he'd generated by plugging in electric. It fueled him, and he struck back. The vengefulness of his feelings toward his audience, toward American culture and English culture, only seemed to propel him to do even more great songwriting and incredible recordings. That is just a moment that has become so canonized that I feel we've lost the shock value, and the genuine risk that it must have generated.

On a purely superficial level, I just wanted a woman's body to occupy that place, so that this strangeness could come back. But then Cate does something to it that takes it in so many more subtle and beautiful directions -- where you can really watch this character exist on-screen, for his humor, for his unpredictability, as a love object, as an artist. Just the layers of subtlety that she brings to it are so profound and so incredible.

I'm so lucky with my actors, I just can't believe it. I was lucky with my creative team as well -- they really rose to the occasion and did so much with so little. But the actors did so much with so little, too. Because they're all on-screen for relatively shorter amounts of time than they usually are, as lead actors.

And trusting you, too, because they had no sense how it was going to come together.

Yeah, and trusting a really difficult script that reflects the complexity of the structure [of the movie], without any of the fun of the fact that it's music-driven and has a rhythm. But you can't really get that on the page when I describe things so ornately, the way I do. The fact that it really came together this beautifully is miraculous.

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