Todd Haynes Offers His Bob Dylan

Though we first met back in 1991, when the NEA-funded homoeroticism of his first aboveground feature, Poison, was rattling the halls of Congress, Todd Haynes and I bonded in April of 1995, when we served as jurors for the short-film competition at the USA Film Festival in Dallas. On our day off from jury duty, we went downtown and visited Dealey Plaza and the Sixth Floor Museum created out of the former Texas School Book Depository and came to the immediate conclusion that not only did Lee Harvey Oswald "do it," but that shooting fish in a barrel would have presented a greater angle of difficulty.

As excited as I was by Haynes' prospects then, I never could have imagined they would take the shape they have or move so swiftly into the sightlines of a large public—first with Safe, released two months after our Dallas confab, his drama about a woman suffering from an "environmental illness" that does double duty as a metaphor for AIDS; then, three years later, Velvet Goldmine, which detailed the polymorphous perversity of the glam rock era; then, in 2002, Far From Heaven, a full-blown re-creation of the melodramas of Douglas Sirk that dealt frankly with subjects Sirk couldn't have touched: interracial love and gay husbands bursting out of the closet.

But rather than move further into the mainstream, Haynes has taken his most radical leap to date with I'm Not There, which opened in Dallas last weekend. Initially subtitled "Suppositions on a Film Concerning Dylan" but now more modestly labeled as "Inspired by the music and many lives of Bob Dylan," it features six different actors playing six differently named characters that either embody or reflect aspects of Dylan's life and art, ranging from Christian Bale as the Dylan of early fame and born-again Christianity to Ben Whishaw as an enigmatic Dylanesque who calls himself Arthur Rimbaud to Heath Ledger as an actor who plays a Dylan-type character in a film-within-the-film.

That's not to mention Marcus Carl Franklin as a black 11-year-old who calls himself "Woody Guthrie," Richard Gere in a period setting as Billy the Kid and, most queer-radical of all, Cate Blanchett as "Jude," a '60s-era pop star whose frizzy hair, sardonic manner and controversial penchant for electric guitar plainly represent the Dylan of his most artistically aggressive period. Add Julianne Moore as someone not unlike Joan Baez, Charlotte Gainsbourg evoking both Dylan's important girlfriend Suze Rotolo and his first wife, Sara Lowndes, cinematography that veers from black and white to color and back again, and a host of Dylan covers by a raft of contemporary artists, and you've got yourself two hours and 15 minutes of rich and strange filmmaking that's seldom been seen before.

Coming after Far From Heaven—your My Own Private Idaho, as it were—this is the point at which you should be making your Good Will Hunting. But you've gotten more experimental rather than less.

[Laughs.] Well, [with Dylan] I had quite a standard to live up to in terms of not shying away from challenging the popular form. And I took that very much to heart with this film.

If you want to know what was on people's minds in that era, the best way is to listen to some of those songs. And [D.A. Pennebaker's documentary] Dont Look Back was quite the deal. There are little bits of Dont Look Back in I'm Not There, but you don't really use it as a template. The main movie you're "sampling" is 8 1/2;, which strikes some people as truly odd.

The reason for 8 1/2 in that part of the film is that, basically, I was looking for cinematic references for getting to the root of each of these little stories and what they were about—how to differentiate them. And usually that had everything to do with the music that was defining that particular period of Dylan or phase of Dylan or psyche of Dylan. And in the "Jude" story, I knew I wanted to do it in black and white. The very first movie proposition that came to mind was Dont Look Back, of course. But when I was thinking of the music of that period—Highway 61 and especially Blonde on Blonde—I very quickly realized that Dont Look Back, a cinema verité masterwork, is far from the sensibility of the music at that point in Dylan's career. It didn't take me long to come up with 8 1/2 and find in that film, and in Fellini in general at that time, what I thought was a beautiful parallel to that sensibility of Dylan's—baroque but utterly urbane.

Your film seems to be directed at an audience that knows a lot of things, like about Dylan's novel Tarantula, and therefore will react when you show an actual tarantula onscreen. On the other hand, the extreme Dylan fan may be very upset by what you've done. Of course, you don't go through his garbage like [Dylan to English Dictionary author] A.J. Weberman, but I can imagine some people seeing you that way.