From cowboys to X-Men, race cars to rock stars, he's pulled off era-defining films in virtually every genre. Here, the powerhouse filmmaker tells us how he won over Bob Dylan and—after a five year journey—created an epic folk-rock fable.
By Alan LightSay what you want about the merits of James Mangold’s super-hyped new Bob Dylan movie A Complete Unknown, just don’t call it a biopic.
“It's a way of putting your movie down,” says the director and cowriter of the film, which stars Timothée Chalamet and will be released on Christmas Day amid a blizzard of rave reviews. “It's a term used as a pejorative to indicate this cradle-to-grave story with lots of cameos of famous people marching in and out. When people use that term, they mean something that feels like it doesn't earn its own emotional gravity—that it's living off the ‘it really happened’ fumes to give itself an integrity that the actual work of art may not have.”
But his emphatic resistance to the descriptor and all its implications feels like something more personal, and it gets to the heart of why James Mangold wanted to tackle the story of Dylan’s early years in New York. The film covers a brief period of astounding evolution, from the time the teenage acolyte of the folk music icon Woody Guthrie made his 1961 trip from Minnesota to Manhattan until he plugged in his guitar and burned down the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, reshaping the future of rock 'n' roll.
For three decades, Mangold, 61, has directed and written acclaimed projects across a remarkably wide range of genres and styles—the racing drama Ford v Ferrari; the romantic comedy Kate & Leopold; the Johnny Cash, um, biopic Walk the Line; the X-Men chapters The Wolverineand Logan; the Western 3:10 to Yuma; the franchise update Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny—picking up multiple Oscar nominations along the way. Refusing to be boxed in, rejecting a reductive term like “biopic,” reveals an exploratory spirit that he shares with the new movie’s subject.
“One of the many ways I connect with Bob Dylan's career is not wanting to be categorized or labeled,” he says during a late November conversation at a SoHo hotel, and he returns to the theme in a follow-up phone call a week later. “My voracious love of movies is really all-encompassing, and it's something I identify with in terms of Bob. I don't think of myself at his level, but I identify with his restlessness and his need to keep moving and testing himself.”
Mangold has pursued every film he's made and, he notes, has been a credited writer on most of them. “I really only enjoy it when I can control it and shape it,” he says. “The idea of just being a guy who comes on and picks shots or makes wardrobe decisions isn't satisfying to me at all.” So when he heard from someone at Searchlight Pictures that they had acquired a Bob Dylan property, “I just dove right into it.”
With that commitment, of course, comes the exhausting marathon of promotion, and as we sit in this anonymous room (we initially met in a lobby area, but he was distracted by two guys nearby loudly shopping for underwear online), he refuels with coffee before sprinting off to a video interview for Golden Globes voters. These conversations aren’t casual; he speaks in dense, lengthy paragraphs. Later, I catch up with Mangold after a Q&A following an industry screening—but only long enough to walk him to the car that’s zipping him to his next appearance.
Capturing the creative explosion and astonishing velocity of Dylan’s development during this mythic period proved to be a test. A Complete Unknown(which is officially sanctioned by the Dylan team; his longtime representative Jeff Rosen is credited as a producer) was five years in the making, which included two lengthy pauses—the pandemic shutdown in 2020 and the actors and writers strike in 2023. During the COVID break, Mangold continued developing the script (written with Jay Cocks), and when he informed Dylan’s camp that he was reaching into some areas beyond the initial scope of the story, the Nobel Prize winner requested a sit-down.
They met at a Santa Monica coffee shop, and Dylan asked Mangold what the movie was about. “I knew he wanted a short answer,” says the director, “so what came out was, ‘It's about a young man who's suffocating in Minnesota, who feels bleak and doesn't see a path to where he wants to go, so he runs away from all his family and his friends to a faraway town and invents himself anew, makes new friends, finds a new family, and blossoms artistically—to such a point that he starts to suffocate again and runs away from that.’ So many of his songs from this time are about moving on and leaving. It's a quest for freedom.”
Dylan “didn’t seem to have a problem with the simplicity of the tale,” and they continued talking. Mangold walked away from his meetings with the singer—who also contributed some notations of his own to the script—with several key observations. “He still doesn't have a handle on what happened,” he says of Dylan’s ability to access this transformative period. “I don't mean he's lying awake at night thinking about it, but when he goes back, it wasn't this cataclysmic battle over the destiny of music.”
To Mangold, Dylan’s development, however radical to the industry it seemed, was driven by something more internal. “It was actually like a bad Thanksgiving dinner with a guy leaving town, having had it with his family and needing to do something else.”
He also notes that when Dylan talked about playing with a band, he expressed a feeling of camaraderie and friendship. Mangold suspects that as the young singer’s fame grew, as he was becoming anointed as “the voice of a generation” and everyone started to want a piece of him, working with other musicians simply came as a relief. “I think he was really, profoundly lonely.”
This is, of course, a lot to communicate on screen—even if the role weren’t also one of the great cultural figures of our time. Conveying any of this story largely rests on whether the actor playing the leading role can convincingly pull off a seemingly impossible task. Chalamet’s performance, which gets at the essence of the part—the gestures, the nervous energy, the internal combustion, even the selfishness (“You’re kind of an asshole, Bob,” the Joan Baez character tells him at one point)—without devolving into a Bob Dylan imitation, has been earning nearly universal praise; he’s already gotten a Golden Globe nomination, and the Oscar buzz is extremely loud.
Mangold first met with Chalamet at the Toronto International Film Festival premiere of Ford v Ferrariin 2019, when the actor was just 23 years old. He told him two things. First, to get a guitar and start playing right away, because getting comfortable with the instrument as soon as possible would be crucial.
And then he offered one more piece of advice, which clearly resonated; Chalamet recently invoked the exchange at that same industry Q&A. “The other thing I told him,” Mangold says, “was that as we were making Walk the Line, Joaquin [Phoenix] would come up to me at different points, and he'd say, ‘Say that thing.’ And I’d go [whispers] ‘You're not Johnny Cash.’ And then he’d go back and do the scene. At some point, in order to interpret this material, you have to let go and trust that all the preparation you've done is going to make something that feels like Bob but also feels like Timmy. The goal is not to make Timmy vanish—the goal is to combine energies in Timmy's life with energies in young Bob's life, and they have a lot of parallels.”
Returning to his own diverse body of work, Mangold finds unexpected similarities in portraying a musical icon and a comic book superhero. “Playing Bob Dylan is not that different than playing Spider-Man,” he says, “in the sense that you're being compared to others, you're being compared to the quote, unquote, original. There's a certain amount of hostility that's just kind of out there because you dare to even throw your hat in the ring.”
He continues the comparison, drawing connections between genres. “If you're working in the world of Wolverine, it's almost like doing a biopic,” he says. “There's shit you can do and shit you can't do. There's all sorts of restrictions, you can't just make it up out of the air. There's lore and rules for the character. Loganwas about as hard as I pushed it, and there were a lot of people freaked out when I made Logan.”
Not that he felt bound to absolute factual precision in A Complete Unknown, which is based on Elijah Wald’s 2015 book Dylan Goes Electric!.Mangold amplified relationships and blurred timelines to sharpen and heighten the dramatic arc—knowing full well that Dylan fans will pick apart the details. He was setting out to make a “fable,” not a documentary (in fact, a documentary already exists focusing largely on this period of Dylan’s career, Martin Scorsese’s 2005 No Direction Home).
“It's not the point,” says Mangold. “I think my job is to show what it felt like. All the movements of the story are accurate, because at a certain point you have to draw a line somewhere. But the movie would be seven hours long if I sculpted every event so that it was discrete and separate and location- and date-accurate.
“So I don't get too concerned about that,” he continues, “except for the fact that we live in this social media world where people trade in these inaccuracies, they use it to invalidate. Even when I make a fiction movie, when they catch a continuity error, they miss the whole boat. It's a fucking movie—OK, it can be bad, but can you participate in it? Can you contribute your own attention, instead of looking for flaws? At what point does the madness stop?”
Even when he’s working on huge-budget action franchise pictures, James Mangold doesn’t have his actors do a lot of rehearsing. “I never have,” he says, “because I've been there where you do a rehearsal, and then six weeks later you're shooting the scene, and you're going, ‘We can't we find our way to that thing we were doing in rehearsal.’ And they're like, ‘What thing?’ or ‘I don't feel it today’ or ‘This location is different’ or ‘I'm cold’ or ‘I don't know what the hell you're talking about,’ and I hate it. So I want the moment they figure out the scene to be the one that I've got in close-up.”
Which is different, of course, from being rushed or careless. “Being prepped up with Jim is the key,” says Boyd Holbrook, who plays Johnny Cash (depicted as a truth-telling chaos agent) in A Complete Unknownand previously worked with Mangold on Logan and Dial of Destiny. “You can spend a day making one scene, which is a great luxury. You can figure out what works over the course of setting up the shot. I remember trying stuff out on Indiana Jonesand doing a John Cazale sort of look. In Logan, we added those cool sunglasses that just tied it all together. Jim is a living, breathing, high-level, practicing artist, and he makes these arenas, these stages, that are set up to have a pretty grandiose scale of performance.”
Mangold was born in New York City and raised in the Hudson Valley. His parents are both prominent painters. “The whole reason I got into this with my dad’s Super 8 camera 40-something years ago,” he says of his initial attraction to filmmaking, “was the sense of power and control and confidence I got being able to tell a story with a camera.” He attended film school at CalArts and Columbia and his first feature, 1995’s Heavy, won the best directing prize at Sundance.
He established his eclectic path early on. “For me, every movie is, in a weird way, a reaction to the last one,” he says. “Cop Land[from 1997, starring Sylvester Stallone and Robert DeNiro] became this very masculine, sweaty, superstar-laden cop picture. And then my next choice was to adapt Girl, Interruptedwith an entirely female cast [including an Oscar-winning Angelina Jolie]. There was a level where it was like escaping from the men's locker room and making a film that had a more fragile and interesting, less gun-driven, life and death, violent emotional landscape.”
Sometimes the results have connected better than others; Dial of Destinywas widely seen as a major disappointment in the Indiana Jones series, while Loganbroke box-office records. “With any of these franchise movies, the last thing I want to do is tarnish or diminish something I’ve loved since I was a child,” he says. “You want to do them if you feel like you can take them somewhere new—which means you have to take risks, and the risks could inflame the fans.
“But the other beautiful part of making Complete Unknown,” he continues, “was awakening in me how much fun it is to work on a smaller scale and really be in the trenches with the actors solving scene work day to day, which is really my bread and butter and what I love, no matter what the scale of the picture.”
That full-throttled commitment is obvious to everyone on set. “I’ve worked with Jim now, so I can definitely tell you how he runs his films,” says Holbrook. “They're all quite passionate. He's a fierce person, in the way he wants to tell his stories. He has a similar process through everything, which is an incredible attention to detail, and he's so involved in everything. And I love him to pieces.”
Seeking a less conventional way into A Complete Unknown, a structural breakthrough came from having Dylan reflected through the extraordinary characters who surrounded him at the time (“In many ways, it’s a movie of reaction shots,” Mangold says). Most significant was pulling out the role of the saintly folk purist Pete Seeger, played superbly by Edward Norton, and making him a narrative foil bracketing these years, initially championing Dylan as the fulfillment of folk music’s political promise but growing increasingly confused and frustrated by the songwriter’s move toward more abstract words and sounds.
Their relationship—as well as Dylan’s connections with Cash, lover/collaborator/rival Baez (Monica Barbaro), and girlfriend Suze Rotolo (here renamed Sylvie Russo and played by Elle Fanning)—comes to a seismic climax at the Newport festival, where Dylan performed with an electrified band, antagonized many of his supporters, and pointed the way toward a new future for rock as a musical and cultural force.
Mangold was influenced by the circle of personalities depicted in Amadeus, which was directed by Milos Forman, who was one of his film professors at Columbia. “All of those relationships were really useful, because they were all different,” he says. “It meant that the movie could transcend just teaching you a Wikipedia lesson about a famous musical icon's life and take a really resonant story about this icon's life and see if it has greater resonance. It’s not just about Bob Dylan and about Newport or folk versus rock, but about the fractured world we live in now, or the sense of tribalism that people have always had about musical forms and politics.”
Representations of Dylan on film have emphasized his mystery and inscrutability. Todd Haynes’s 2007 I’m Not Therefeatured six actors, of different races and genders, playing the singer, and even the documentaries Rolling Thunder Revueand Trouble No Moreincluded made-up characters and fictionalized speeches. Mangold sought something more direct.
“I like art that moves you,” he says. “I still go back and watch On the Waterfrontor East of Eden, and I thought there was a way to make a movie about Bob Dylan that was not detached, that was not chilly or coy or playing truth-or-fiction games, but just telling the story of a 19-year-old boy who comes to town and invents himself anew. I was very unashamed to be working in a milieu that I thought is really fun and really rewarding.”
So who is A Complete Unknownintended for—Bob Dylan fans who get all the movie’s references (for better or for worse) or Timothée Chalamet fans who may never have heard of Bob Dylan? Does it risk being not enough for the one and too much for the other? Mangold claims that he never considered a target audience while he was making the film.
“I don’t think that way,” he says. “I'm not making dinner in someone else's restaurant. I'm making dinner in my home the way I'd like to serve it to my friends. If there's anyone I have in mind, it's someone who's hostile to the movie. When I did the opening of Walk the Linein the prison, I was imagining some guy who was dragged to the movie, doesn't want to see this country and western movie. I'm imagining, how do I shut him up? He may not give me the time of day, he may not even like it, but how do I have him stop bitching to his friend or girlfriend about coming to see this movie?”
Mangold repeatedly expressed immense pride in Chalamet’s performance, which required singing many of Dylan’s best-loved songs—often in full, and usually for narrative as well as musical purposes. The actor and director spoke every day since committing to the film, even during the lengthy pauses in production, and every night after shooting. “I really saw him change over the five years,” says Mangold, “His seriousness, his ability to articulate what he was looking for in a scene or out of himself, his absolute relentless focus.”
He also defends choices Chalamet made that have been mocked in some of the press, like asking to be called “Bob” on set or refusing to see any visitors while in character. “He was just trying to do his job,” says Mangold. “You can make that stuff strange, but you can also go, this is a guy who's got a fucking bear of a job, and there's going to be a world of judgment brought down upon him, and he's owning it. If I'm a Dodger fan, I don't want my star pitcher having relationship issues or family issues or a fight with their brother before they pitch. I want them pure and focused, locked in. That was the kind of commitment he made, and I'm grateful.”
He notes that the dynamic between stars and directors creates a singular situation, and earning that confidence is essential not only to the results on screen, but to the realities of getting a project made. “The real magic fairy dust of movies is trust between the principals,” he says, “because if you really think about it, a movie production is incredibly skewed—I may be a fairly successful movie director, but my actors are very often the entire reason the enterprise is getting financed, right? So the thing lives or dies with their presence, and the unique balance of power that exists on a movie set only exists at the discretion and generosity of your actors giving you the license to be their boss. Whether you talk about Christian [Bale] and Matt [Damon] or Timmy or Hugh Jackman, to know that you have the back of your actor and they have yours in this scariest of all worlds is a unique kind of alliance, and the best movies I've made have always come from an environment where that was number one.”
It's not yet clear what comes next for Mangold. According to the trades, he’s in the mix for a Swamp Thingmovie and an upcoming Star Warsinstallment. He says that he loves doing these kinds of pictures, that seeing Star Warsas a teenager is one of the things that inspired him to make movies, but nothing is finalized.
Whatever the scale of his future projects, whether franchise tentpole or something more intimate and character-driven, what’s certain is that Mangold will be running the show. “You don't do them if you don't have control of the picture,” he says. “It's that simple—if you don't control the destiny of the movie, don't make the movie. If that ever occurs, that is a line in the sand. If I sense I'm just part of a committee, my system shuts down and I lose interest.”
Mangold insists that from cowboys to X-Men, race cars to rock stars, making different kinds of movies just isn’t as challenging as you might think it is. “Whether I'm directing Loganor Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destinyor A Complete Unknown,” he says, “my job is essentially the same every day, which is amid all that technology and spectacle, to get in a room with actors and get some moment that is indescribable or interesting in some way that pulls you in. To get something human to happen.”
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