Indie Auteur Todd Haynes Explains the Daring “I’m Not There”

Todd Haynes plus music equals heartache. His cult classic Superstar (1987), a Karen Carpenter biopic reenacted with Barbie dolls, is only available on grainy bootlegs because surviving brother Richard refused to grant rights to his sister’s songs. Ditto for Velvet Goldmine (1998), a lush glam rock fantasy from which spoilsport David Bowie withheld his own catalog. So when Haynes decided to direct I’m Not There, an audacious and free-form meditation on the many faces of Bob Dylan (played variously by Heath Ledger, Richard Gere, Cate Blanchett, Christian Bale, Ben Whishaw and African-American child actor Marcus Carl Franklin), you could almost smell the legal battle brewing. Thankfully, Dylan miraculously granted rights to this not-always-flattering interpretation of his life and work—good news for Haynes and audiences alike.

It’s really extraordinary that Dylan granted you rights, especially since you’ve had such struggles with artists before.

Haynes: Well, it was just like, easy, which is so crazy about the whole thing. [Producer] Christine Vachon and I went and visited Jesse Dylan—Dylan’s oldest son, who’s a filmmaker in L.A. So we described the concept to Jesse and [Dylan’s manager] Jeff Rosen, and Jeff said, “It’s interesting; why don’t you write it down on one sheet and we’ll send it to Bob?” So I wrote it out as simply as I could, and a couple months later we got a call from Jeff saying that Bob said, “OK, let’s give the guy the rights.” It’s really incredible.

This entire movie reminded me of an Oscar Wilde quote you used in Velvet Goldmine—”The first duty in life is to assume a pose.”

Haynes: Yeah, but in Dylan’s case it goes beyond the pose, where a person absolutely enters into these bodies and becomes them for a time. I really think of Dylan as the consummate performer, even more than being this amazing singer and songwriter and wordsmith. He’s somebody who embodies what he’s doing in the moment totally, and lives and dies in the moment. But when he’s done, it’s dead. It’s over. It’s no longer alive, and it’s almost like he forgets it ever happened. I just find that to be so interesting, and so American. We keep discovering ourselves in the moment as if yesterday never happened.

During the course of making this movie, you entered a new phase of life, too—you moved from New York City to Portland and created a whole new life on the West Coast. Was making this movie a reflection of your own shedding an identity and starting anew?

Haynes: I really don’t identify with that aspect of Dylan. I really feel like I am this more reflective and analytical person, and my medium as film is not a medium you live in the moment. But there’s no question that Dylan marked a kind of reminder for me, and I associated this from my early days of being a Dylan fan in high school, that change is good. And the fearlessness and the swagger and the devil-may-care attitude that I think I find innately embedded in his voice and the spirit of his music is something that I needed again later in my life, and that ushered me from one place to another. That’s a fantastic thing to remember.

This entry was posted by RNYK on Wednesday, May 7th, 2008 at 11:21 am