Director James Mangold on connecting with Bob Dylan for ‘A Complete Unknown’

Director James Mangold’s long-in-the-works Bob Dylan flick A Complete Unknown, starring Timothée Chalamet, is finally hitting theaters on Dec. 25, and the director reveals in a new interview how the pandemic may have helped in the film’s development.

Mangold tells MOJO that while the pandemic delayed the film, it also allowed him a chance to get more time with Dylan himself. 

“Bob had a tour that he’d just cancelled, and he asked to read the script, and that was the start of our connection,” Mangold shares. “He liked what I was doing and saw that I didn’t have some kind of agenda.”

“Then we sat down and had a series of one-on-one meetings, four or five times for at least a half day, just the two of us drinking coffee,” he adds. “And it became a huge opportunity for me to fill in the cracks in the story that the many books about him don’t cover.”

Chalamet had been cast to play Dylan since 2020, and Mangold says, “I thought he was perfect for it from the start and remained so.”

“Timmy’s incredibly sharp, witty, ambitious, kind of wonderfully odd and cool,” he says. “I felt he kind of could really embody a lot of things that Bob was, especially in that early time in his life.”

The film, which Mangold describes as “a fable,” covers a five-year period of Dylan’s early career — and that was enough for the director.

“I don’t feel pressure to define Bob for the ages and all his work over decades,” Mangold says. “I’m just talking about the moment that this guy blossomed, he became empowered, and then moved on. And where he moved to is either another movie or another writer’s business.”

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