Todd Haynes – Chronicling A Rolling Stone

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By IFQ Critic Todd Konrad

Since 1986, with the brief release and controversy that surrounded his unorthodox Karen Carpenter film, Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story, filmmaker Todd Haynes has consistently challenged audiences with his genre-bending explorations into popular culture and society that includes Poison, Safe, and most recently, the Academy-Award nominated film Far From Heaven.

And now Haynes returns with I’m Not There, his boldest work yet which chronicles the life and myth of musician and pop culture icon Bob Dylan. Haynes speaks with IFQ Critic Todd Konrad about the trials and tribulations that brings this unique film into being, his long-time producer and friend Christine Vachon, and speculates on future cinematic ambitions.

IFQ: To begin, would it be fair to say that the film is concerned in a way more with Bob Dylan as an idea or concept rather than solely focusing on the individual himself?

Todd Haynes: Yes, I would agree with that, but I would also say that when you really look at the man himself and maybe that is even in quotations, you know. The accounts of him throughout his life all line up so closely to what I’m actually doing in terms of describing him as all of these different people. I feel I didn’t really impose on him so much as I kept bumping into it almost everywhere I looked, you know through the books, the biography, the research and even in just the way, you know, what we all kind of know about Dylan at the most basic level or things like, “Oh he plugged in an electric and everybody booed” or “Oh yeah, he became a Christian at the end of the Seventies.” These are obviously two examples of radical changes that he went through and even if you sort of have to explain why everybody freaked out when he plugged in an electric because that doesn’t seem like a terrible thing to do today. It sort of built into his myth and his actual life. He was always undergoing these sorts of radical changes with major fallouts.

IFQ: What led you first to choose Dylan as your subject and along with that to choose structuring it in such an unorthodox manner rather than sticking to a more conventional, straight-forward narrative form?

TH: The idea sort of came up when I was sort of at a transitional period in my own life and found myself getting back into Dylan’s music with a sort of weird ferocity that I hadn’t really encountered before in my life where I was kind of a Dylan fan in high school but hadn’t stayed abreast of everything he was doing through the Eighties and Nineties. I found myself intensely craving that voice, those songs, that music. At the end of the Nineties, when I was in my last years of living in New York and I was about to start writing the script for my last film (Far From Heaven), I drove cross country to Portland, Oregon where I was going to be able to write it and Dylan was my sort of soundtrack on that trip. I just found myself getting ever deeper into his biography and as I said, this idea of him as this constantly changing property was so consistent in all the things I read that I just realized that was a key to him and that would be really the only adequate way to get under his skin. So that’s really where the idea came from and the concept all in one sort of moment.

IFQ: Do you feel that you learned anything new about Dylan through the process of making this film?

TH: Well yeah, I mean I’m not sure I learned anything that really contradicted things I knew or things I suspected about him. I don’t think I felt that I faced any huge turnabouts. I just learned all about the other things I knew less about, the details and was able to find a home for so much different and contradictory information about him that this concept, this idea of having multiple characters made it possible to have conflicting and discontinuous ideas and not have to fight that and or force them into a narrative arc or any of the other conventional ways that people try to reconcile contradictions in somebody’s life.

IFQ: I’d like to move from strictly the creative arena and more into the business end regarding the project. How was the process of actually getting the financing for it? As I’m guessing that this would not be considered an “easy sell” to a major studio, not in terms of the subject matter but how it is structured.

TH: Yeah, you’re absolutely correct there. It was a really, really tough film to get made, but mostly it had to do with the United States and finding financing domestically. The script which was the result of this concept that Dylan had signed off on and given his blessing to and this was the first time he’d ever done so for a fictional film about his life. The script was incredibly dense, very untraditional kind of script. I tend to fill it with descriptive detail that probably most scripts don’t need, but they’re there for me to visualize the scenes I’m talking about and even describe the dissolves and background music and things you don’t necessarily include in a shooting script. And remarkably, despite all that, the actors, an amazing caliber of actors, signed on very quickly with no real resistance. And so shortly after getting those actors we went to Cannes to try and pre-sell the film and that went incredibly well.

We got some remarkable pre-sales for European territories and felt like, “Wow, we really have the wind in our sails.” And then we came back home [Chuckles.] and started to find domestic financing and that’s when everything ground to a halt and the script was shopped around every studio, every classics division of every studio, independent producers, financiers and basically was met with perplexity if not much harsher reactions that were probably politely not stated in front of me, but I understood why. I knew this was unlike anything that people had read before, but I also figured that with my own track record as at least a critically appreciated filmmaker, these actors, and the life and times and music of Bob Dylan, granted for the first time ever, I figured that some people would be able to overlook a script that they might not get and go with it. But that really wasn’t the case; I mean we were really in the midst of a conservative period in every way, but it was certainly affecting the kind of risks that were being taken by studios and producers. And it wasn’t until Jim Stern and his company Endgame, a private equity source, came into the project that we were able to stark eking out a production schedule.

IFQ: Now once you got the money together and were able to make the film, the dreaded issue of distribution raises its head. Had distribution been secured during pre-sales or did you shop the finished film to potential buyers after production?

TH: We couldn’t get a distribution deal from anybody before shooting the film, so we went ahead with our equity investor and set out to get the film shot and we knew we would need to sell it later for the U.S. distribution so the Weinstein Company came in after that process.

IFQ: Your producer on I’m Not There was your long-time producer Christine Vachon, whom you’ve worked with and known for the past, what is it, 20 years now?

TH: It’s nearly that, yeah, we started working together in Apparatus Productions which was this non-profit film organization that we put together with Barry Ellsworth. All of three of us went to Brown together so we knew each other from college and that was ’86, I think. And the first film that we worked together on our own was Poison, my first feature and her first feature as a producer. But yeah, Christine is an amazing person and this film would not have happened without her. That fight, that persistence, that refusal to take no for an answer or to give up is more her efforts than mine ultimately and it was true for this film and true for the film we did, Safe. Those were two of the hardest films to get financed that we made together.

IFQ: Well, after spending so much time on getting I’m Not There financed and shot, are there any projects on the horizon that you’re keen to start work on?
TH: Nothing that’s formulated, but I definitely have been thinking a lot about our political situation today and realizing that Bush and Cheney will not be receiving articles of impeachment before they leave office and I think that maybe there’s times where films can provide a social and ethical function of explaining what misdeeds took place when they aren’t addressed by congressional or legislative means that we are supposed to have at our disposal as a so-called free society and you know certain films have spoken elegantly about the Watergate era, the Vietnam era. And I mean, there already are some great films out there right now about Iraq, but I think that we haven’t fully figured out what happened yet. So I think that might be a worthwhile project.