Breaking Baz: ‘A Complete Unknown’ Writer-Director James Mangold Reveals His Process With Timothée Chalamet & What Dylan Himself Thinks Of It All

deadline.com:

EXCLUSIVE: James Mangold is sitting comfortably in a posh London hotel sipping tea. Actually, the seats are disagreeably sunken and the filmmaker jokes that we’re like “six-year-olds” because we’re sitting so low to the ground. “Yes, daddy, I’ll have tea,” he jokes.

The filmmaker has been scooting around town like a rolling stone for London screenings of Searchlight Pictures’ scorchingly realized A Complete Unknown, starring a magnificent Timothée Chalamet as Bob Dylan, circa the early 1960s when the boy from the north country was in the embryonic stage of his career.

Mangold’s screenplay, written with Jay Cocks and based on Elijah Wald’s book Dylan Goes Electric!: Newport, Seeger, Dylan and the Night That Split the Sixties, is like the libretto of a great opera, and it allows Dylan’s early repertoire to emerge organically rather than perfectly fully formed.

We’re able to witness the birth of a phenomenally great artist as he locates the harmonies to pair with his poetic lyrics, and in so doing divorcing himself from the constraints of the high church of folk music; severing links to the likes of Pete Seeger [an extraordinary Edward Norton], and, to a certain extent, Joan Baez [beautifully captured by Monica Barbaro].