In “A Complete Unknown,” Bob Dylan (Timothée Chalamet) and Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro) sing to a giant crowd of thousands of fans at the 1964 Newport Folk Festival. But for director…
In “A Complete Unknown,” Bob Dylan (Timothée Chalamet) and Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro) sing to a giant crowd of thousands of fans at the 1964 Newport Folk Festival. But for director and writer James Mangold (“Walk the Line”), he wasn’t so interested in the fans because Bob and Joan are glued to each other.
“There’s a weird contradiction you feel on stage,” Mangold says. “There may be all these eyeballs on you but there’s kind of a focused connection that’s intense. The connection, that mic, [forces] them to be at a shared distance, all of which brings on other aspects of intimacy, romance and sexuality while they’re singing a song about not needing each other.”
Mangold, Chalamet and Barbaro joined Variety’s “Making a Scene” to discuss the considerations that went into the intimate duet set to “It Ain’t Me Babe” between Bob Dylan and Joan Baez. The scene transpires while Sylvie Russo (Elle Fanning), Bob’s partner at the time, watches from the sidelines and gets her heart broken.
While Chalamet says that the intention was never to create “carbon copies of these musicians,” the original video of Bob and Joan singing the duet proved to be “super informative. They’re really having a laugh and it seems like they have a secret.”
Barbaro acknowledges that the song choice is very on the nose but it was intentional on Mangold’s part. In the clip, Joan Baez tells Bob to “just fuck off and sing.”
“You watch a lot of footage of Joan being very intentional and put together about her answers. Yet when you learn about her, she is a person who would say something like, ‘Fuck off and sing,’ but she wasn’t doing that publicity,” Barbaro says. “The audience doesn’t necessarily get that until decades later when she talks about the way she was.”
Mangold remarks that he loves the rapport that Chalamet and Barbaro built on screen. He describes Joan Baez as “formidable. Everyone at this point in the story is kind of dancing on eggshells around Bob and that’s not Joan. It adds a degree of difficulty for Bob that’s fun to watch because he’s dealing with someone who’s not gonna take a certain level of shit and may even be giving it back.”
Barbaro looks back on the film’s production and how focused she was on nailing Joan’s “certain level of vibrato and tone” along with her “finger-picking style” on the guitar. While the team shot all the singing scenes multiple times, allowing Mangold to choose from many coverage angles, the “It Ain’t Me Babe” scene was shot the least: Barbaro was on a tight schedule.
“I was like throwing off my guitar and hair, I had to get on a plane to shoot another project at the same time,” Barbaro recalls.
One of the big stories from the film has been how Chalamet pre-recorded his Bob Dylan vocals but sang live on set — Mangold ended up using the latter tracks. “The reason they’re always singing live is honestly because they’re breathing,” Mangold explains. “They have to be moving oxygen … You have to actually do it or else it is just fraud.”
Chalamet commended Mangold’s directing style: “Kudos to [James], who really had his eye on the whole movie and the fact that [watching] actors do karaoke really isn’t interesting.”
