Todd Haynes Interview, I'm Not there

MoviesOnline recently sat down with Todd Haynes at the Los Angeles press day for his new movie, "I’m Not There,” the highly anticipated biographical film about legendary singer and songwriter Bob Dylan which Haynes directed and co-wrote with Oren Moverman. The film follows six distinct characters, depicting different stages of Dylan’s life, embodying a different aspect of his life story and music. It’s the first biographical feature project to secure the approval of the music legend.

"I’m Not There” dramatizes the life and music of Bob Dylan as a series of shifting personae, each performed by a different actor – poet, prophet, outlaw, fake, star of electricity, rock and roll, martyr born-again Christian – seven identities braided together, seven organs pumping through one life story, as dense and vibrant as the era it inspired.

Arthur (Ben Wishaw), a renegade symbolist poet, serves as the film’s de factor narrator, while being interrogated by a nameless commission as to the motivations, subversive undercurrents, and political misreadings of his work. His witty, ironic responses provide counterpoint to the chapters of a life that begin to unfurl.

First up, as an embodiment of Dylan’s youthful aspirations, we meet Woody (Marcus Carl Franklin), a precocious train-hopper who, despite being 11-years-old and black, calls himself Woody Guthrie. Set in the late 1950’s, Woody has adopted the posture and tales of the dust bowl troubadour with a calculated earnestness. To the supporters he encounters on the road, Woody’s tall tales of circus escapes and musical glory provide impressive evidence of his authenticity, even as his impersonation is revealed. 

But the character who first achieves success "singing about his own time” is Jack (Christian Bale), who hits Greenwich Village and spearheads the protest-music scene of the early sixties with his original compositions, strident performances and high-profile LPs. As the devouring public divines a social and political consciousness in his lyrics, Jack severs ties with his ‘message’ in a bizarre retreat from both his lover and folk singing champion, Alice (Julianne Moore) and his young worshiping audience. 

Robbie (Heath Ledger), a New York actor and motorcycle enthusiast, races to counter-culture fame with his performance in a 1965 film biography of the now-vanished Jack.  Robbie’s troubled ten-year relationship with Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg) is chronicled from their initial meeting in a Greenwich Village coffee shop through to their eventual separation against the background turmoil of the Vietnam War. 

While Robbie struggles to balance private life with encroaching fame, Jude (Cate Blanchett) surrenders body and soul to a full-throttle assault on his folk music following. Closely following Dylan’s mid-sixties adventures, Jude shocks his audience by embracing amplified rock and an increasingly nihilistic, amphetamine-fueled persona. His new sound attracts artistic kudos from Allen Ginsberg (David Cross), underground ingénue Coco Rivington (Michelle Williams) and international fame, but infuriates the protest-music old guard, not to mention journalists like Mr. Jones (Bruce Greenwood). Evading emotional attachments and basic self-preservation, Jude’s dangerous game propels him into existential breakdown. His resurrection comes in the nick of time: Pastor John (Christian Bale) is Jack twenty years later, a born-again Christian preacher who has jettisoned his folk music legacy for the gospel. 

Finally, the last and oldest of our characters is discovered in full retreat from the world. Billy (Richard Gere)—no longer "the Kid”—has survived his famous showdown and found refuge in the metaphoric town of Riddle, Missouri living out his days in a self-imposed exile from the past. But when word of the town’s impending demise forces a confrontation with his old nemesis Pat Garrett (a reincarnated Bruce Greenwood), Billy is forced to abandon his sanctuary and continue moving on.

Oscar-nominated writer-director Todd Haynes’ short film, "Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story,” used Barbie dolls as actors to trace the demise from anorexia of the singer, and has gone on to become an underground cult classic. Haynes’ first feature, "Poison” (1991), was awarded the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance in 1991. Haynes’ next film was "Dottie Gets Spanked,” a short film which The Village Voice hailed as "A Pop Art vision of ‘50s suburbia.” His second feature, "Safe” (1994), was named Best Film of the Year by leading critics at The Boston Globe, Film Comment, and Interview Magazine, among others. The Village Voice went even further, naming it the best film of the 90s. "Safe” also marked the first of Haynes’ collaborations with widely celebrated actress Julianne Moore.

Haynes’ third feature was the potent rock drama "Velvet Goldmine” (1997), starring Ewan McGregor, Jonathan Rhys-Meyers, Christian Bale and Toni Collette. The New York Times described "Goldmine” as "dazzlingly surreal,” and the Cannes Film Festival honored the film with an award for Best Artistic Contribution. "Far From Heaven” (2002), Haynes’ fourth feature, was the single best-reviewed film of 2002. Starring Julianne Moore, Dennis Quaid and Dennis Haysbert, it swept critics awards across the country, including the New York Film Critics circle. "Far From Heaven” was recognized with four Academy Award nominations, including a Best Actress nod for Moore and a screenwriting nomination for Haynes.

Todd Haynes is a provocative and strikingly original filmmaker and we really appreciated his time. Here’s what he had to tell us about his new movie, "I’m Not There”:

Q: Can you talk about the genesis of this project and how this film came about?

TODD HAYNES: It came in the year 2000 which was a time when I was getting back into Dylan music with a fury in some sudden way, I just suddenly had to hear Dylan. It was an interesting time because I was planning to leave New York for a little while to write my script "Far From Heaven” and drive across country which I love to do and made all these cassette tapes for myself for the ride. And I landed in Portland, Oregon where my sister lives and there was an empty house that I could work in and I was writing "Far From Heaven” by night, but by day I just kept thirsting for more and more Dylan and I was encountering stuff that I had never heard before and reading some of the biographies and reading a lot of the interviews from 1965, 1966 and it was just this great time of pure obsession. It was in that moment that this sort of idea, this concept of looking at him as a series of different people, all a cluster of different selves, came to me and with that idea came the idea to make a film.

Q: Was it more his personal life than his music that you were obsessed about?

TODD HAYNES: No, it always started with the music. Everything sort of came from the music but the music and his life were so closely kind of constructing the other. They were each in this constant mirroring of the other I thought, and I decided that the film should be made up of the places where that was most true, where the music and his creative imagination and the genres he was getting into were reflected in some way with his life and his activities. So that’s where the idea came from. I really had no real expectations that we’d get rights from Dylan and there’d be no way to proceed without them and I had another project that was really my practical focus. I think that made it even better that I just didn’t even really expect it to happen and then it did and it was just a complete surprise.

Q: Was there something about your life in that period that his work was feeding into that made you so open to him?

TODD HAYNES: I think it was about change. I think I needed some change in my life and I ended up staying in Portland and I fell in love with the city and just that whole different environment and fantastic people and found myself, like in New York you start to get very stingy with your time and space. You get very guarded with your time and space and if somebody came to your door and buzzed the door without you knowing they were coming, you’d just be like, "Oh my God, the nerve!” and I didn’t really like that side of myself but I saw that most people were that way there. And suddenly in Portland I just felt open to things and people and available and it just became this amazing feeling of rebirth. All the people I knew were 10 years younger than me and people my age were already sort of settling down in New York and were having babies and my life wasn’t like that and I felt I had almost more in common with these younger people in Portland. And now, of course, they’re all having babies and settling down. [Laughs]

Q: Each of these aspects of Dylan in the film are so fascinating, but I keep finding myself going back to the Bohemian Dylan because you do two things that are interesting that I’d like you to talk about a little. One is that you take the Bohemian Village Dylan and you have him become the evangelical Dylan and then you also only present him in this documentary. You distance us from that particular character. Could you talk about why you made those creative decisions?

TODD HAYNES: Well the reason I wanted to tie, as you call it, the Bohemian period or the protest era Dylan with his Christian period is I found really interesting similarities in the kind of moral and ethical drive that was behind both of those periods in his life. Of course, they’re very, very different and they had very different political interpretations clearly. But that need to have the answer and to be supported by a doctrine and a following characterizes both of those periods in Dylan’s life and interestingly, a kind of uncustomary lack of humor. In both those periods of his life he was pretty dead serious and still did incredible work. The protest songs are among his most famous and enduring and the Gospel songs are exquisite, so in a way the music kind of transcended the politics of each in a way. But I felt like it was a way that helped me understand the Christian conversion better for those reasons. And then I definitely chose…I thought if it was a documentary, it would put the Jack Rollins character in a kind of legendary status out of our direct access and framing him within a frame in the film and that we could recreate those kind of fake archival clips and stuff and that would give it an extra legendary brand to it. But that same documentary would be finding him out in their real time, like in the mid 80s when we imagined it taking place, that they would discover what happened to Jack Rollins in the real time of the documentary.

Q: During the Cate Blanchett portion of the film, there’s a brief moment where he seems very distraught when they find out he is Jewish. Was that something that you wanted to bring out?

TODD HAYNES: All of these characters run the risk of being unmasked, each one of them, because they are all adopting a new guise, a new self, a new narrative that the artist is creating, but that means that he’s remarkably vulnerable to being discovered and that’s true for Dylan and it’s almost amazing to think of how shocked he would become when people would find him out or would reveal truths about his past that he was trying to make fuzzy or make much more mystical than he actually thought they were. But that felt like it was an important tension to carry through the whole film and that’s why at the end the same actor who plays Mr. Jones returns in this form of Pat Garrett to basically unmask Billy the Kid and send this Dylan back on the road, back on the train, back into the world and that that cycle continues.

Q: A lot has been made of the fact that you have six different Dylans. Can you talk about the evolution of radically different directorial styles for each of those segments of the film and how they borrow and pay homage to other filmmakers throughout?

TODD HAYNES: Oh yeah, completely. I sort of realized fairly quickly that all these tropes, these psyches of Dylan that I was settling on had their root in the 60s era which made sense to me because that would be the most applicable and appropriate backdrop for the story or film about Bob Dylan and that the way they should be differentiated should come from the cinema of that era and that’s something I always like to do with my films. It was true for "Far From Heaven” when we looked really closely at the cinematic language of 50s melodramas and particularly Douglas Sirk movies and tried to get inside that practice that made that era of filmmaking unique. Because I’m a filmmaker. I’m working in a medium that has a long and interesting history but where the stylistic kind of vogue changes all the time and the 60s -- which again Dylan was drawing from the life blood of that period and it would ultimately draw on his -- was this amazing time for cinema as well, particularly European art film which my film quotes fluently, avidly or a lot. And then ultimately finding a voice in the kind of hippie westerns of the late 60s that I think was ushering in that rich period of American cinema that would be the 70s period. But they were starting to use these long lenses and flares and that kind of soft palette and a painterly kind of approach and this was more true in movies like "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” and "McCabe & Mrs. Miller” than it is for "Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid” so Ed Lachman and I were really looking more at those first two examples, at least in terms of the lenses and the palettes of the Billy story. But yes, Godard all the way, early Godard for the Robbie and Claire story and Fellini, most notably "8-1/2,” for the Jude story.

Q: How involved was Dylan?

TODD HAYNES: He was not involved at all. He basically just gave us permission, gave us rights to the music and life and then basically just carried on with his own stuff which is what he does and just isn’t that interested in stuff about his past and people’s interpretations and people’s stuff. That’s no small feat that he gave us permission and that [says] something about what I wrote and maybe my films that I sent -- I’m not sure what it was -- I’m sure mostly it was the concept made him do something that he had never done before which is say okay. But from that point on, it was always through Jeff Rosen who was a very generous and reliable conduit to Dylan and the materials that we needed and he’s there to kind of anticipate Dylan’s feelings I guess, but mostly that was manifested through a tremendous amount of creative respect for me and my imagination.

Q: Has he seen your film yet?

TODD HAYNES: Not that I know of. I don’t know. I actually saw Jesse Dylan last night, his oldest son, who is the one who put the DVD of the movie into dad’s suitcase right as he embarked on the recent tour and he’s like, "I haven’t heard anything, Todd. I’ll call him again. I’ll ask my Dad if he’s seen it again.” But he’s just doing his thing, you know.

Q: Have you met him?

TODD HAYNES: No.

Q: Does that make it easier or harder?

TODD HAYNES: It didn’t make it harder. I don’t know if it made it easier or harder. It was just something I never needed to do for what I was doing, what I was after.

Q: "Chronicles Volume One” came out while you were getting this underway. Did that have any effect on how you approached anything?

TODD HAYNES: Not really. It blew me away. I just thought it was one more kind of gift from Dylan to the world. I think it’s just a gorgeous piece of writing. The one thing the script did do is I put in Gorgeous George. I loved the little Gorgeous George part in "Chronicles” and I had to have them in the movie. I just thought that was a really nice touch. But no, it was really its own thing, similar to the films that he’s been associated with from "Masked and Anonymous” to "Renaldo and Clara.” They are films that I watched of course you know and they’re fascinating and problematic and confusing and they probably affirm some of the things I was trying to do more than even "Chronicles” did but they didn’t really change what I was doing.

Q: The Scorsese documentary that came out a couple years ago as well as the "Chronicles” sort of demythologized Dylan to a certain extent. There’d been all this silence and enigmatic clues in it. Both of those coming out close to the same time were seen as sort of explaining that he wasn’t hiding in the 60s, he wanted to be left alone. I kept thinking as I was watching your film that you’re almost taking out before that and remythologizing him or imagining him in different ways. I wondered if that crossed your mind or if you think that crossed his, that he went one way and then agreed to your project to build up the myth again?

TODD HAYNES: I don’t know. I don’t think his approval of mine and his involvement in the Scorsese project which actually was a project that was long in the making way before Scorsese even got involved... All of the interviews of Dylan and most of the interviews in the film were conducted by Jeff Rosen, his manager, and they happened years before, at least a few years before he gave us permission or we came along. But it wasn’t my intent to mythologize him or to protect his ambiguity. Maybe the ambiguity is certainly in the move, but to me, I felt like each of these stories and each of these places he occupied are incredibly specific and concrete and he wrote and he left behind each place he occupied an unbelievable amount of work that explains it and basically exhausts it. They are all like these little houses that he built and they’re all solid and they’re all very specific and they have their own architectural style to them and their own ambiance. And I wanted to have each of them stand. Now I’m really going on this metaphor. I’ve never done this before. [Laughs] The neighborhood that they occupy and the geography of one to the next is not straight forward and there isn’t just a perfect linear or teleological connection throughout but they’re all very specific and concrete to me.

Q: With the idea of mythologizing Dylan, you have the electric performance at Newport near New England and you have the Pete Seeger character picking up the axe and going for the cords which Pete Seeger denies completely. Does it matter to you what the actual truth is or is the inner truth of that more important?

TODD HAYNES: It’s both – where the two meet kind of. No, Seeger didn’t literally pull an axe off the wall and start to aim at the cords but he expressed a desire to do so. What did happen the day before though when Mike Bloomfield’s blues band played, they were given kind of a dismissive introduction by Alan Lomax, who was one of the promoters of the festival. Maybe he did it. I can’t remember if he did it himself because this was an electric blues band playing at Newport. It wasn’t like Dylan was the first person who ever used electric music that day or whatever. And it’s an amazing story. Albert Grossman, Dylan’s manager, who also represented this band, was irate at the dismissive intro and the two of them, they’re these two big burly guys, got into a physical fight and started rolling on the floor and dust was… they got into a physical fight. And Albert Grossman was always known for his cool headedness, so that story combined with the Pete Seeger myth or at least it’s stated intention because he was definitely upset and not pleased with the level of sound as he would later say. He would insist it was about you couldn’t hear the words. But to me, it all coalesces into a fury and into a state of intolerance about this change in Dylan’s music or just that sound and how it was deviating from the mandate of the folk ethos. So what I do in the film is not that big a deviation from the truth or even making mythic something that wasn’t there.

Q: Do you have a favorite Dylan song?

TODD HAYNES: I get asked that question and it’s a really hard question to answer but I’m always content to just say "Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands” because it’s so epic and so magical and it always gives me shivers so sure, I’ll say that. But there’s so many and when they pop up on the iPod at different times, you’ll have forgotten one and it’ll just feel fresh and other times it’ll be like, "I can’t hear that again,” advance and just go to the next thing.

Q: You know how Dylanologists are, is this going to be a search for a one to one correlation between reality and what you have? Do you tell people "Don’t walk into the theater with that” or do you say "Come play”?

TODD HAYNES: Well play but really there’s no reality. It’s about music. It’s about creation and it’s about an intensely fascinating artistic subject so reality is just such a sad thing to impose on such a rich body of work and such an amazing period of a life. But I do want people to play and feel light about the film and not be burdened by checking off sources and where it all comes from.

Q: I read that you made mixed tape compilations for your actors. For example, with Heath Ledger and Cate Blanchett, what music was it that you felt would help them unlock that character? Can you give us an example? Was it music from their time?

TODD HAYNES: Well for Richard Gere’s story, for Billy, it was music that spanned many, many different years of Dylan’s life but that all reflected the themes of his story so they work. There was a lot of basement tape stuff, country music, weird covers of traditional songs that came up at different times in Dylan’s life, whether it was in the basement tapes period or in the covers he did of exclusive roots music covers from the early 90s – "Good As I’ve Been To You” and "World Gone Wrong.” And then some stuff from his most recent records like "Cold Irons Bound” and "High Water” were songs that kind of discussed this imminent sense of biblical catastrophe looming that was part of the imagination of that story. Robbie’s mix is all the love songs or it’s my favorite ones that sort of tell a story where they’re more hopeful early, optimistic. The heart wrenching ones are at the beginning and the ones about divorce and conflict from "Planet Waves” and "Blood on the Tracks” are more at the end and it ends with "Sara.” It’s such a beautiful collection because those songs are just gorgeous. Jude’s is absolutely specific to the "Blonde on Blonde” and "Highway 61,” the electric period, and it includes live recordings and studio cuts. Jack’s songs go back and forth between protest songs and gospel songs so it’s sort of an interesting shuffling from one to the next. Woody’s is more Woody Guthrie-influenced stuff – some of Dylan’s earliest recordings, "The Minnesota Tapes.” Arthur’s are sort of visionary songs, songs where the poetic influenced, opened up the possibilities, and those spanned through the whole career. It begins with "Series of Dreams” which comes much later but the film could almost be called "Series of Dreams.”

Q: Can you talk about your casting process and how and why you went after these specific actors?

TODD HAYNES: Sexual favors. [Laughs] That’s the only way to do it today in Hollywood. I wish. No, these actors are just… I just love them, I’m so in love with them. I just think they all… Now we’ve been doing press together. Cate’s been busy. She had to do a lot of stuff for "Elizabeth [The Golden Age],” but she’s so proud of it and she’s so pleased with the results. When she first saw the cut, she left me this message on my cell phone that I should have saved. I saved it for a while but I finally lost it. She was just so passionate about what I’d done. And Heath has been doing so much stuff with it. They are just extraordinary people and they’re artists. They want to put themselves in unknown situations and take risks and it’s not easy and I saw some of them suffer, experiencing bouts of lack of confidence and suddenly just feeling like they’re naked and they’d never done acting before like Charlotte Gainsbourg and Heath, and at times Kate even, which just showed that they were putting themselves on the line for this. Even though the amount of time each of them needed to spend on the film was so much less than the film where they’re the single lead in which is mostly what they do, they just cared so much about what they were doing. It was amazing how quickly they wanted to take part and how thoroughly they threw themselves into it.

Q: Can you talk a little about collaborating with Oren and the writing process and how the two of you worked together?

TODD HAYNES: Oren first came into the process when out of the blue -- this is very shortly after we got rights to the film concept -- Jeff Rosen called me up and said "Would you also consider adapting this for the stage?” And I was like "What?!” I was still just reeling from getting the rights to the film and I don’t think of myself as a stage guy. I did theater stuff in high school and college but not really since then. But then I started thinking about the concept and how a stage venue provided things that even a film couldn’t where the characters could actually share a stage at times and maybe share a song. Things could happen on a stage that were really interesting. But it was too much for me to take on by myself and I was still about to go off and do "Far From Heaven” so I called Oren up who’s a friend and a great screenwriter and I said, "Oren, you gotta help me. Would you like to do the stage thing with me and I’ll do the movie script? We can kind of brainstorm together?” So he came out to Oregon, to Portland, and we had a sort of brain storming session on how we might adapt it for the stage and what would be the theatrical tropes that we would replace with the cinematic styles of the different stories. And it was just really fun because we both felt like we were imposters in a medium that isn’t really ours and that made it kind of even more cool. And then I had to go off and do "Far From Heaven” and somehow this just kind of disappeared as a real thing and then we were hearing rumors about the Twyla Tharp production and I thought, "Okay, that’s what that became.” It was high. I mean I had my hands full. And then I proceeded to get into the script and I worked for a good year, definitely a full year if not more on the script and the research and on that, and I had a big mass of a movie and really so much of the process after all the research was of elimination and exclusion. It was like what is redundant, what’s the best way to make this point when I have 20 examples of it from Dylan’s work, life, background. So that’s when I called Oren up again. I was like "You want to come and finish this with me? It would be so fun and I could have fresh eyes, someone I really trust who’s been on the inside with me.” And he was there and it really was. To make this thing happen, it was going to take a lot of people, a lot of creative partnerships, and I was ready to start that process of collaboration.

Q: The film is so ambitious and unique in the way it’s structured which makes it really interesting.

TODD HAYNES: Thank you. It helped to have fresh eyes and someone to bank those ideas off of and to bring new things. Oren is Israeli, but Oren found himself getting so into the gospel period, the Christian period, and even when I’d be like "Okay. It can’t be this long. Let’s just move on.” I was interested in it but he would be like, "No! Todd! I gotta get into that more!” and he’d write more scenes.

Q: Can you talk about the editing process after the Weinstein Co. got involved in the struggle to get it down to the cut it’s at now. Do you think it’s as good here as it would’ve been longer? Are you happy with it?

TODD HAYNES: I am happy with it. It’s long already. It’s not that it’s that long in minutes. It’s just so dense and there’s so much going on and you have to think about the experience of a viewer. How much can they take? There might have been times where I was sort of scratching on myself, like "Would it be better longer?” Sometimes it feels more pleasurable to actually have breathing room. There’s very little breathing room in a movie now and if somebody goes up to pee and comes back, they miss about 20 chapters. And I’m always like, "Hurry up and get back. You’re missing this and you’re missing that.” But it wasn’t, you know, I had final cut and Harvey was concerned about length and he had questions about the Billy story but he was not alone. A lot of people did. I just have a process that I go through and it has very much to do with showing cuts of the film to people and it’s not just like all my best friends who are going to tell me what I want to hear. That doesn’t help me. I need to have people who are going to be honest and so we write up our own questionnaires. When it’s a producer or a distributor, they have their process of vetting how a film plays and it’s usually a classical testing process and my films don’t test…they test very poorly and they do not reflect how the films are regarded. There’s just no relationship. "Far From Heaven” got a 19 out of a 100 on the official testing score and at the end of the year when they add up all the best reviewed movies of the year, it was the best reviewed movie of the year. So I know my films need contextualization and they need the press to help and it was the most successful film at the box office as well. But the press element and the way the films can be set up for the world for their distribution is not reflected in the classic testing process. And so the scores, the reactions I was getting in my process, were much closer to what…and this film actually tested like 45 out of a 100 when it was officially tested. So it’s the highest scoring film I’ve ever done.

Q: Was that shocking for you?

TODD HAYNES: Yeah, it actually was. It really was.

Q: The marketing of this film seems to play off identity. For example, on the poster you’ve got the actors listed as "They’re all Bob Dylan,” but none of them are Bob Dylan. Was that intentional?

TODD HAYNES: What’s in a name? [Laughs]

Q: It seems like we’re marketing Wheaties here.

TODD HAYNES: No, I disagree. I loved their campaign. Have you seen the teaser or the trailer they did? I think it’s amazing. I mean this is the first time for any of my films which have always had…they’re always fairly high concept things. There’s always an experimental element to them and there’s always some kind of… something dangerous that I’m trying out that I don’t know if it’s going to work and usually when they’re marketed, that’s the thing you kind of have to hide, kind of like tuck behind and then do whatever they think will sell up front. Remarkably this film, it’s the concept that is drawing people to the film. It’s this many people playing Dylan and Cate Blanchett is one of them and there’s a black kid. That is what’s up front and that’s actually enticing people to the film. No one’s hiding that if anything and the teaser that they first produced out of Weinstein Co. made that absolutely up front and made it really seem fun. And they were like "Bob Dylan the greatest songwriter” and then it changed to "Fake, liar, cheater, genius” and the words kept shifting. It was almost like a Godard trailer with all the text and no spoken word and just the music. And I was like, "These guys…” I was just so impressed with it. And they are all Bob Dylan, you know. They are all Bob Dylan. Bob Dylan has taken many names. Every song he sings he’s assuming a different identity. The name isn’t what it’s about.

Q: Then he’s not really Bob Dylan?

TODD HAYNES: Then he’s not really Bob Dylan. We’re talking real, we’re talking blood.

Q: Well obviously identity is a big part of this and the fluidity of identity is a big part of glam rock as well. I’m curious where you see the connection between "Velvet Goldmine” and this film, coming from that angle?

TODD HAYNES: There’s a lot of really interesting similarities but there are I think fundamental differences. And I think one is an intensely… it has so much to do with British traditions and a kind of self-conscious, ironic relationship to identity and to the pose and this sort of via Oscar Wilde this whole idea of the pose and of inverting provided wisdom and common beliefs and playing around with those inversions and very much to do with homosexuality, gay sexuality, and bisexuality. This to me is so utterly American and Dylan embodies these different phases of his life not in a self conscious, ironic way where he’s sort of planning it out and it’s about dressing up and painting your face. He is like some kind of method actor or some amnesiac who basically completely enters these phases and almost makes himself forget what happened before or after and I think there’s something very American in that. We are kind of exuberantly innocent all the time and even when we uncover our hypocrisies, it’s almost like we never knew they were there before. It’s like, "Oh my God, slavery! Shocking!!!” You know, just the things that we keep repeating, our own revelations, and it’s just very different. It’s a much less reflective and analytical procedure, this one. But it’s completely fascinating and I think intensely American.

Q: Thank you.

TODD HAYNES: Thanks guys.

"I’m Not There” opens in theaters on November 21st.