Original subtitles

Hello, this is Jim Marigold.

I'm the co-writer, director, and one of the producers of this movie

and I'm gonna be talking to you for as long as I can hold up as the movie plays.

As the film starts and you go through these logos and for early titles,

we're playing Woody Guthrie's "So Long, It's Been Good To Know You,"

and there's a reason.

And in many ways, I think this is a film about letting go or saying goodbye.

And the movie also ends with the same song.

When I first sat down, as I was writing,

with Bob Dylan to talk about the movie,

Bob turned to me very early in the conversation,

he said, "Jim, what is this movie about?"

And I realized he was asking me to kind of tell him,

in a very short nugget, what this movie was about.

And what came out of me was,

"This is a movie about a young man in Minnesota

who was choking to death, suffocating,

and decided to leave everything behind-- his family, his friends--

and go to a new place,

and start again with a few dollars in his pocket."

And he does, he invents himself anew.

He starts a new life, becomes wildly successful, blossoms creatively,

and then starts suffocating again, feeling claustrophobic.

And again, leaves.

So it's a story about two leavings.

One that is his arrival at the front of the movie,

and one that is his departure at the end.

[indistinct chatter]

I think to begin with, just to deal with what's on the screen,

we're looking at the recreation of New York City in 1961.

Particularly Greenwich Village and particularly MacDougal Street.

And my team, Phedon Papamichael, my wonderful DP and longtime DP,

and Franςois Audouy, who has also been with me for years,

and the whole team-- Arianne Phillips on costume.

I could just list names

but what I wanna say is that all these people who have worked together,

and with me many times before, worked to try and create a kind of verisimilitude--

uh, truthfulness, to our recreation of this place.

We didn't want it to be dreamy, we didn't want it to be false.

We just wanted to somehow relate what was magical about New York,

and particularly Downtown New York in the Village at this moment,

which was a kind of creative hub or ground zero of what was happening,

not just in folk music but also in art,

in music on the folk side but also music on the jazz side.

Just around the corner from MacDougal Street,

you could easily find, you know, Coltrane or Miles Davis or Thelonious Monk playing.

This was a really-- a vital area,

partly because the rents were cheaper and artists could afford to live there

and gathered to kind of explore where art was going--

music, art, jazz-- in an age of modernity and in the postwar age.

Part of what I'm trying to do, both in the script that I worked on with Jay Cocks

and in the direction at the beginning of the movie,

is to not make the movie only about Bob.

And I'll get to why a little later,

but that we're kind of creating what I call kind of a round-robin structure

of introducing characters discreetly

and then finding their way into the story, into Bob's story,

so that you're kind of not only articulating

this mysterious young man who's come into town

but also the slightly less mysterious or more easily readable characters

who are going to surround him and have interactions with him

for the next two hours and 15 minutes.

Pete Seeger is a remarkable character

and Edward Norton is phenomenal, I thought, in this role

and took it on in every way.

And one of the things that is so delightful about Seeger

is that in the face of even legal troubles and being, you know, blacklisted

for a period early on in his life when he was with the Weavers,

there was a kind of unstoppable enthusiasm and optimism to him.

[reporter 1] How do you feel about the judgement?

[Pete] We didn't get the result that we thought was right...

People, when they see the movie, kind of think

of what Edward's doing as kind of Mr. Rogers,

but Pete Seeger was Mr. Rogers before Mr. Rogers.

This kind of wonderful, gentle, kind-- singing songs.

You can't dampen him.

♪ This land is my land ♪

♪ From California' ♪

He is really a determined, optimistic figure

although of course, in the course of events of this story,

he will find himself dampened.

♪ This land was made for you and me ♪

So then we come back again to the Bob story.

Timmy's character has hardly spoken much of a word

except asking for directions.

And we're approaching what is,

I thought of from the very first time I was working on the script with Jay,

this was such a pivotal scene.

This opening scene in which Timmy finds his hero ailing in the hospital

with Huntington's Disease.

He's traveled cross-country ostensibly

with no other purpose than to kind of get here

and get to this guy,

and has a song written to sing for him.

We shot this sequence at this hospital.

Although it actually wasn't a hospital. This was a--

I think, at this point, is owned by the school system of New Jersey.

We shot this sequence fairly early on.

And it's a pretty pivotal scene,

not only because of the things I said--

it kind of launches the story,

it gets Bob in contact and interaction with Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie--

but it also is a kind of proof of concept to the audience.

What I mean by that is,

I always knew as we worked on the script

that this scene required Bob to both feel like he's still a very young man

and at the beginning, the cusp of his talent,

but also a scene in which he demonstrates,

when he sings the song for Pete and Woody, talent.

He has to actually demonstrate talent.

In order for the other actors to look at him and go, "Holy shit, this guy's good,"

he's gonna have to actually demonstrate a kind of passion

and/or proficiency that makes you stop and think.

Come on over, then.

[Mangold] Although Timmy and I didn't discuss that kind of pressure,

he's a brilliant actor and a really sharp young man and he knew what he had to do.

I'm Pete, by the way.

[Mangold] He was very insistent, at this point,

that he wanted to be able to do this live and in the room with the actors...

Something come after that?

[Mangold] ...even if that meant singing the song 170 times

when I was shooting Edward or shooting Scoot McNairy who's playing Woody.

He just wanted to play it live and in the room.

I sing and I... I play,

and I write songs, actually, a couple of friends of mine,

Paul and John, out in Minneapolis.

Midwestern boy?

Yeah, and they showed me some of

Woody's records, uh, Folkway ones...

[Mangold] Jay had written a version of the scene in his first draft

which was really good and I just couldn't stop expanding on it

or trying to dig further into it.

The initial scene, and this kind of standoff between these three characters,

was so iconic, and beautifully written by Jay.

He said you was in the hospital, so... I hitched myself here.

Why is that?

[Mangold] And I felt

it kind of is this triangle which will be omnipresent throughout the movie,

this young, new member of folk music,

or potential member of folk music,

who ends up becoming its de facto leader and superstar in Bob Dylan.

The reigning king and icon of American folk music, Woody Guthrie,

who is sick and can no longer really perform his duties

and, in a Shakespearean sense, his kind of first lieutenant, Pete Seeger,

who is leading the folk movement

into one of its most prosperous and popular times...

It's mostly family now, though.

Uh, Woody wants to hear something.

[Mangold] ...but also trying to stay connected with Woody at the same time.

You shy?

Not usually.

[Mangold] One of the things when I direct,

you're always trying to find, is what the scene is about,

but also not play it too hard, play against it.

Like, one of the things I love is that in this scene

and the way Timmy handles it, and it's part in the writing,

is that Bob Dylan has traveled 4,000 miles or 3,000 miles for this moment,

with his guitar, with lyrics written, with a song in hand,

to sing for Woody.

But when he gets here and they actually ask him to sing,

of course, he looks shell-shocked and nervous.

And those contradictions are what makes us human and believable.

Uh...

I wrote for you.

[I folk music playing, Bob Dylan "Song to Woody"]

♪ I'm out here a thousand miles from my home ♪

♪ I'm walkin' a road other men hale gone down ♪”

[Mangold] Since this scene was shot very early in the movie,

I'm also learning about how to shoot the movie.

You know, you come with a plan,

but then you see what your actors are doing

and the plan gets modified.

Modified by what's amazing that's going on in front of the lens

that you shouldn't ignore just because you had a plan

that might have not taken into account

some of the discoveries the actors are making.

And here, one of the things that I really realized

was just how mesmerizing I felt Timmy was in this role.

And therefore, I realized this movie was going to be a lot about watching him sing.

And as long as I made sure he kept the subtext of the scene alive--

what I mean by that is not just the song but also the drama of the scene alive

while he was singing, then I thought it could hold our attention,

it wouldn't seem just like a concert.

And what you see here,

what Timmy is doing so masterfully, honestly, is singing this song

just well enough that he feels like a young, talented man,

but not-- he needs to give himself room to grow,

even in his musical abilities.

But also, he's playing, if you see it,

the intensity and the pressure of the situation.

If you look at his eyes,

he's trying to push through the nervousness and the anxiety

and how pivotal this moment is in his life.

He's a nobody,

and he's sitting in the presence of two extreme somebodies

who he idolizes.

And this is a moment in his life

where it all comes down to what he's doing on this stool,

at this bedside, on this night.

-[♪ music stops] -[Woody bangs table]

And that is the drama that he's playing

that allows you to feel the relief at the end of the song.

Because it's not just about a song, it's a scene.

Do you mind?

Oh, no.

[radio announcer] Suspected of collaborating. ..

[Mangold] This conversation between Edward and Timmy's characters, Bob and Pete,

is really the briefest introduction

to what will be a bigger tension later in the film...

[Little Richard] ♪ I been fold, baby, you been bold... ♪

That's the flip side on "Long Tall Sally."

[Mangold] ...which is essentially Bob's love and adoration

and attraction and knowledge of music beyond folk.

He draws no boundaries.

And I got this-- You can easily get this from reading about Bob,

but you also get it from talking to Bob.

He just loves all music, all kinds of music,

and knows anything and everything about all music

and, frankly, movies and all sorts of art.

And Bob is a kind of sponge.

And the difference, then, between these characters,

even in this little scene that we're trying to highlight,

is that Pete is kind of focused 100% on advancing the agenda

and the fortunes of the folk music scene...

It can get the job done without the frills.

[Mangold] ...and Timmy's character is not.

He just loves good music, folk or not.

And he loves great folk music.

But what he seems to love most of all,

and be the thing that makes Bob decide whether he likes something or not,

is its soul, its authenticity.

In any movie, whether you're making a fantasy film or a science-fiction film,

or even a film based on reality,

you know, people use this term "world building."

It exists in every kind of movie.

I've made all these kinds of movies, and I can tell you,

even in a movie like this, we're doing world building here.

We're showing you MacDougal Street,

we're showing you the legal pressures on Pete Seeger.

We're introducing this young man to all these spaces that he's never seen before.

The magic of New York City downtown,

the courthouses, the clubs, the bars,

the hospital where this aging king, Woody Guthrie, is dying.

And now here, this kind of wonderful, warm world

of Pete Seeger, Toshi, his wife, and his children,

in which they live a kind of almost Amish existence

in a house that just got running water

and still has a kind of combo-outhouse-toilet situation in it

which became the butt of a joke that we just played.

He met one of his heroes tonight.

Not me, Woody.

But there is a kind of beauty that you feel in this house,

a kind of warmth and love.

He played us a hell of a song.

Here's your pancake.

[Tin ya] Thank you.

♪ If you're travelin' to the north country fair ♪

♪ Where the winds hit heavy ♪

[Mangold] This was also a scene we did fairly early in the schedule

in which Edward and Eriko Hatsune and the children

all are kind of just operating

around Timmy singing "Girl from the North Country."

Again, it's a scene in which--

It's not that Timmy's rendition of the song is spectacular.

But what I'm always focused on when making movies about artists--

and I've done several,

'cause I even consider Ford v Ferrari a movie about artists--

is that what I love watching is, how does the art arrive, how is it born?

And how fragile it is when it's first offered.

And how important it is that the people in orbit around this artist

recognize the value of this very fragile thing as it's being born.

Because so often, for any artist,

especially young ones, the work--

when they're onto something, they can be easily discouraged and give up.

And the blossoming of a character and an artist like Bob Dylan

is, of course, about his brilliance

but also about those around him

that recognized and saw the seeds of what was in him

and gave him the space and the support to blossom.

♪ A-wim-a-weh, a-wim-a-weh, a-wim-a-weh ♪

♪ Hey-up-oh-a-wim-a-weh ♪

♪ A-wim-a-weh, a-wim-a-weh, a-wim-a-weh ♪

♪ A-wim-a-weh, a-wim-a-weh ♪

[Mangold] So, in terms of our world building, if you will,

this is another chance to establish,

"What is folk music at this time?"

And what Pete's singing, one of his classic arrangements of "Wimoweh,"

is kind of one of his concert staples,

and getting the audience to sing along,

and the idea of a concert as just a single soul alone with one instrument,

these are things--

I realize I'm making a movie for an audience

that may not have any real experience with what folk music was in the '60s,

or folk music at all.

So these ideas about what this music is,

its simplicity and its reliance on just the authenticity of the voice

and the beauty and power of the song,

is something I'm feeling I have to kind of educate the audience on

or give them a chance to understand.

[man 1] Joan! Have a great show!

[woman] Miss Baez!

[Mangold] And with this shot,

we introduce another, you know, spoke of the wheel, if you will,

in this round-robin of the movie,

which is Monica Barbaro playing Joan Baez,

and the character of Joan Baez.

[mumbles]

[Mangold] So again, we're leaving our hero,

like we did to find Pete in the courthouse,

finding Joan, introducing her and Albert Grossman--

Danny Fogler doing wonderful work as Al Grossman--

Five minutes, Joan.

Bob Shelton's back, he's at the bar.

So is John Hammond.

[Mangold] And giving us a chance to get to know each of these people

and understand some of what's going on for them,

before then connecting them back into the orbit of Bob's character.

Tony Bennett,

Johnny Mathis, Doris Day, Miles Davis.

They have everyone except their folk singer.

-Albert. -Mm-hmm.

Please leave.

[Albert inhales sharply]

Other girls strum, Tito, they smile.

Not Joanie.

She acts depressed, looks at her shoes,

makes men crazy.

[applauding in distance]

[footsteps receding]

[I folk music plays, Joan Baez "House Of The Rising Sun"]

[Mangold] These performances by all my actors of the music in the movie--

it was really important to me that they do them,

that they do these performances,

and, in many cases, live and on set.

And you might wonder why,

and, for me, it's just, "What am I after with this movie?"

I'm after capturing these people and making you feel you know them.

And they play such incredible, simple, exposed music.

What I mean by "exposed" is there's no drums or bass or keyboards or synth.

There's nothing to kind of cover, there's no production,

there's no Auto-Tune, there's no elaborate mixing.

It's just the human voice and a guitar.

I don't think I could make a movie--

I don't know how, someone else might be able to--

about people who do something that is so stripped-down and raw

and then apply a production technique to replicating it

that is the opposite,

with earwigs in their ears and playback systems and them lip-synching,

all of which would be exactly opposite the constructs and philosophy of folk music.

♪ The Rising Sun ♪

[Mangold] So again, here we have a song but it's not just a song.

There are dramatic things happening, right?

We are introducing Bob in the room.

We're introducing Bob as looking at her,

and his gaze is one of desire and fascination.

And we're seeing that Joan feels it, even on stage.

We're also introducing

the kind of nightingale-like perfection of Joan's voice,

which, of course, is different than Bob.

Bob's edgy, a little sloppy, a little lifelike,

his voice is craggy,

he doesn't always hit the note and he doesn't care.

And Joan represents a kind of technical perfection,

both on guitar and in her voice,

that is a stark contrast to him, and a wonderful contrast.

[audience cheering]

The challenge for Monica, playing this role, of course,

is that she's got to play someone

with a kind of legendary voice.

And Monica had never really sung before,

except, you know, as we all might,

driving the car with our radio, or in the shower.

Hey, this is my friend, Bobby.

-Hey. -Oh.

You know, part of being a movie director is being a gambler

and feeling like, "Well, if I back myself in a corner, I'll find a way out later."

And my gamble on this movie was just believing that Timmy,

Monica, Edward, Boyd playing Johnny Cash,

would all find a way to do it.

And if they couldn't, I'd figure something out.

These are all extremely gifted actors, and they did.

You know, sometimes it's good in the position I'm in

to just set a high bar

and see if the actors can fulfill it.

And I'm so fortunate to be working

with some of the best actors in the world.

And so then, of course, I should be asking a lot of them,

because they are really good.

This young man, he's been playing around town a biz'

but I thought it was high time he took the stage at Folk City.

So, I want you to give a warm welcome to Bob Dylan.

[all applauding]

[Bob] All right. Cheers.

Oh, man. All right, thanks, folks.

Thanks, Pete. That's, uh...

[Mangold] Part of what happened as I was working on the script for this movie

is you start arranging the Bob Dylan song catalog

in the order that these songs popped up.

And what's really interesting

is how autobiographical these songs become...

in ways-- You know, people talk about Bob being an enigma

or not revealing much about himself,

but honestly, when you listen to this music

and place it in his life at the time,

and understand what these songs were popping out of,

you suddenly understand a kind of emotional relevance they have

to who he is.

I hope you think it's good. It's gotta be good for somebody.

"I was young when I left home."

It couldn't be a clearer declaration

for this 19-year-old with no money

who's come to New York with no real plan on how to make it in the world

except hoping that what he can do on a guitar

and with his lyrics and with his singing will somehow provide for him.

♪ No, I never wrote a letter ♪

♪ To my home ♪

I was talking during a previous beat,

but it's one of my favorite moments

where Bob goes, you know,

"Ladies and gentlemen, Joan Baez. She's pretty good."

And then he adds, "She's pretty."

And that kind of stops everything 'cause it's a little inappropriate.

And then he corrects himself and goes, "She sings pretty."

And then he corrects himself again and goes, "Maybe too pretty."

And I love the way our actors play that beat.

And I also think it's an early establishment

of Bob's kind of awkward, provocative way

of letting people know he likes them

is a little bit by sticking them

and kind of making people a little bit uncomfortable

within, essentially, his honesty.

♪ Thisaway ♪

-He's very good, isn't he? -Yeah.

He's my client.

♪ Lord, Lord, Lord.”

♪ And I can't go home this away ♪

[playing harmonica]

[Mangold] This club, Gerde's Folk City,

is one of many we re-created from the time,

legendary clubs where tons of historic music was played for the first time.

There's Gerde's Folk City, there's the Gaslight.

Obviously we have Carnegie Hall and others.

All of these clubs were created very faithfully

to look very much like what they did,

and feel, even more importantly, like they did in the day.

Another place we took real pride re-creating was the classic Studio A,

the famous Studio A of Columbia Records.

CBS Records, Columbia Records was, in the '60s,

kind of the preeminent recording company of the world.

Classical music, pop music, country music, all of it.

And they had most of the great stars,

from Miles Davis in jazz,

to Barbra Streisand just beginning in vocals,

to Johnny Mathis,

classical stars of classical music,

on and on and on.

So I didn't want to overstress it,

but the idea of this dishevelled, rumpled 19-year-old

getting signed to this gigantic record label...

was momentous.

It doesn't happen.

It just doesn't happen, and didn't happen until this.

-seven-six-six-seven-one... -[Bob clears throat]

Fixin' to Die, take one.

[strumming guitar]

This studio--

This particular studio is one in which

so many landmark recordings of the '60s were laid down.

We re-created it on a sound stage-- it doesn't exist anymore--

and very faithfully.

I mean, obviously, it's really just a box with a control room,

but the way it looks, the signage.

All the period mic stands,

microphones are all real, working period mics.

All of this dressing arranged just as it was

'cause we have incredible photo research of all these places.

You know, one of the real advantages of this movie

is people were shooting pictures of Bob from a pretty early stage,

so we know what these spaces,

everything from this studio, to his apartment, to the clubs

looked like top to bottom.

Traditional repertoire for now, Albert.

We're putting a younger face on folk.

♪ Well, everybody's got somethin' ♪

♪ That they're lookin' forward to ♪

One of the challenges of making a biopic, as we call them,

is that we, like every genre,

whether you're making a western or a cop movie,

there's kind of cliches of the genre

that you try and avoid.

You try and fulfill the things, the signposts

and the kind of familiar tastes and flavors

that people love about the genre,

but you try and avoid other things that may have become tired.

Thank you to Brownie, and Sonny, especially.

One of the things I tried very hard in the telling of this story to do

was to avoid too many dates and facts and introductions

and explaining why this scene is important,

or people going, "You need to get..."

You know, it's just you watch him audition,

you watch him lay down his first record,

you watch him beginning to start his career here.

And I'm not so much kind of telling you what each scene is,

even though all these moments happened.

I'm trying to let you fall into the story as if it's a movie

and not make it a kind of educational piece filled with factual nuggets,

which, frankly, I think other mediums are better at delivering.

What movies are great at delivering is character,

intimacy, point of view...

♪ Walk on ♪

...and also just the sensual beauty

of re-creating a time that doesn't exist anymore.

And one that, you know, when I watched it

and it was certainly when I looked forward to making the film,

is one that I miss.

How old are you?

-20. -You wrote those songs?

This is the last of our large principal characters getting introduced,

Elle Fanning playing Sylvie Russo.

What, you mean for my age?

[chuckles softly]

[shushes]

[Mangold] She's going to play a huge role.

She comes in very quickly into his life

and kind of changes the entire emphasis of the picture,

this scene becoming kind of a launching pad of a series of scenes

of the two of them falling in love.

That's Alan Lomax.

That's what he does.

He runs the Archive of American Folk.

They record folk music.

How do you know so much?

-My sister works for him. -Oh.

[Mangold] One of the things that happened early on for Bob

as he was signed to the record deal

and started doing interviews and playing his solo gigs around town

is people wanted to know, "Who was this guy?

Where did he come from? Who is Bob Dylan?"

And of course, when he did interviews,

he told stories very much like what I have him

telling Sylvie here on this walk,

which is kind of that he traveled

with a kind of circus or carnival

and was a kind of creature of the road

living a kind of vagabond, Woody Guthrie-esque life,

learning music from cowboys and strange characters he'd meet

in his travels riding the trains.

Of course, this is all fiction

that Bob made up to make himself feel maybe, perhaps, more interesting

than just a kid from Minnesota whose parents owned a hardware store.

No. I thought we were going to see Guernica at the Museum.

Ah, Picasso's overrated.

But, to me, it's a fascinating window.

It's not so much, to me, about highlighting Bob as a fabricator of truth,

but to highlight that he loves telling stories,

even making up ones about himself

and the person he wishes he was, perhaps, instead of the one he is.

[Jerry] And will you be happy, Charlotte ?

This scene from Now, Voyager,

a classic picture with Bette Davis,

I chose to put in the movie

because it kind of prompts a conversation in the next scene

about identity.

In Now, Voyager, which, if you haven't seen, you should watch--

it's one of the great, classic Hollywood films of the Golden Age--

Bette Davis's character goes through a kind of transformation

from a kind of wallflower young woman

trapped in the household caring for her morn

and kind of blossoming as a woman

and kind of reconstructing her life mid picture.

And as they discuss that movie in this scene,

what I'm trying to get at is that Bob's character

kind of identifies with someone

who was kind of birthing them self anew.

Of course, he's arrived in town, he's changed his name,

he's telling people stories about his life on the road at the carnival

and creating a kind of mystique around himself.

And he's a little prickly about people kind of challenging this notion

that people can just reinvent themselves.

Some of the songs you played today on your record?

Well, it's mostly covers.

Just traditional stuff.

You know, folk songs are supposed to

stand the test of time, like...

urn, Shakespeare or something.

They say no one wants to hear What a kid wrote last month.

Who's they?

Record company.

I love the chemistry between these two actors in this scene

and one of the things you really try to find in a movie

is actors who have comfort with each other.

Elle and Timmy had worked together before

and have known each other for years,

kind of grown up as actors in the business together.

That kind of familiarity,

and both of them also being enormously talented as actors,

I think was hugely an advantage for me here,

where I have to, in a matter of minutes,

'cause the movie has to keep moving,

get a kind of connection and a kind of magic between them

that makes you believe that things are gonna move pretty quickly with them

and they're gonna come together.

-We organized the freedom rides. -All right.

This is me.

[Mangold] One of the takes we did of this scene,

I noticed Timmy, when Elle kisses him on the cheek,

he does this kind of flinch,

almost like it was a little startling,

and I really loved it.

And we leaned into that idea

because I think it fits in with an idea that Timmy and I discussed about Bob,

which is this kind of idea that he may be incredibly confident with a guitar,

and incredibly confident in many ways,

but there's other ways where some of his bravado

hides a great deal of insecurity

or unease at the pressure he has upon him

and what people expect of him,

and what he expects of himself.

As Timmy wanders into this record shop,

it, of course, gave Phedon, Frangois and me a chance

to just kind of re-create what the small record shops of the '60s looked like

at the height of interest in music.

But also what's going on in this scene,

Bob is hearing Joan Baez singing,

seeing her record is sold out,

and more importantly, seeing that his first record

from Columbia Records isn't selling.

...and the Black churches serve as the gathering spots...

Let us help you stimulate your conscience.

-[crowd cheering] {speaking indistinctly]

And then we quickly move into the other things

that were happening in Bob's life at this time,

which was also a kind of rising political awareness

spurred on mainly by Sylvie and her political involvement at the time

in civil rights and concerns about the world

and war and nuclear weapons,

but also what was going on around him.

I don't think you could be alive in the '60s, the early '60s,

and not be aware of a country in tremendous upheaval,

wrestling with civil rights issues,

women's rights issues,

and also a kind of rising culture that questioned the values of '50s America

and had different ideas about how life should be lived.

♪ And pretend that he just doesn't see ? ♪

The reason it was important to try,

even with thumbnail sketches,

to show all these influences,

is it wasn't very long until Bob had written "Blowing in the Wind,"

which is a kind of meditation on,

what do we do, and how do we react to all these cruelties

that we see going on around us?

What is the answer?

And, interestingly,

a lot of people propose answers in their folk music.

A lot of people, politically, will propose answers.

In a way, Bob wrote nothing but a question,

in a sense suggesting that the answers are

somewhere floating in the ether...

if we could even be lucky enough to find them.

For me, it's really wonderful to take a song as iconic as "Blowing in the Wind"

and to see it getting, in a way, abused,

meaning he is auditioning it and playing it for Woody,

who probably hears the value in it,

but he's getting cut off by an orderly,

and that's the last we hear of it.

To me, that's kind of the magic of watching art getting made in a movie

is that it's not always like you sing it, and then everyone just goes "ooh and aah,"

and it ends up on radios across America,

that these gems, these pearls, these beautiful creations

sometimes bang around for a while

before people recognize their value.

This is a scene of Sylvie's sister kind of digging around in Bob's stuff,

discovering his real name is Zimmerman

and kind of seeing these little windows into his life in Minnesota...

Move along.

...and undermining her sister's confidence in this relationship

and whether this guy is being completely honest with her.

Here we get the first glimpse of Boyd Holbrook playing Johnny Cash,

albeit on a TV screen.

Boyd and I have made several movies together, and I adore him.

He's a brilliant actor and a great person.

And Boyd is also a Southern boy and has this great masculine presence,

which I thought he could really lean into, playing the Man in Black.

You got it.

[Sylvie] I have to do this. It's a school trip.

This scene kind of follows the scene between Sylvie and her sister,

in which the kind of... in which the kind of anxieties

she has about Bob are kind of coming to fore.

Are you God, Bob?

I always find, so often, in my experience, in relationships with family

that always, just when someone's leaving on a trip,

there's very often a last confrontation

of something that's been simmering.

And so, this is a moment where Sylvie is confronting Bob

on just not being sure who he is.

I don't know you.

There's a face on your driver's license.

He's different.

-Has a different name. -Wow.

[Mangold] One of the things when you're casting a film

that you become very conscious of,

at least the way I think about actors, is that--

It's, A, what can they do with the role?

But it's also what does this person bring to the role?

What I mean by that is,

every actor has a kind of core energy, a core vibe, if you will.

And in this section of the movie in particular,

but in this movie there is kind of a... a triangle

between Bob and Sylvie and Joan.

-Yes! -Mm.!

And I really wanted Joan and Sylvie to be

very different characters,

not kind of...

And I don't mean blonde versus brunette.

I mean very different characters.

[strumming guitar]

And what Sylvie is, in many ways, is

kind of one of the most normalized people in the movie.

She's not a singer-songwriter.

She's living life, learning about the world,

concerned about politics, high functioning, socially able,

but kind of also really kind, really loves Bob for who he is,

loved him before he was Bob Dylan, in that sense.

And Joan is a kind of different energy,

a kind of show business professional,

grounded and kind of strong, almost masculine in some ways,

almost a match for Bob, in terms of her strength

and her kind of sense of gravity and confidence in herself.

And all... Both of those things, I think,

are incredibly well done by each of the actresses playing these roles,

but also are part of who they are.

[John F. Kennedy on TV] Good evening, my fellow citizens.

[Mangold] Elle, when you have the joy to know her,

is a really loving, kind, collaborative, wonderful person.

So is Monica.

But Monica is also kind of very cut and dry, very matter of fact,

gets down to business very quickly.

There's a level where there's overlaps in character.

Because I think of the motion picture camera as a kind of X-ray,

and it's what makes acting for movies so precarious, so challenging.

It's that it's not on a stage where you can kind of

fake your way through a moment or two,

and many in the audience may never see it.

[indistinct shouting]

...I directed that our surveillance be stepped up.

[Mangold] The camera is so close.

We can see the pores.

We can see the veins in your eyes.

We can see everything about you.

There's really nowhere to hide in a close-up.

So you have to bring something of yourself to the role

so that you can actually live in it

under the intense observation of the camera.

And there goes the whole ball game.

So, how do we relate Berlin as the...

[Tin ya] What's on TV?

[Mangold] Doing research on the movie was very interesting,

the way the Cuban Missile Crisis played such a pivotal role

in kind of moving Bob into a kind of even more aggressive position

in terms of some of the political songs he was writing.

Also, it was very interesting

to observe how Sylvie going away, for this period, to Europe

had left him, for the first time, really alone in the city,

at a moment when the shit hits the fan

and there's a week in which people are not sure they're gonna live

or whether the whole East Coast of the United States

might be annihilated in a nuclear attack.

Taxi! Taxi! Hey! Come on!

[panting]

And it was from this firmament that the song "Masters of War" was born.

[Bob] Thank you.

This is a new one.

♪ Come you masters of war ♪

[Mangold] This is a re-creation of another famous club in New York

where a hell of a lot of great things happened,

including some of Bob's earliest performances, which is the Gaslight,

which was a club in a basement off of MacDougal Street.

♪ You hide in your mansion ♪

♪ While the young people's blood ♪

♪ Flows out of their bodies And is buried in the mud ♪

[Mangold] And, again, this is just Timmy playing in the room

for the extras and Monica, and us shooting it.

♪ Will it buy you forgiveness ♪

The point being, again,

what better way to try and capture

the authenticity of folk music

than to just let it be authentically folk music, live and in the moment.

♪ All the money you made ♪

♪ Will never buy back your soul ♪

♪ And I'll watch while you're lowered ♪

♪ Down to your deathbed ♪

[Mangold] Interestingly, when you're trying to get actors

and encourage them to take risks, the biggest thing--

One of the biggest elements of my job is to try and make all the pressure go away.

To try and make it seem like it's just us playing here,

and there will never be a moment where all this is analyzed in the press

and taken apart, and people poke at it and find problems with it.

To do the work, you kind of have to free yourself from understanding,

being aware of how much it's all gonna be analyzed later.

We shot this scene between Monica and Timmy in his apartment

very late in the schedule.

I'm very glad we did, for many reasons,

one of which was just they kind of had this great comfort

with each other by this point.

It's one of my favorite scenes in the movie,

just because I think it says so much about the characters...

and their unique relationship.

The Unites States almost went to nuclear war.

You get to see that Joan in the aftermath of the Cuban Missile Crisis,

and waking up in bed with him in this new morning

where it appears the world is gonna go back to normal,

that Joan is really his equal and sees through him.

For instance, she doesn't, for a moment, believe he traveled with the carnival.

But also that he sees through her,

and he sees her struggles to write music

that rival the standards she usually sings...

If he does, we will call off the quarantine

and there will be no invasion.

...and makes no hesitation to poke her where she's vulnerable.

Has the United States made a deal with Moscow? The answer is no.

In a way, the scene is a kind of love scene

between two incredibly talented, confident and egotistical geniuses.

Well, that's that.

And what happens with the song is it becomes a moment

where all their posturing with each other vanishes

and it becomes just purely the beauty of each of them

and connecting.

Who taught you to play?

Well, I taught myself really.

Picked up a few licks at the carnival.

At the carnival?

Oh, yeah, there was singin' cowboys that'd come through,

teach me all sorts of funny chords.

Yeah, they'd pass through in the shows

in, uh, Kansas or Dakotas.

[Mangold] Bob's apartment we built on a stage as well.

It is an exact replica, almost down to the inch,

of the actual apartment on 4th Street

where Bob lived for all these years,

and all this iconic music was written.

I had lessons as a kid, you know, normal lessons.

Everything. I mean, the dressing, the pictures on the walls.

Not just the shape of the room. Everything.

A great deal of effort--

Regina, our set decorator, and Franςois Audouy, our production designer

went to a tremendous amount of effort

to try and really make it like it was.

I mean, when we had all this photo research

that showed us what it looked like.

Sunsets and seagulls.

Smell of buttercups.

Your songs are like an oil painting at the dentist's office.

You're kind of an asshole, Bob.

Yeah, I guess.

Play this.

[Mangold] Timmy had this idea, when we did this scene,

that we should have the strings...

Often musicians, when they're at home,

won't trim, with a wire cutter, the extra string

on that end of the neck of the guitar.

So, we let them be long, but if you watch very carefully,

you'll notice they keep getting shorter as I'm moving into close-ups

because the strings kept bouncing in front of his face.

And I was getting so frustrated I just kept coming in and giving them a haircut,

so they're already significantly shorter in this shot

than they were in the wide one.

♪ How many seas must a white dove sail ♪

♪ Before she sleeps in the send? ♪

♪ Yes and now many times Must the cannon balls fly ♪

[Mangold] You try to find this very fine balance as you shoot the music,

where you don't want everything to be this kind of cliche scene of people going,

"Oh, my God. It's this famous song."

Again...

But you also want to show that people do recognize the talent in his music.

So, it's a very fine balance

between kind of playing what's really strong about the music,

but also not turning it into kind of this, "Oh, my God. That's solid gold."

♪ How many years can some people exist ♪

And some of this is also in the shooting style.

It's kind of observational. I'm not trying to overdo it.

I'm just letting them be and letting them sing

and letting the moment happen like it might in a house with two musicians.

♪ The answer, my friend ♪

♪ Is blowin' in the wind ♪

♪ The answer is blowin' in the wind ♪

Music has this power--

When we do our jobs, it has this power to let us drop our attitudes.

And one of the beautiful things here is each of these characters

has their own ego and their own defenses and their own pride,

but in the moment they're singing, they're kind of just one.

And what I was really focused on was when the song ends,

I wanted to see all that other stuff sweep back in.

As soon as the beauty and purity of the song ends,

you suddenly are left with,

"Who are we? What are we? What are we doing here?"

And I think it's a really great moment,

particularly for Monica right here,

when the song comes to a close.

[♪ music stops]

So, this is...

What?

I don't know.

Have you recorded that song?

No, not yet.

You should let me try it.

[Mangold] One of the ways I was trying to avoid

kind of being too historical or biopic-y, a cliché biopic,

was to, again, as I said earlier,

try not to involve myself in dates,

telling you how the records are selling, what's on the charts, what it is--

Just let you live with the characters at different moments

on this timeline

and see how the story between them all is developing.

And that's very much this section of the movie.

I feel like the movie's very much in a groove at this point.

And the scenes just keep coming and are purely observational,

but each kicking into the next.

[Sylvie laughs]

But these are obviously sessions for what will be his kind of--

the... the really landmark album Freewheelin' Bob Dylan.

And Freewheelin' is the record that kind of changed everything.

And it's also the record

where most of the songs are finally his own writing.

♪ When your rooster crows at the break of dawn ♪

Who... Who wrote this?

Folk music, up until Bob Dylan, really, was really predominantly--

It had a tradition that the artist would sing traditional songs,

songs that had existed for decades, if not even a century.

[Sylvie squeals]

He may be arranging them in new ways,

but that the songs were kind of timeless and proven by history.

And Bob changed that, in the sense that he kind of said

we can write new folk music for today,

although his first two albums are mainly covers,

and it really took until Freewheelin' for him

to fully assert the power of his own writing.

♪ Still, I wish there was somethin ' you could ♪

♪ Do or say ♪

And a lot of the exposure-- And this is what this scene was trying to show.

A lot of the exposure for Bob Dylan's early music

actually came about as a result of people covering his music,

whether you're talking about The Byrds or Joan Baez or others.

There were a lot of people who recognized his songwriting talent

and were covering them and putting them on the charts and recording them

before Bob, really, had broken as an artist himself,

as a recording artist himself.

- You can plug that here. -[Albert] What did I say?

No, Sylvie, don't bring 'em in here.

I didn't bring them, Bob, you did.

[Mangold] I love this frame of Bob's apartment.

And it kind of really plays for a long time in the scene, in depth.

When you refer to scenes playing in depth,

what I mean is I've got actors sitting in foreground,

I've got Danny Fogler directing things in the background.

The frame is just kind of alive, packed with activity of all different sizes.

But also, if you look at this frame, it comes back again.

Urn, I love the wardrobe.

Urn, Arianne Phillips and I have worked together numerous times.

And the style and fashion of Bob Dylan,

and also this period in the Village,

is so beautiful and so interesting.

And, you know, I love this top Timmy's wearing in this scene.

And, you know, of course, Grossman in his suit-- period suit.

And all this work on wardrobe only works

when it's also working with the set and the background,

and how unified these frames, to me, feel.

It's not just a costume designer saying one thing

and the production designer saying another,

and Phedon and I doing yet another thing with the camera.

That there's a kind of integration

of all these looks and feelings and the color palette

is a result of incredible teamwork.

Hey, there.

[♪ music stops]

[Mangold] Also, one of the things, you know,

when you talk about costumes that many people don't think about is,

you think, "Oh, the costume designer helps decide

what they're wearing and how it fits." Right? Of course.

But there's two aspects to that job that are really complicated.

One is that a lot of these clothes don't exist anymore

and the fabrics they were made with don't exist anymore

and the way they fall on a body doesn't exist anymore.

So, you've got to make them,

or you've got to find vintage pieces,

or enough of them that you can handle the action of the movie.

But the other aspect of costume design that's really interesting

and is a particular, unique gift of Arianne's,

besides just her incredible eye and research,

is her kindness and openness with actors.

You know, when a movie starts, one of the first places an actor goes is

to wardrobe, to costume, to get fitted,

to begin the process of constructing

and finding their wardrobe and their look

and how they feel in these clothes

and whether they feel like these characters in these clothes.

And that process is really fragile.

The actors are all nervous.

They're at the very beginning of a giant undertaking.

And Arianne conducts a kind of laboratory

with the actors and the wardrobe, their props.

For this, it would be eyeglasses and harmonica racks

and working with props, guitar straps

and everything where they can feel entirely comfortable.

Because that's what you want.

You want, in the end, these actors to just feel like these are their clothes.

They've been using these tools forever.

And this also goes to our hair team and makeup team of Stacey and Jamie.

You know, I wanted it messy in this movie,

and this shot perfectly exemplifies it.

Like, Joan's hair never looked so beautiful

as when there's a lock blowing across her face.

That these are rumpled heroes. That they aren't glam.

That kind of period hasn't come yet.

These are kind of people who part of their look

is a representation of their musical philosophy,

which is being real.

And, Monica, by the way, if you notice in this movie--

It's hard because it's a wide-screen movie, so you don't often see feet,

but she's almost always barefoot in this film,

whether in an apartment or even on stage at Newport or elsewhere.

That was a particular habit of Joan Baez's

that Monica made sure she kept alive in the film.

Oh. And Mr. Hammond's office set these aside for you.

It's at this point in the movie

that Johnny Cash becomes something a little more

than just a vision on a small black-and-white television.

And this is a depiction of something that, of course, really happened.

And the words of these letters from Johnny Cash

are the words of his letters to Bob Dylan.

[Johnny] I'll just say, uh, your Freewheelin' album...

[Mangold] When I read about that these two artists

started becoming pen pals in this period,

I called Bob Dylan's manager, Jeff Rosen,

and I asked him, "Do you have these letters?"

And he said, "Sure, I'll send them over to you."

And then, suddenly, in my e-mail popped up scans of these incredible letters

that Bob had saved that Johnny Cash had written him,

which, to my knowledge, have never been reprinted anywhere

and were incredibly helpful to construct this kind of dialogue that Bob was having

with someone he admired from far away,

who was kind of grounding him and giving him perspective as his star was rising

and life was becoming less easy to manage.

[man 2] Hey, Bob, where you gain'?

[newscaster] Over 300,000 marchers descended on Washington today

to demand the end of segregation.

from New York, Bob Dylan.

♪ When the marshals and cops fled the scene ♪

[Mangold] The point of this whole sequence is, in a sense,

just depicting how life for Bob Dylan changed

with the release of Freewheelin'',

effectively a hit album but also one that made him a star

and a kind of object of desire and fascination as a person,

as well as an artist who was a singer-songwriter.

[Bob] Dear Johnny. Thanks for that letter.

I am now famous.

[indistinct chatter]

[Mangold] And it was so apparent to me,

in the correspondence between Johnny Cash and Bob at the time,

that this was something Bob was really focused on,

was how to wrap his head around

becoming this kind of symbol

or something larger than a person,

a kind of character with a huge number of rabid fans.

[Johnny] I was in, uh, New York last week,

saw a bunch of folk singers that couldn't hold a chigger on your ass.

This idea that Johnny mentions in the letter

about tracking mud on someone's carpet,

which is how he ends this first letter to Bob,

became a really important kind of purpose for Johnny Cash

in the dialogue of the movie, that, urn, when we--

I don't mean the dialogue, literally what people say.

I mean the kind of dialogue of ideas.

By the end of the picture,

it's very much Johnny Cash's kind of creating a permission structure

for Bob to follow his desire

to play electric and to go headlong into rock and roll.

♪ It's a hard ♪

♪ It's a hard It's a hard ♪

♪ It's a hard rain's a-gonna fall ♪

-Thank you. -[audience cheering]

[Mangold] One of the inspirations,

[Mangold] One of the inspirations,

[Mangold] One of the inspirations,

when I first came on the movie

and started working on it five years ago,

was the film Amadeus,

which was directed by a mentor of mine, Milos Forman...

who also happens to be a mentor of Edward's.

Because Edward made a movie a couple of decades ago with Miles,

who has since passed on,

but was a really important figure for both of us,

in terms of creative guidance and showing us how to make movies.

I'm thinking we see Toshi's family in Japan...

But Milos made the film Amadeus from the script by Peter Shaffer,

based on the play by Peter Shaffer,

and that, too, was a kind of real template,

a kind of model I used when I was trying to shape the script of this film.

Because there was a very interesting aspect to that movie.

It's called Amadeus, of course, the first name of Amadeus Mozart.

And that, ostensibly, is who the movie, you'd think, would be about.

But the movie intensely follows characters besides Mozart

and answers questions about Mozart

more through these characters,

these other supporting characters,

than through the central figure himself.

And, obviously, if you recall that film,

you'd remember F. Murray Abraham, playing Salieri,

being the most dominating one and his feelings of jealousy and frustration

that God would have given so much talent to this young man over him.

But there's also a lot of other key relationships--

with the king, with his wife, and others in the movie.

And in very much many ways, the way that film was constructed,

you learned about your hero, Amadeus,

through the reactions of others,

through the wake, in a sense, he leaves in the water,

the afterburn that he leaves on other characters.

And that was a kind of strategic philosophy

I tried to follow a lot with this film,

which was somehow learning about Bob

through the way he interacts with others,

and the effects he has upon them.

♪ Show me the country ♪

♪ Where the bombs had to fall ♪

♪ Show me the ruins ♪

♪ Of the buildings once so tall ♪

[Mangold] We built this fairgrounds, the stage and the surrounding set pieces,

in a park in New Jersey where we lived for a few weeks

doing all these Newport concert sequences.

And the Monterey sequence, as well, was a different version of the same band shell,

reconstructed differently.

[audience cheering]

It was a miracle that the movie gets to cross seasons.

You know, we started shooting in March

and caught the very end of winter and the leafless trees.

And then, by the time we were shooting this in May,

we obviously had the world in full blossom,

which really helps when you're making a movie covering four years,

that you really feel the seasons changing on and off in the film.

-That was beautiful. -Thank you.

All right, all right.

-[man] Where's Bob? -He is comin'. He's a-comin'.

One of the things, you know, I felt really interested to explore,

in trying to kind of make a portrait of Bob Dylan,

was to not come in with any preconceived notions.

Obviously, we want to portray him and have him resemble the man who we've seen

in documentary footage and in photographs

and in writings and in his music.

But I also wanted to somehow have the movie revealing something new,

having something new to share.

And, in many ways, that's his humanity. You know, his yearnings.

And this shot, you see it so well,

which is his absolute fascination with a band,

with someone who can go out with his mates on stage

and, together, make a big sound and a big impression.

And I think that was a huge thing for Bob,

his fascination and love for music and the music made louder than folk music.

[audience cheering]

♪ Now I taught the weeping willow how to cry ♪

♪ And I showed the clouds ♪

♪ How to cover up a clear, blue sky ♪

The other thing this film becomes is a kind of, for me, at least,

a meditation on what it is to be talented.

And that we use the term often, for talent, as a gift.

We say "it's a gift." Right? And it is, of course.

Some people just have a knack, a kind of innate ability.

They start 18 spaces ahead on the game board.

There's a kind of ability they have, or an instinct they have,

that puts them so far out in front.

And certainly that's true of many of the characters in this movie,

but none more so than Bob Dylan himself.

And-- But what I'm interested in is not just observing,

yes, that they're talented, that's obvious.

But what does it feel like to have that kind of talent?

You know, again, remind yourself, this is a movie about a guy,

between 19 and 24 years of age, who, in that period,

wrote dozens of the most important songs of the century.

What were we doing? What was I doing?

What were you doing between 19 and 24 years of age?

In all likelihood,

not impacting the world and the culture as profoundly as this guy did.

But the other half of that observation that's really interesting is

the questions about artistry and celebrity.

Because they're two separate things, right?

So, if you think about it, artistry is what Bob's doing right here,

which is the writing and performing of this song.

But celebrity is something else.

Celebrity often comes with great artistry,

which is that you become an idol.

You become a kind of icon or a symbol.

You stop being, to many people, a person,

and you start being a kind of movement or a symbol,

which everyone reads into what they hope for, what they want.

What they believe.

And they want you to keep being the person they believe you should be,

or the rock star, or the symbol they want as a kind of symbol.

And one of the things I was trying to get at,

and I think Timmy does so masterfully in these scenes,

is to both love coming out on stage and performing his music

and wanting to share it with an audience,

but also that there's a kind of ambivalence or hesitation

to fully embrace the love of an audience or the adoration,

which I suspect can sometimes--

I mean, in my own way, I can project making movies

and presenting them to people.

Sometimes you don't know what to do with the kind words

and the powerful, passionate feelings people have

about the work you've made.

And that's only something I've had in my own small way.

But on the scale that Bob was hitting people and moving them,

I think it's really interesting to kind of observe it

from a less judgmental point of view.

Meaning, you know, there's been a lot of speculation

that he can be a difficult person,

or is a complex and eccentric person.

And all that may be true, but he's also a person.

And living inside that skin and being that person with all that pressure upon you

yields behaviors and reactions

that many of us can't ever know 'cause we'll never get put in that position.

All of this that I'm saying is leading up to this moment where he finishes the song

and he's greeted by such passionate applause.

And we cut to Timmy, as Bob,

and his reaction is kind of numb

or ambivalent or not sure what--

What am I supposed to do in the face of all this?

And I felt that was a really great place to leave this character

in kind of Bob Dylan version one.

Go to black and arrive and find Bob Dylan version two,

who is, a year later, kind of a superstar at this point,

but still roaming and ambling around the Village as a kind of icon.

But at this point has a level of popularity and notoriety

and influence in the world

that is completely, staggeringly different than the young man

who arrived with a dollar in his pocket in the opening act of our movie.

[blows whistle]

And this is the same MacDougal Street that we brought Bob

in his little newsboy cap and his guitar case to.

This very corner is where he first crosses on MacDougal Street

at the very beginning of the movie.

And now we find him in tailored clothes

on his badass motorcycle

and wearing Ray-Ben's at night...

and with that iconic hair.

[indistinct chatter]

[man] He's here.

Excuse me, one second. Hey, Bob. Bobby.

This scene, again, is a kind of a reintroduction to a lot of characters.

We're seeing Sylvie is no longer with Bob.

He's got a different young woman on his arm.

Things have moved on.

And you also--

I was trying very much to just work with Timmy

on kind of carving out this feeling that Bob feels put upon,

an alien, a kind of object, a commodity.

He walks in a party like this,

and everyone wants something or wants to say something to him

or have a moment with him.

And they're hoping he sings.

So that it's dawning on us, perhaps, the predicament a character like Dylan

or anyone else with this level of fame and fandom gets to,

which is you kind of can't go anywhere

without someone wanting something from you.

What'd you pull me into, man? Is this a fucking gig or something?

In this case, this is a charity event at Harold Leventhal's apartment

in which, you know, Leventhal is telling him that,

"I kind of got all these people to shell out the money and come here tonight

because they thought they might hear you sing a song."

This is my wife, Toshi.

Which, of course, burns Bob out because that means he's working.

He's not here to enjoy himself like everyone else.

He's got to perform.

All right. Well, don't hold it against him. It's for a good cause.

Pete Seeger sweeps in and masterfully coaxes Bob into playing a song

and then joins him.

The only moment in the film, really, where Pete and Bob actually sing together.

♪ Oh the time will come up When the winds will stop ♪

♪ And the breeze will cease to be breathin' ♪

♪ Like the stillness in the wind ♪

♪ 'Fore the hurricane begins ♪

♪ The hour that the ship comes in ♪

♪ And the seas will split And the ship will hit ♪

♪ And the sands on the shoreline ♪

♪ Will be shakin' ♪

♪ And the tide will sound And the wind will pound ♪

♪ And the mornin' will be breakin' ♪

[Mangold] We're now approaching a kind of pivotal moment in an elevator sequence

that begins a new sequence of Bob's discomfort in his own life

which we've seen signs of,

but as he enters this elevator,

we're also gonna introduce the last really major new character

to arrive in the movie,

a character by the name of Bobby Neuwirth,

who became, in the mid-'60s, a kind of protégé and sideman for Bob,

someone he met randomly

and was kind of a musician and a charmer and an artist

who was rambling around through the scene in New York at that time.

Whatever it is they don't want me to be.

We depict them kind of connecting on this elevator scene...

I'm not a horse, so...

...and Bobby Neuwirth kind of challenging Bob just very gently

about some of his bravado and cynicism about his stardom

and obviously getting under Bob's skin.

One of the things that was really clear in--

when I had the honor and pleasure of hanging out with Bob Dylan

and asking him questions about all these times

that we're re-creating in the movie--

One of the things he said that was so interesting to me

is he talked about how lonely it is on stage as a solo performer.

And the kind of loneliness he felt as a folk performer going out on stage alone,

and how jealous he was or admiring he was when he looked on,

as we show in the sequence only about 20 minutes ago,

when he's watching Johnny Cash perform.

He's not just loving the fact that the music is getting played with the band.

He was seeing the fact that they had camaraderie,

that Johnny Cash had friends he traveled with,

that he had mates,

that they were making music together,

that it wasn't-- all the pressure wasn't on one person.

And when I spent time with the real Bob Dylan,

he really articulated that that was as much of a reason

of him moving toward rock-and-roll music

as any, you know, more highfalutin ideas

of where music needed to go next,

that Bob felt isolated, he felt alone.

You know, as he articulated to me,

"Just imagine what it's like to have to play literally alone on stage.

Just you, a mic and a guitar for two hours."

And you ride there alone, and you go home alone.

And that the idea of the burden

and the lack of kind of what, here, I'm trying to show

in this scene where he goes to see Neuwirth

with his own band at a small bar,

is just how much fun it looks like they're having making music,

and how that aspect of music-making has perhaps vanished from Bob's life

at this point in the story.

♪ We had five million hogs ♪

♪ And six million... ♪ -[woman 1] That's him.

That's Bob fucking Dylan right there.

-[man 1] Where? -[woman 1] No, that's him.

-[man 2] It's him! {woman 1] Bob! Bob!

[woman 2] Bob.

[woman 3] Bob.

[woman 4] Bob. Bob.

Take your glasses off. Let me see your eyes!

-[Bob] Hey, get off! -[man 3] Fuck off!

{Bob grunts] -[crowd gasp]

[Bobby] Hey, hey, hey.

[man 4] What are you doin' man?

[knock on door]

Here, Timmy and Elle are kind of reunited

when he goes to visit her at her apartment now that they've broken up

and finds someone in her bed.

But it made sense to me that he'd come to see Sylvie

at this moment of unraveling in his own life,

looking for some kind of equilibrium, if you will.

Because, really, she is the only person in this story

who loved him when he was nobody.

I think Pete Seeger, I could say that's true for,

but the intimacy of this relationship was unique.

Thanks.

You know, everyone asks where these songs come from, Sylvie.

But when you watch their faces,

they're not asking where the songs come from.

When I wrote these lines for Bob,

I felt they were as close as I wanted to come

to kind of putting into words, spoken words,

the kind of loneliness and anxiety

and even paranoia he might be feeling.

So often I've seen when people get to this kind of moment--

I mean, I've seen it more with actors, obviously,

and the musicians because of my profession--

but when people kind of explode

and become kind of an object of interest for everyone,

there's this very unique way that you can start to feel like prey,

like you are vulnerable and everyone's hunting for you.

Even your own fans can approach you sometimes with a kind of adoration,

but also they're carrying these small knives

they stick in your ribs at the same time,

like missing your last album or wishing you could do something like this again

or just these little remarks that get in your head

and make it hard to really find what you really should be doing.

And I think this whole sequence, this montage--

Which, very much, Timmy and I made up. We just took an afternoon.

And even this scene on the phone with Albert

is something we just made up on set--

I didn't quite know what to do,

but Timmy and I just kind of found our way

of him playing in the apartment

and kind of having this explosion of creativity

after he's isolated himself from almost everyone in his world.

[I upbeat folk music playing, "Subterranean Homesick Blues"]

♪ Ah, get sick, get well Hang around a ink well ♪

♪ Hang bell, hard to tell If anything is goin' to sell ♪

♪ Try hard, get barred Get back, write braille ♪

[Mangold] One of the joys

and one of the things that I'm very conscious of,

making a film like this

with such a wide array of unique characters coming in and out,

is how much--

You know, as we see Norbert Leo Butz arriving in the movie more forcefully

from this point out, playing Alan Lomax,

and P.J. Byrne, who's playing Leventhal who we've met already--

I'm trying to kind of create a fabric of depth in which you really--

Everyone's believable. Everyone has a character. Everyone has an agenda.

And so the movie has interesting characters wherever you turn.

And, of course, this is a scene separate from Bob,

one of the many, as I was describing,

where we leave him for a moment

and kind of go backstage with other characters--

a scene in which we begin to sense

the stresses and tensions arising in the folk movement

as their number one star, their proponent and their kind of--

the face of folk music, Bob Dylan, is also a management problem for them

because he's no longer really interested anymore in playing folk music.

And yet, he's the single force that's responsible for most of their audience.

So that contradiction obviously historically created a lot of stress

for the pooh-bahs of the folk movement.

And this is a meeting at what we call the Archive,

the folklore center where a lot of planning of the trajectory

of the folk movement and the Newport Concerts was made.

[Alan] We are here to celebrate folk music.

From the people, for the people, Pete.

The sound of a guitar

-and a man's voice. -[Harold] Ora woman's.

Alan, please. Let's calm down.

[Alan] Don't talk to me about ticket sales, Harold.

-I don't give a shit'. -[Harold] Okay.

Hey, Tom, give me a second, I Want to fry something.

I love this story about Bob, you know, buying this whistle from a street vendor

and it finding its way into the recording of "Highway 61

But the other thing that, you know,

when you're directing the movie,

that's what's happening on the surface,

but what is the other thing you're feeling here?

You're feeling the camaraderie of a band.

Look at every one of these faces.

Bob Dylan's smiling. Mike Bloomfield's smiling.

The rest of the band is smiling and laughing.

They're having a good time.

And while you're absorbing the song and the scene

and the whistle and all those accoutrements,

I think, emotionally, what you suddenly see

is this character is suddenly blossoming again.

He's just having a great time,

and everyone around him is having a great time suddenly

with what he's beginning to play with and how he's beginning to expand.

♪ Abe said, "What?" ♪

♪ God said, "You can do what you want, Abe ♪

♪ ”But the next time you see me comin' ♪

♪ "You better run" ♪

This is one of my favorite scenes in the movie,

and it was the one that was the hardest to defend

when we were trying to figure out the budget of the movie

'cause it was a scene in which you go,

"Is it required? Must you have this scene?

How does it advance the plot?"

I'm not even sure what the plot of this movie is to be honest.

It's kind of a movie that's just a slice-of-life movie,

of watching these characters and their relationships change and develop

and the power relationships between them change and evolve.

But what I loved about this scene

was how it cut from Bob in the studio making "Highway 61"

with this rip-roaring sound,

and then we out to Pete Seeger on a local public-access television studio

doing old-style folk music,

urn, holding down the fort, if you will,

keeping up the world of folk

although trying, as he will, to kind of use new media and the TV studio,

to spread the word of folk music.

[Jesse] What kinda station is this anyway?

This is educational, Jesse.

This is a local public educational channel, yeah.

And, you know, I try, in my movies, not to pick sides.

You know, a lot of people, when they talk about scripts or movies,

they'll talk about the good guy or the bad guy, right?

Urn, I don't ever really talk or think that way.

In the movie, I don't like to think there's a good guy or a bad guy.

The truth is that even villains in movies, even diabolical ones, they don't--

Characters don't wake up every morning and go,

"How can I do an awful thing to someone?"

They usually, in their own way, think they're making the world better.

Everyone thinks they're making the world better.

They could be misguided, they could be even sociopathic,

but they actually believe they're making the world better.

And in this case we have two wonderful characters in Bob Dylan and Pete Seeger,

each of whom who just have a different view of the world

and see it differently and see their artistic journey more differently.

Pete's a little more dogmatic and a little more involved

in the ideas of folk music as being supreme over all other kinds of music,

like many of the compatriots of the folk music scene

who see this kind of innate value in the stripped-down sound

of just a man or woman and a guitar.

Bob doesn't have that same dogma.

He doesn't have that same agenda.

He just likes music of all kinds.

And this is just another wonderful moment

to see Bob in Pete's world trying, as he will,

to kind of both evolve as an artist as he is in the studio at this time

with this rock music he knows which would displease Pete,

but at the same time attending to Pete and coming to be a guest on his show,

and jamming with the wonderful Big Bill Morganfield who plays Jesse Moffette,

who's kind of famous-- a kind of amalgamation of, you know, Muddy Waters

and other blues singers that we created

to kind of represent that wing of folk music

and roots music that was also flourishing,

which was the blues-- the Delta blues and the Chicago blues.

Well, I was watching real close, Jesse.

I got these special binoculars, right?

And they allow me to see into your soul.

Bill had never acted before and, urn, is just a...

[stammers] ...is strictly a musician.

Although, after this movie, I think he'll be acting more

'cause he's phenomenal in this scene with Timmy.

It's okay. All right. Just don't squeeze her too tight.

-It's all right, Pete? -Oh, yeah.

It's a family station. You can...

As long as I don't squeeze her too tight.

[Jesse laughs]

Then it's all right. I'm gonna... watch this.

[♪ blues music playing]

I love what Edward's doing in this scene,

which is you feel this phenomenal sense of pride,

kind of paternal pride, that Timmy's character, Bob, has come through for him

and shown up at his small TV studio

to add his star power to this show.

And to watch kind of both wings of folk music,

the totally real, authentic Delta blues of Jesse Moffette

being combined with the kind of new age, '60s-forward,

rock-and-roll folk of Bob Dylan,

and Pete kind of presiding almost like a diplomat over this meeting.

♪ Oh, baby, I've been lovin' you ♪

♪ Well, I ride on a mail train, babe ♪

♪ I can't buy no thrill ♪

♪ And I've been up all night, babe ♪

♪ I'm leaning on the windowsill ♪

Here we are, man.

We shot this sequence even before we started production

outside the Hotel Chelsea.

The Chelsea Hotel is one of the landmarks of kind of--

in rock-and-roll history in New York.

So many things have happened there.

We actually couldn't shoot in New York on a weekday,

so we scheduled these as kind of weekend pre-shoot days,

where we got, you know, the courthouse scenes in New York,

exterior of the Chelsea Hotel,

also that earlier scene with Joan running out of the Chelsea

during the Cuban missile crisis.

This is a set we built on our stages in New Jersey of the hallway and the room,

Joan's room at the Chelsea.

[knocking at doors]

I always love this moment where Bob knocks on all the doors

'cause he can't remember which is Joan's room.

And these are just bits of behavior that you try and put in the script

or find with your actors even on set.

And they may not always be advancing the story,

but part of what makes, I think, movies like this work

when they do work, and I hope this one does,

is that you really enjoy the characters

and watching them getting pressed up against the world.

And I have to be very conscious that,

while I wanna keep advancing the story forward,

I also just wanna be enjoying these actors in their roles

and watching their behavior.

Of course for me, in my mind, as Joan is waking up

and finding Bob writing yet another song feverishly in her cramped hotel room,

what I'm trying to lean on here is the difference between these two.

Joan is not, by and large, a songwriter

and Bob is, centrally and first and foremost,

a kind of volcanically prolific songwriter,

and that that in itself is a kind of wedge between them

where Joan is a kind of amazing performer and presence and musician

and with a voice beyond compare in terms of its angelic beauty,

but Bob has this other thing,

this ability to just generate a song at 3:00 a.m. in the room,

and that kind of puts a little bit of a wedge between them.

♪ That he not busy being born is busy dying ♪

[Joan sighs]

When you're blocking scenes,

you know, you don't want a scene like this to be too cutty

when you have actors this good

who can kind of make the scene function within a frame,

and I think you'll see this in many other instances.

But one of the advantages I had was this wonderful circular mirror

that our set dresser put on this side table in Joan's room.

So it allowed me to actually have a two-shot of Joan over there,

while also looking at Bob at the table

so that I barely needed to cut the scene

'cause I had kind of everything I needed in one frame.

Even if you notice earlier, the scene opens,

we cocked the mirror a different direction--

not that you necessarily notice it watching it unless I point it out to you--

so that even there you're seeing Bob's reflection

or other things in the room in the mirror.

Mirrors are incredibly helpful when you're shooting and blocking

if you can use them creatively.

okay-

You know, Albert booked us on a tour, Joan.

People, you know, on tour,

they typically sing songs together.

Somebody's gotta write those songs.

It's my fucking guitar.

See ya on tour.

This next scene is a kind of encapsulation of a tour that Joan and Bob did

which was fraught with conflict

in which they toured as a pair,

singing together and separately and making a show together.

A lot of this scene, almost all of this scene,

was improvised between the two actors,

meaning the very beginning of this scene where they're singing this song

and then she starts playing "Blowin' in the Wind"

and he says, "I don't want to do that,"

that I had written down.

But then what proceeds with this riff that Timmy ends up doing

about his guitar breaking and his bus catching fire

and arguing with the audience,

that all just happened on the night.

Particularly of note

is how wonderful the background artists were in the film,

background artists meaning what's commonly called extras.

Even though you hardly see them because of the way we lit this scene,

there's about 150, 200 people out there,

and they're reacting to this concert that Monica and Timmy are doing,

but they're also interacting with our actors, particularly Timmy,

booing and shouting catcalls at him as he refuses to play the song.

And that, I think, really inspired Timmy to take the scene

to places that I had never expected in the script.

They already got that song on the record. Pick another song.

Joan, choose somethin' else.

You guys wanna hear "Blowin' in the Wind," right?

-[audience cheering] -Nah, man, /don '2'... Look...

It's why they came here, Bob.

Nah, I don't believe they came here to hear that song.

'Cause I don't believe the set list...

[indistinct shouting]

I don't believe a set list was advertised.

No, no set list...

Unless that draconian figure

from, uh, Chicago, United States up there promised songs...

[Mangold] The look of this scene was also based very much on the look

of the real concerts that Joan and Bob did,

where they just had, you know, two mic stands and two stools,

and they were cross side lit in this way,

with really strong spotlights coming from the right and left and front of stage.

And it produced this great look, you know, with this severe back light on Bob and Joan

as you shoot them over their shoulders toward the crowd.

My guitar broke. Yeah.

Hey, listen man, don't get mad.

Hey, the truth is

-it broke on the way here. -[Albert] Oh, come on, Bob!

[Bob] No. Hey, man.

The bus I came to actually caught fire on the way here

and my guitar ain't even on me right now.

So, I'm gonna just go see the guitar doctor backstage.

Or something, you know.

You may notice in this film lens flares, you know, when-- like right there--

when sharp, strong lighting sources hit these lenses.

Lens flares are something that have pretty much been engineered out of lenses now.

Lenses have gotten so refined with computer technology

that, in the modern sense, it's very hard to create a lens flare

that, in the modern sense, it's very hard to create a lens flare

that, in the modern sense, it's very hard to create a lens flare

because the lenses have become so perfectly machined

that they can even handle incredibly bright sources of light

aiming right into the lens.

Part of the period look of the movie

was to try and use lenses that might produce these flares

like they did in those days, in the '60s.

So we actually used vintage lenses.

We didn't use many lenses on the movie.

Almost the whole film was shot with a 30 mm anamorphic,

that prime lens, for every shot.

But the lens kit we used was really old

and had just been repaired and kind of refined,

but that's part of the reason you get those wonderful lens flare effects

in the anamorphic lenses,

is that it's very, as we say, old glass.

[humming]

♪ Railroad Bill, Railroad Bill ♪

♪ Never worked and he never will ♪

♪ And it's ride, ride, ride ♪

[Bob playing harmonica]

[Mangold] This is another sequence showing the advancing nature

of Bob's rock-and-roll explorations in the studio,

but also, more than anything, again this sense of camaraderie.

Bobby Neuwirth is now part of his team.

The band itself, who are all shown arriving for work this morning

as he's playing with Bobby here,

it's kind of the team arriving to the locker room, in a sense,

to perform their roles for the day.

♪ Said if I didn't like it He would take my life ♪

♪ I'm gonna ride, ride, ride ♪

[Mangold] And this story with Al Kooper comes from reality,

that Al Kooper was invited to the sessions as a second guitarist.

But they already had a guitarist.

And so, there was really nothing for him to do

except sit in the control room.

And he snuck back in the studio and got on an organ

and added, urn, what was and is the most iconic part of "Rolling Stone" musically,

which is this kind of great organ part underneath it.

[chuckles nervously]

I don't care about money. I wanna play, man.

No one's on organ.

You don't play keyboards, AI.

[I instrumental music tuning, playing]

[Bob] Still, don't even worry about what we're doin'.

Play like you're in the room alone.

[Mike] All right.

[Bob] Play for yourself, it's gonna sound better.

-[Mike] All right. -[Bob] Uh...

[Mangold] I'm so lucky Charlie Tahan came on to play Al Kooper,

and I'm so lucky to have actors like this, wonderfully talented actors,

who also bring so much of their own unique personality and vibe to the movie.

Charlie brings, immediately,

this kind of comedic, disheveled sense of uniqueness that is Al Kooper,

and, immediately, Bob takes a liking to him.

♪ Once upon a time you dressed so fine ♪

♪ Threw the bums a dime in your prime ♪

♪ Didn't you? ♪

Newport never seen threads like these, man.

[Mangold] We see how far we've come at this point in the movie

where Bob seeing Pete Seeger outside the window becomes more like seeing Dad.

You know, like, "Oh, God. Dad's here."

And I don't think it speaks, in any way, to Bob not having real love for Pete,

but there is a generational difference between them and there was.

And also, Bob felt really confined by the dogma of the folk music world

and what they considered to be true music

and what they considered to be false or threatening music,

and Bob had no such recognition.

[car engine starts]

Be careful on that thing.

[car driving off]

Hey, Sylvie.

[Mangold] Here you have Bob coming back to pick up Sylvie

and invite her to go up to Newport.

Sylvie!

You know, in many ways-- There's a thing in drama

called the obligatory scene or sequence.

In playwriting, it used to be called the obligatory scene,

and it's kind of like in a mystery play, you know,

where Hercule Poirot or Sherlock Holmes will get everyone

into the same salon together

and announce who killed who with a candlestick in which room.

And the reason we call it the obligatory scene,

at least in old dramatical theory,

is it's the scene in which all the characters you've met

through the journey of the play or the film

are all present for this one kind of obligatory scene in which they come--

they all arrive representing all the different story forces,

character forces, desires and intentions that they have.

Newport, in this movie, the Newport '65 Concert,

is essentially the obligatory sequence,

where you've got Joan, Bob, Sylvie, Pete, all of them.

Everyone's here. Johnny Cash.

Anyone you've met in the movie is basically in Newport '65.

And so this becomes our kind of culminating sequence

in the last reel of the movie

in which Bob decides to unleash the music he's been hiding in the studio

to his folk family.

It's interesting 'cause when you talk to Bob about this period

and the choice to end up coming to Newport

and playing rock and roll at a folk concert,

even he is not sure why things went down exactly as they did.

But I tried, in dramatizing it, to view it as an emotional act.

That, in a way, he was feeling more and more boxed in,

similar to the guy who left Minnesota,

boxed in by his family and his world,

that he couldn't be the artist he wanted to be.

He was no longer free.

And I think that, following Dylan's life and reading about it,

it seems to me that an awful lot of the moves he's made in his life

are about maintaining freedom to be wherever--

to be whatever kind of person and artist he wants to be.

She ended up alone in that movie.

No, she didn't.

They got together when they were older.

[Bobby] Knock, knock.

Choose your weapon, General.

You got this guest thing with Joan in a half hour.

That one.

Yes, sir.

I'll meet you back here later?

Why?

I'd like to catch that.

[Albert] You're on right now. Let's go.

- You're running. -[Bob] All right, Albert.

-Hold your horses. -[Albert] Come on. Come on.

Let's go, let's go. Up. Go, go, go. Come on.

-[Bob] Okay, right in there? -[Bobby] Right in there.

Okay, we're running, we're running.

Okay, all right.

-Hey, Pete. -Hey, amigo, how are you?

-Hi, Sylvie! -Pete!

I haven't seen you in a while.

-Oh, okay. -How's it going?

Oh, it's all just jubilation through and through. Couldn't be better.

-[Alan] Hey, Bobby! -Hello, darlin'. How are you?

[Mangold] This is also the only scene in the movie--

Elle and Monica often joke

their only scene together is just the look they exchange in a few moments

as Bob joins Joan on stage.

The point of this becomes the bringing the triangle, as well,

between these three characters to full fruition.

And, of course, Sylvie's growing realization

that what she had with Bob she can no longer have,

that she may love him purely, that she may have known him the longest,

that she may be there for all the right reasons,

not because of anything she's gonna get out of it

other than loving this young man,

but that the possibility of that relationship surviving

this scale of fame and fortune is pretty hard to imagine.

♪ The sky is erupting ♪

♪ I must go where it's quiet ♪

[audience cheering]

Thank you.

How about saying hello to the man who wrote that one? Come on out, Bobby.

[Mangold] Also, this explores, you know, the emotional complexity

that a lot of us in show business find,

which is that, you know, it's really hard.

You experience this kind of closeness with the people you make movies with,

or the people you're on stage with,

that is more intimate or intense than almost anything else in your life.

And yet, you do all have a home life.

You all have a real life, you know, that isn't on stage.

And the collision of these two worlds, as happens in this scene,

is sometimes toxic,

makes it impossible to have a kind of conventionally successful domestic life

because you have these two worlds that are, in some ways, trying to compete

and asking for all your time, love and attention.

♪ You say you're lookin' for someone ♪

♪ Never weak but always strong ♪

And in a way this becomes a scene in which Sylvie has to watch,

even if their relationship is not active,

the magic and the chemistry between Bob and Joan.

And she has to kind of reconcile with that.

Can I live with this?

Can I live with being this invisible person,

as she later calls herself, a spinning plate in this world

in which he exists with so many people,

with such intense relationships,

and, of course, even an intense relationship

with all the millions and hundreds of thousands of strangers

in this audience and out there in the world

through the magic of records and radio.

♪ Go lightly from the ledge, babe ♪

♪ Go lightly on the ground ♪

In a way, it's almost like a sex scene, uh,

that, you know, the way these two sing together,

the way they connect, the way they look at each other,

it's like she's having to watch them be together

in a way that is almost just as hard as it would be watching them making out.

These sequences are also--

You know, you'll see visual effects credits at the end of the movie

and you may wonder, "Well, where are the visual effects?

There's no aliens or spaceships flying through."

But, of course, you know, this is a mid-priced movie,

and we couldn't possibly afford to do a concert for 100,000 people, so...

[stammers] ...paying them all and feeding them all lunch,

and keeping them, you know, planted in their seats all day while we shot.

So most of these sequences at Newport were shot

with, you know, no more than 200 extras each day and many days, less.

And the rest is the magic of an incredibly skilled visual effects team

who would extend our audiences both in the sequences you saw earlier in the film

in Carnegie Hall and Town Hall and many others,

but also here at Newport where, after the first six or seven rows of people,

the rest of the people are all completely generated

through the power of visual effects.

Like even in a shot like this, urn, just above the microphone,

our real people run out

and the rest are completely simulated.

[chuckles] Simulated audience,

beautifully done by our team.

[audience cheering]

You could play basketball with those polka dots.

Yeah, take that shirt off, man.

You look like a goddamn clown.

Anybody here see where Sylvie went?

[♪ rock music playing over radio]

Hey, Bobby.

Hey, you know where Sylvie is?

She split while you were playing with Joan.

[Mangold] I would be remiss if I didn't mention the two brilliant editors

who worked with me on this movie, Drew Buckland and Scott Morris,

who had a monumental task for several reasons with me.

One is, this is a kind of movie that is really found--

you know, it's very much the script that Jay and I wrote,

but still, because it's not plot-driven,

the rhythm and the drive of the movie

is something that is found in the cutting room.

And how it's gonna work, and how you make sure you're staying connected to Bob,

and at the same time, all the other characters,

and keeping all these, to use my own metaphor in the script,

to keep all these plates spinning is an incredible feat.

And we did all this in record time,

because, you know, as I'm sitting here talking, it's December of 2024,

and we just finished shooting this movie in mid-June.

So all of post on this movie,

the mixing, the scoring, the sound effects, everything, color grade,

and the editing, of course, the editing of what was, what could have been--

I mean, I could have made a four-hour movie--

all occurred in a very brief window of aggressive and highly creative work.

♪ All day and all of the night ♪

I took the inspiration for this scene from sequences in On the Waterfront.

There's a sequence with Brando and, I believe, Eva Marie Saint

kind of dealing with each other on and around a fence,

and I somehow imagined this scene would be really powerful

if they weren't just standing talking to each other

but there was a kind of barrier between them.

Come on.

What are you doing?

Where are you going?

I'm going home.

Why?

It was fun to be

on the carnival train with you, Bobby,

but I think I gotta step off.

I feel like one of those plates, you know,

that the French guy spins on those sticks

on The Sullivan Show.

Oh, I kinda like that guy.

Again, this is just beautiful work between Elle and Timmy

and their long-standing friendship.

And I've known Elle for many years as well,

because there was a time we were working

on another movie together that almost happened,

where we had spent a lot of time talking and working, and to me that's everything.

You know, to get performances-- I'm very proud of these.

To get these kind of performances, it's really up to the actors,

but the biggest thing that I contribute, I think, is a couple notes,

perhaps wise, about ideas or avenues that they're missing.

But more than anything, creating the space around them to do their work,

to just create the mental space around them to focus and do their work.

And that means I kind of have to be a sponge

and try and absorb all the scheduling pressures,

financial pressures, concerns from the studio,

whatever it is that might be in my ear any given day,

location pressures, weather pressures,

tomorrow's work, scheduling changes--

try and keep it all away from them

so that they can be, in a sense, pure with the material,

and not have their heads clouded.

This sequence and Edward's telling of the story of the seesaw and the two baskets

was a real writing challenge but also an acting challenge,

in the sense that it's a kind of moment for Pete where he's trying,

however gently and with good nature,

to convince Bob to just let them have one more concert,

one more year of the old Bob doing the same old thing,

instead of the new Bob doing the new thing.

And it was Edward

who suggested we perhaps investigate this parable that Pete loved to tell

about these baskets and the seesaw, and I wrote this into this scene,

and I'm really proud of Edward's work in this scene, and-- but also Timmy's.

I think it's really lovely to see these two characters

who we met so long ago in that hospital room together,

and to see how far their lives have changed

and their relationship has changed.

[Pete] It's a good story.

[Albert chuckles] Okay.

Bob needs his rest, all right?

We all need our rest.

It's all right. Let him tell his story, AI.

Come on, give it to me good, Pete.

All right. Imagine, we got a seesaw.

Seesaw? -[Pete] Yeah.

Okay. [chuckles]

One end of it, it's anchored firm to the ground

'cause it's got a basket full of rocks on it.

The other end, it's floating up here,

way up in the air and wishin' it could come down

but all it's got is a basket that's half full of sand

and the sand is leaking out all the time.

Okay, now...

Could you get me a cigarette, man?

[Pete] We see this situation.

[Mangold] This is as good a time as any to take a moment

and talk about my working relationship with Timmy,

which is a point of incredible pride for me on this movie.

I really love him. He's a great person.

He's also an incredibly gifted actor.

But beyond the gifts

and beyond the friendliness and trust in our relationship,

he also brought something else to this movie, which was an incredible focus.

He really, during the period we were shooting this movie earlier this year,

kind of shut out everything else

and focused everything he had on this job.

You know, we would talk a few times a week at night after we wrapped,

and kind of go over the next day's work.

And he spent all the rest of his time basically just trying to keep up

with whatever the next song he was gonna have to play in the movie was

and kind of be on target, and ready to do it proficiently on the day.

Monumental task for a guy who hadn't ever touched a guitar before 2019.

And the level of focus, and the level of concentration he had

on entering the skin of this character is something I've only seen a few times

with actors in my career.

And I'm honored to have made this movie with him

and consider him my partner making this film.

He's been with me from the very beginning and we've been connected through it all.

And, you know, it's one of those friendships,

like with many other wonderful people who worked on this movie

including Edward and Danny Fogler and all the others--

You go through something together making a movie that is hard to explain

because it's really hard work.

You're waking up at 5:00 am.

You're having to make these scenes work every day.

And whatever it is, it's what's gonna live forever in the movie.

Sometimes you're up all night.

The sequences coming up of the Newport concert at night

are all shot with us shooting from, you know, 6:00 p.m. to 6:00 a.m.,

and so we're all exhausted, we're stressed,

we're trying our best to do something great and hoping it is.

And that kind of focus and taking care of yourself

and making sure you get your sleep,

and making sure you're ready for the next day's work,

and making sure you understand it--

It's not just knowing your lines

but understanding your lines and what's behind them.

That kind of focus, I've never had a troupe of actors

who were so supportive of each other

and so focused and inspired by the task at hand.

All we're talkin' about is tonight.

He's scared of your music, Bob.

[Pete] Nobody's scared of anybody's music.

You are. You're scared that the kids

out on that lawn might like it.

And why would I be afraid of that?

Because you're pushing candles and he's selling light bulbs.

Albert, there's only one of us

who's focused on how much we're selling

and it ain't me.

-Hey, Bobby, Bobby... -[door opens]

I love this scene between Boyd and Timmy,

and again, it's kind of one of these scenes that I got asked about.

Do we need it? Right?

But I really fiercely defended it because I love the energy in the scene

from Bob's perspective, being an admirer of Johnny Cash,

seeing him kind of dishevelled and perhaps a little hungover,

and in its own way, a kind of reality check,

that even when you get a band and even when you have all this success,

no one is necessarily happy all the time.

But it also becomes a scene

in which Johnny Cash ends up kind of setting him straight

and giving his own perspective on this whole controversy

of whether Bob should perform electric or not.

okay-

- This yours ? - Yeah.

Hey, man, you got a cigarette?

Yeah.

Thanks.

Let me get outta your way.

[bottle shatters]

A guy I knew in the Air Force had a Triumph.

[car engine starts]

Whenever I show friends this scene,

they all worry about the fact

that we're denting these beautiful cars on either side

as Johnny slams his way back and forth.

Fear not, these cars were all repaired and given back to their proper owners.

And he didn't even do that much damage, to be honest.

- Want a Bugle ? -Nah.

You playing tonight?

Yeah, that's what the program says,

but I'm not sure they wanna hear

what I wanna play, Johnny.

Who's they?

I love Timmy's use of his hands in this movie, if you notice it.

He really applied a great deal of observation to the way Bob uses his hands,

which is extremely unique.

And not only that, but to the length of his fingernails,

which he grew to a very healthy length during the course of production.

Track some mud on the carpet.

[strumming guitar]

With this shot, we begin kind of the descent into the big night of Newport '65

and Bob playing electric for the crowd.

And very much like a showdown at the O.K. Corral,

this kind of becomes a little bit of a western

with Bob mounting up and heading to the O.K. Corral, bringing his axe.

[audience cheering]

[man] How crazy is it' gonna be tonight, Bob?

[Bob] Uh, pretty crazy. Come check it out.

[woman] It's sold out. We can't hear it.

I'll sing louder.

[crowd clamoring]

♪ Old hammer ♪ -♪ Let your hammer ring ♪

♪ Won't you ring old hammer? ♪

♪ Let your hammer ring ♪

So? How are we?

I think he understands.

♪ Let your hammer ring... ♪

♪ Let your hammer ring ♪

♪ Broke the handle on my hammer ♪

This shot, if any, is the best illustration

of what I mean by an obligatory scene.

Everyone's there-- his band, Grossman, Bobby Neuwirth, Lomax,

Leventhal, Joan, Johnny Cash, everybody.

♪ Let your hammer ring ♪

♪ Won't you ring old hammer ♪

Pete thinks we're gonna be okay. All right?

♪ Won't you ring old hammer? ♪

♪ Let your hammer ring ♪ -[sighs]

[woman 1] We want Bob!

[audience shouting] Bob! Bob! Bob!

[Mangold] So all these shots where you see crowds,

whenever you see the crowds raking off into the distance like this,

those are all digital crowds after the first seven rows.

[Alan] We have one more act now.

We love you, Bob!

All right, okay.

[woman 2] We want Bob!

Now, this is also where the movie enters a sequence

where I felt like we had to be a little more meticulous in our attention to detail

because this concert was actually shot. Right?

Not in the way we shot it, with--

They didn't have cameras on the stage

looking out like this over Bob to the audience,

but it was shot in a more perfunctory way.

But we could really see what went down.

These are the actual songs he played, and this is the reaction the crowd had,

which is a distinct mixture of some pleasure

and a lot of frustration and anger.

A lot of it because the Bob they were watching holding an electric guitar

just didn't look like the Bob or sound like the Bob they wanted.

You know, we've all had that person, that recording artist, in music where we go,

"Oh, you know, I miss their old albums. I like their old albums."

Well, that's how this crowd felt.

More than just the betrayal of the sound was also what he was leaving behind.

He just didn't want, as he said in the previous scene,

to sing "Blowin' in the Wind" for the rest of his life.

What the hell is this?

♪ I ain't gonna work on Maggie's farm no more ♪

[man 2] No.! This is all wrong.!

♪ Well, I wake up in the morning ♪

♪ Fold my hands and pray for rain ♪

♪ I got a head full of ideas ♪

♪ That are drivin' me insane ♪

-What are you doing? -[audience booing]

♪ It's a shame the way she makes me scrub the floor ♪

We shot this sequence very much-- There was really only one way to do it

given how many actors and how many extras and how much time we had,

which is kind of like a one-act play

in the sense that this whole concert sequence,

all the songs, all the actions, I rehearsed like it was a play

and then we ran it from every angle we needed.

The widest shots, we would run every actor

just doing all their stuff from beginning to end,

so we had like, 22-minute takes where Timmy would come out, sing these songs,

and all the action that would transpire would happen

in each shot from beginning to end.

♪ I ain't gonna work on Maggie's farm no more ♪

♪ Oh, no! ♪

-Turn it down! -What?

Turn the fucking music down!

-Hey, calm down. -No, no.

-You work for us! -Hey!

-Lomax! -[Alan grunts]

Just like we set it this afternoon, all right? Nobody touches the board.

[both grunting]

Now, hold it!

[indistinct shouting]

-What the hell's going on? -Just ignore it.

Sorry, Ode Ha- Sorry.

Get off the stage!

Keep playing-.

Again, you know, I'm not trying to pick sides here.

I think, you know, movies so often end up in a situation like this,

a kind of confrontation in the end

in which you're supposed to be rooting for one side against another side.

I really liked the idea that we would just bring you this mess,

this big emotional mess, this kind of--

It's like a family Thanksgiving run amok

with everyone getting in a big argument and storming away,

and let you pick who you agree with or disagree with.

'Cause I love all these characters.

I love Pete Seeger and Toshi Seeger and their love for folk music,

and I love the folk community

and their commitment to this kind of anachronistic sound

and how it could save the world.

But I also love rock and roll, and I appreciate the restlessness of artists,

that they can't just keep doing the same thing all their lives.

You know, Pete was a different kind of artist than Bob.

Pete's art was really the movement he was shepherding,

where Bob's art was his music, period.

And they had different agendas.

And that's so much of what I try and get out here,

is that instead of us having to pick a side

and feel like one side is wrong or one side is right,

that we just get to experience this very real emotional fracture

between a lot of wonderful people whose hearts are in the right places.

Pete!

All right, all right.

[Mangold] This moment where Bob gets called Judas

actually did not occur at Newport '65,

but occurred at a concert about a month earlier

where he played a little bit of rock and roll in London,

and someone in the audience called him Judas.

But Timmy and I felt like we should stick it in and kind of just represent it,

because it really was a way of looking at the way some of his fans felt about him,

that he had turned his back and was suddenly betraying them.

♪ Once upon a time you dressed so fine ♪

♪ Threw the bums a dime in your prime ♪

♪ Didn't you? ♪

♪ People call say "Beware doll You're bound to fall" ♪

♪ You thought they were all kiddin' you ♪

♪ You used to laugh about ♪

Again, this entire sequence was also performed live by Timmy.

This entire set is a live performance.

[woman 3] This is a folk fest/val!

♪ Now you don't seem so proud ♪

And you know, it's not just to be able to brag about it,

in doing press on the movie.

There's a real value to it that extends way beyond that,

which is just that there's so many discoveries the actor can make

when they can control the recording they're making.

Like, this close-up of Timmy is an example.

He's just living in Bob's skin here.

He doesn't have to worry about matching his vocals to some prerecorded track.

He can actually just be alive as Bob,

phrasing the lyrics,

phrasing the music exactly as would befit the moment for where he is

with the audience, with the crowd,

with what's going on backstage and what he's feeling.

[audience booing]

Let's get the fuck out of here.

Oh, shit.

God damn.

Bobby, you broke it down and blew my mind! Fuck!

[Albert] Are you okay? Did you get hit?

-Are you okay? -[Bob] Nah.

[Peter] Bobby was... All right.

Okay. Listen.

He was only scheduled for three songs and...

Maybe you wanna go back out there,

and let out a little steam?

[Bob] The hell you talking about?

Why would I wanna do that, Albert?

[Bobby] To end the show.

We just ended the show, man. It's done.

Let's go. Pack up.

[Mangold] I think the reason some people see this concert as being so pivotal

beyond the simple character stories

that are getting kind of fractured and exploding at this night-- on this night,

is that the world changed so much around this moment.

Meaning that this concert by Dylan at Newport

also becomes a kind of marker,

where it's not necessarily that this concert changed everything,

but just that the late '60s, the post-'65 '60s,

are very different than the pre-'65 '60s.

That in the years that follow '65,

the ascent of The Beatles, of The Stones, the landing on the moon,

the hangover after the series of assassinations

which will continue through the '60s--

you know, you're talking about losing Kennedy, Malcolm X, Robert Kennedy--

escalation of the Vietnam War,

the arrival of the nuclear threat as an ongoing reality for people to live under,

all of this kind of arrives-- the sexual revolution, the feminist revolution,

all of this arrives in the years right after '65 predominantly,

and the pre-'65 years are kind of more naive and simple.

And that Bob's turn into this edgier music

is also a reflection of the world becoming a lot edgier,

and a lot more complex.

As you can tell, I find all this stuff really interesting,

and I felt that the best way I could tell this story

was to be kind of observant in the directorial style

that Phedon Papamichael and I shot the movie.

I felt like we wanted to be stylish. The movie, I think, is stylish.

It's a really cool-looking film, and the lighting is beautiful,

and the camerawork by Scott Sakamoto is brilliant.

But on top of all that, we didn't want to be so stylized

or kind of aggressive with the camera and movements that we made

that we distracted from the power of what was going on in front of the lens.

I didn't wanna have a kind of competition--

"look at me" versus "look at them."

I really wanted you to fall into the eyes of these actors

as we watch Toshi seeing Bob drop off the kind of intense feelings

that these people were having,

that I wanted to make sure the camera recorded and Phedon and I got on film.

All right.

Here you go.

Thanks, Johnny.

Got what they wanted.

Bob.

-Bob! -[Bob] Gig's over, Toshi.

Go, go.

[I upbeat rock music playing]

So in many ways, as I was saying, this is a movie less about plot

and more about character.

And even more specifically about growing up

and becoming who you're supposed to become,

even if that doesn't make everyone in your life happy.

It won't, you know.

I mean, I think most of us have realized--

I'm now 60 years old, and you can't make everyone happy with every choice you make.

You can only make a choice that has the most integrity

and makes the most sense to you at the moment.

And so, these close friends and lovers

who celebrated and had these intense times together,

each, after this kind of-- this explosion

and the reverberations from it at Newport '65,

kind of move on to great success and huge careers,

and some of them, like Joan and Bob, will stay connected.

And Pete and Bob performed again and saw each other.

But of course, it was never the same. It never could be the same.

That's kind of the beauty of life

and something I've focused on in all the films that I've written and directed,

which is this aspect of how, you know, I think too often in movies

we put this kind of value on people being together at the end of the film.

Which certainly, you know, I did with Walk the Line.

And it is a value. Relationships are everything, but nothing lasts forever.

Everything has future challenges ahead of it,

and the real measure of the way, at least I see it, that we get on in life

is having an effect on each other.

Have we changed each other?

Have we, for a while, touched each other?

And "for a while" is good enough sometimes.

Not every relationship can be forever.

Not every relationship can withstand the changes of time

and family and politics and culture.

But the reality is that for a moment, for these five years,

these people all shared something extremely triumphant

and meaningful and moving together

and helped change the world.

And that couldn't last. Those things can never last.

And in many ways, that's why I saw this,

as I opened telling you, as a film about a series of arrivals and departures,

or a kind of two goodbyes, really.

Bob saying goodbye to the young man in Minnesota.

Robert Zimmerman saying goodbye to the young man in Minnesota

and becoming Bob Dylan, in a sense.

And then Bob Dylan having to say goodbye to this world

because it had no longer become one, if everyone was being honest,

that was working for everyone.

But I love this idea that the last place he goes

is to see Woody before he hits the road,

who was the other really pure relationship, like Sylvie, in the film,

who never really wanted anything from Bob

other than him to continue to pursue his talents.

About a month and a half before we started shooting,

in the dead of winter, Timmy made this week-long trip to Hibbing, Minnesota

to investigate and just breathe in the air of the place that Bob came from,

the real place Bob came from and grew up as a child.

And he toured his house and he went to his high school

and he just kind of tooled around and absorbed the vibe.

But there's one other thing Timmy discovered that was kind of miraculous,

which is he found a gentleman who had been collecting Bob Dylan paraphernalia

from the Hibbing area.

And among all these objects there was a record album, a 78 record,

and it was a recording of Woody's.

But on the plain brown wrapper of the record,

Bob Dylan, 17- or 18-year-old Bob Dylan,

had drawn a picture on the record sleeve

and it was a picture that showed him, Bob Dylan,

standing in the lower left holding a guitar case from behind,

and then it showed a kind of winding road

going up to the upper right corner of the album sleeve.

And in the upper right corner was a picture of New York City,

and underneath it was written, "Woody in NYC."

So even before he ever left, Bob was dreaming--

Young Bob Dylan, you know, 18-year-old Bob Dylan was imagining himself

trekking this long road to get to New York City

and find his hero, Woody, in New York.

And when Timmy found this it was such a touchstone for us,

because it kind of showed

that this young man had really been envisioning this journey

and this transformation for years

and was dying and itching to make it,

similar to the transition into rock and roll

that he started itching to make for several years

before he finally blew it out on the stage in Newport '65.

Anyway, we've come to an end.

If you've made it this far, I wish there was a special prize I could offer you

for riding through this commentary to the very, very end,

but even if you haven't and you've left long ago, fare thee well.

And if you're still with me, God bless you and thank you for listening.

Everyone who worked on this film and all the names you see coming before you

are people who take real pride in their work

and really put their heart and their souls into this film.

The paychecks weren't large but the passion was,

and we all gathered

to re-create a world we all really wanted to have a chance to play in.

And we did.

And so whatever happens with this movie--

this is before it even comes out--

I hope it does well.

But beyond all that, our greatest reward has already happened,

which is the process of making this world come alive

and getting to live in it for this time.

Thank you very much for listening.

[I music fades]

[♪ folk music playing, "Blowin' In The Wind"]

[♪ music stops]

[I folk music playing, "Mr. Tambourine Man"]

[♪ music stops]