Todd Haynes, the openly gay filmmaker who spearheaded the queer cinema movement with his revolutionary film Poison and last made Far From Heaven, has returned with a fascinating film centered on musical icon Bob Dylan, I'm Not There. Haynes' film is less a bio-pic and more a movie valentine to Dylan. Inspired by Dylan's music and life, the film, told in a non-linear style, weaves together biographical and artistic elements and features Christian Bale, Heath Ledger, Richard Gere, Ben Whishaw, Carl Marcus Franklin, and Cate Blanchett all playing different versions of Dylan – who is never referred to by that name. Haynes, wearing a cream-colored western-style shirt and black pants was relaxed and full of passion as he talked with Windy City Times about his latest project. Highlights:
WINDY CITY TIMES ( WCT ) : You came at Dylan's music in such a different way. I loved how you told the story through his influences and through the viewpoint of his fans and the people around him. I couldn't help wondering – this passion that you have for music – because it's been the basis of other of your films – do you play?
TODD HAYNES ( TH ) : Not really. I wish I did. I've fooled around with music a little bit but given all the people that I know who do it for real it's hard to even cop to.
WCT: What was it about Dylan that suddenly opened the door for you?
TH: It happened at the end of my 30s. I really hadn't listened to Dylan seriously or regularly for 20 years and it was definitely some kind of a signal or urge. I think it had mostly, initially, to do with a need to just help move myself from one place in my life to another. That was really geographic as well as everything else. I moved to the west coast after living in the east for 15 years after college but it was mostly my needing to shake up my life and get my life back in a place of inspiration and excitement and give it forward momentum. The focus on Dylan all of a sudden became this reminder, I think, of a time when the future was full of all hope and promise and potential when I was a kid. There's something about that voice – a sort of fearlessness in it and a kind of total commitment to the thing he's singing about at the time and that's the only way I could really explain it.
WCT: When you decided to make the film it must have been amazing to get the letter or the phone call saying you'd gotten the rights to his music.
TH: Yes, yes, it was.
WCT: Did you feel like you could be true to your voice or did you feel like you needed to follow some of the traditional bio-pic rules – at least at first?
TH: Not really. The idea to make a film was the idea to do it in this way. That's what I eventually took to Dylan's manager. All of this was just free play; there was no reality attached to it. I had no expectations of getting rights and I was not going to begin to do this project without them. So it was really just pure love and freedom and then it got validated and made official and then it was like, 'Oh my God!'
WCT: Did you feel a sense of responsibility to Dylan's life or music at any point? Was that a pressure at first?
TH: The responsibility I felt was to Dylan's weirdness.
WCT: ( laughs ) I love that you said that because that's so true.
TH: Yes, it's really true. That's what's amazing about Dylan. It's not that he wrote 'Blowin' in the Wind.' It's that he wrote everything else and that he's still Bob Dylan and that he would never compromise or change what he did for an audience or for a place on the Top 40 or whatever.
WCT: Has he responded?
TH: No, not that I know of. He has a DVD in his suitcase and I'm happy just knowing that. I think I could just go on thinking, 'That's cool – Dylan has a DVD of my movie all about him in his suitcase on his never ending tour and maybe he'll never get to it.' ( laughs ) No, I wanted him to watch it and tell me what he thinks but it's been about three weeks now since I've heard back but we'll see.
WCT: Let's talk about the cast for a minute. I can see Ben Whishaw who was so good in Perfume: The Story of a Murderer and Christian Bale and Heath Ledger but what clicked in your head to say, 'Cate Blanchett must play Bob Dylan?'
TH: I wanted an actress to play that part from the very first formation of the concept. I knew I wanted to have a woman play Dylan in the ཾ period and mostly because, again, it was trying to unlock the weirdness of that moment that he really was some hybrid gender, some creature that was not by any stretch of the imagination traditionally masculine or male looking, acting. He was much skinnier; he was in that amphetamine haze of the times, the hair was bigger, the gestures were completely dandified and extravagant and strange; just bizarre.
WCT: But strange and bizarre and aware of it. There had to be a bit of posing on his part. Also, any individual like that – anybody who was speaking out against the establishment spoke to a lot of subgroups must have been electrifying – speaking to my gay readership here.
TH: Absolutely. He was so enamored of Allen Ginsberg and queerness and that kind of gay New York of the mid 60s. That aspect of hipster queerness was cool for Dylan and he vocalized it at this one time of his life as well. He said things like, 'Oh yeah, I hustled when I first came to New York in 1961.' He was just flaunting a kind of 'cooler than thou' attitude that who knows the veracity of every word? But it was in the spirit, certainly.
WCT: That's also the one time in the movie when he gets excited – when he spots Allen Ginsberg.
TH: Completely. It's so romantic. He had a crush for sure.
WCT: Okay, going back in your career for a moment. Poison really sparked the queer film movement but with each subsequent movie you've seemed to move away from that identification. You've become Todd Haynes, filmmaker, not Todd Haynes, queer filmmaker. Is it demeaning now to think of movies in that genre? To be linked with that?
TH: No, not especially for the time when Poison was made. New queer cinema was a really apt and necessary category to describe all these movies that were coming out of a kind of fresh, political necessity in the AIDS era and coming out very closely aligned with activism around AIDS and questions of identity representation that came out around that time. I feel incredibly proud to have been part of that time and those films.
WCT: Is it relevant again now with our country having swung back into a conservative mode?
TH: Yes, absolutely.
WCT: Do we need those queer voices even more now?
TH: We do it's just that we're in a much more complicated place. Not all in a bad way. I mean, on the one hand, the big issues among gay people getting the most attention are gay marriage and gays in the military and these couldn't be more 'conventional' or conservative wishes. On the other hand, 'Ugly Betty' is like the hit show of the country and I just saw Hairspray on the plane here and I was thinking, 'These are huge hits and these are incredibly queer, gay products' which I think is just fascinating and they also both have their cool, ethnic awareness. One of those is because it's coming from John Waters, who is just a genius and an originator. But I just find the 'Ugly Betty' phenomenon really interesting.
Obviously there is a much more complex cross-pollination in mainstream society today of what we at once called an underground gay sensibility. There isn't the same sense of that kind of counter-culture that new queer cinema could be. I wish there was; I wish there were young radical gay filmmakers doing edgy films that didn't look like anything else but I haven't seen that happening in a long time. The issues now are more subtle. I guess what's at stake for me personally is what does it mean to not want to be assimilated and to not want to be accepted and not to be totally woven into mainstream culture. To me that's where I came to a lot of knowledge and creative energy. I work from a more dissonant idea of gay history and people like Genet and Pasolini and filmmakers like that.
WCT: So what is next?
TH: I don't know yet. I've been really flipped out about the results of the Bush-Cheney era. It's been overwhelming and incomprehensible and profound and so big that words seem weird; they seem evil and silly. How we get out of it; how we move forward and how we reckon with it are big questions that I'm thinking about. I'm happy to see all kinds of films coming out this year about the war, about stuff but I don't know what mine will be yet exactly but it's something I can't get out of my head.