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SPEAKER: This is a production of Cornell University.
MARY FESSENDEN: Welcome to Cornell Cinema. I'm Mary Fessenden, the director. And it's really thrilling to see this theater so full. It's great.
The first thing I would like to do is thank the people who have made tonight's event and the related Todd Haynes Retrospective and Bob Dylan Series possible. They are David and Pat Atkinson. The Atkinson's are the donors who make possible the Atkinson Forum and American Studies at Cornell, a program that seeks to bring to campus the best that America has to offer in the arts. And the American arts don't get much better than the visionary films of Todd Haynes, the insightful film writing of J. Hoberman, and the legendary music of Bob Dylan. So please join me in thanking the Atkinsons.
[APPLAUSE]
Yeah, stand up.
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I'd also like to thank Nick Salvatore and Glenn Altschuler from American Studies and the fabulous Cornell Cinema staff for all of their assistance with this event.
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Finally, our very special guest-- Todd Haynes, J. Hoberman, and Bob Dylan-- no, just kidding.
[LAUGHTER]
Bob couldn't make it. Before introducing Jim Hoberman, I'd like to explain how the evening will work. We'll be doing a screening of I'm Not There, as you know. And then after that, we'll be taking a short 5 to 10 minute break.
That will give you some time to stretch your legs, use the restrooms, while we prepare the stage for a conversation between Jim and Todd, which will actually be videotaped by CornellCast. And that will be available for viewing on the web I think sometime quite soon. And so any friends who weren't able to get in, you should tell them that they can actually go to the web and view the entire conversation on CornellCast.
So, now, onto Jim Hoberman. Jim celebrated his 30th anniversary working as a film critic for The Village Voice this past fall, having published his first review in the paper on October 24, 1977, a review of David Lynch's Eraserhead, which, by the way, had its 10th engagement at Cornell Cinema just last month. Before joining The Voice, he studied English literature at the State University of New York in Binghamton and filmmaking at Columbia University.
He made experimental films for a while, one of which was actually included in the New York Film Festival. He became a Voice staff writer in 1983 and the senior film critic in 1988. In addition to his film criticism, he has written nine books, including the definitive history of Yiddish language cinema and the Dream Life, Movies, Media, and the Mythology of the Sixties.
He has curated film series at the Museum of Modern Art and the American Museum of the Moving Image in New York and the Pacific Film Archives in Berkeley. And he's a current member of the New York Film Festival selection committee. He is affiliated with New York University and Cooper Union. And he lectures at universities around the country.
Over the years, he's been honored with several awards, including the Alternative Press Association's award for best film critic and a New York Book Critics award nomination and a Guggenheim fellowship. The Brooklyn of Brooklyn Academy of Music Cinematek is currently honoring Jim and his 30th anniversary with a film series that he curated. And they're write-up sums up Jim nicely.
"J. Hoberman is one of the greatest film critics to emerge from his generation. His writing is adventurous, erudite, and provocative, while simultaneously expressing a boundless pleasure in the art of cinema." We are thrilled to have him here. Please join me in welcoming J. Hoberman.
[APPLAUSE]
J. HOBERMAN: Thanks. Thank you. 30 years-- I was a teenager when I started emotionally in any case. As a journalist, I think the best thing for any journalist really is to get a scoop. And I had this privilege 20 years ago when I heard about a little Super 8 movie that was showing in some obscure venue in the East Village in New York.
And I went to see it. And it turned out to be this brilliant treatment of Karen Carpenter as enacted by a cast of Barbie dolls. Of course, it was Superstar, Todd Haynes' second film, but the first film of his to be shown. And it was tremendously exciting for me to be able to write about this film, which I knew nothing about and hadn't read anything about it and just to stumble across it and write about.
And maybe the third best thing that can happen to a journalist is to be interviewed by the national media in regard to some other thing that you wrote about that has somehow become a political football for the various right-wing groups. And I got that privilege, also, thanks to Todd Haynes when I wrote about his third movie Poison, which had been funded by the NEH, or the National Endowment for the Arts and Humanities. And because it dealt with some presumably taboo material dealing with illness and sex in America-- it had become and was funded, partially, by the government-- it became an issue. So I got to hold forth on that on NPR, whatever.
Since that time, Todd has made several other films. His film Safe, which came out several years later, was voted by a critic's poll organized by The Voice at the turn of the century as the single best movie of the 1990s. After that, he made Velvet Goldmine, probably the most cerebral rock movie ever made and another sort of cause celeb.
After that-- Far From Heaven, a film that many people thought was the best movie of its year, 2002 I think. A fascinating meditation on the 1950s is refracted through the films of Douglas Sirk. And last year, I think that Todd made his culminating film to date.
And you might have heard something about this film. It has something to do with Bob Dylan. In any case, I think that last year, it was a terrific year for movies.
There was a great David Cronenberg film. And there was There Will Be Blood. There was a movie called Southland Tales that a lot of people didn't like, but I thought was very good. But I think that I'm Not There was really my favorite of all of these. And I would like to present to you the filmmaker, Todd Haynes.
[APPLAUSE]
TODD HAYNES: Thank you. Thank you so much.
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you, guys. It's so nice to being back in Ithaca on this gorgeous, beautiful day we all had today. And it's such a privilege to be here and show my retrospective of films and to have Jim here to say all those things, so nice.
I'm not going to talk at length now, so we have time later to talk. But I want to thank Mary Fessenden for arranging all of this and inviting me back again to this beautiful campus--
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--and, of course, to David and Pat Atkinson for making all of this possible and for reciprocating artistic freedom, particularly tonight, by making art free, which is pretty cool--
[APPLAUSE]
--and all the amazing things that they do. This film was definitely a life-altering experience and privilege to be able to treat this extraordinary subject and his body of work to the screen, you know, and be given that freedom and that privilege to explore his life as a filmmaker. And so there's a lot to talk about and a lot of movie to watch.
So I hope you guys enjoy the film. I'll be here afterwards with Jim, and we can discuss it. And I hope you have a really good time. Thanks so much.
[APPLAUSE]
[INTERPOSING VOICES]
[APPLAUSE]
J. HOBERMAN: Are we miked OK? I guess so. Hello? I have to say, this is the third time that I've seen the movie. And I wasn't even sure I was going to stay--
TODD HAYNES: Yeah.
J. HOBERMAN: --for it. And I just started watching it. And I got completely absorbed-- very different than the other two screenings. And I noticed a number of things I hadn't seen before and was, once again, impressed by just the wealth of detail, how rich this movie is. I was struck this time by how precisely you got the feel of these early '70s westerns with this kind of magic hour lighting--
TODD HAYNES: Yeah.
J. HOBERMAN: --and so on, but, you know, the sense of muddy streets and everything. So you've been working on this movie a long time. And how does it feel?
[LAUGHTER]
Did you get to do what you wanted?
TODD HAYNES: I did. I really did, which is saying a lot, I guess. Because I really had a very high standard to apply myself to and to sort of, you know, rise to. And when I really think about it, it was a very difficult film to make practically, logistically, financially.
But, creatively, it really was an extraordinary experience when I think back on it. And I think back on the relationship that we developed with Jeff Rosen, Dylan's manager. Because people may have heard or not, but the whole thing started with the concept of the multiple characters and definitely a structure that would be interwoven.
And that's really all I had when I first approached Dylan in 2000 via Jeff Rosen and Jesse Dylan, Dylan's oldest son who's also a filmmaker. And they just suggested I write it out in a one sheet description, and we send it to Dylan. Although, both of them were intrigued by the idea, neither of them could vouch for him or presume what he would say.
He'd only rejected proposals for more conventional biopics in the past. And he was, as they continued to tell me, inscrutable in every possible way and that their opinion mattered little. And so he basically signed off on the concept. And that was the beginning and end of my relationship with Dylan himself.
And the entire process that followed, which was interrupted when I did my film Far From Heaven, then came back to it full on in '03, probably, to begin official research and writing and all that, was really through Jeff Rosen. And he's the gatekeeper. He's Dylan's manager of the past 30 years.
And he's an amazing guy. And he really gave me an incredible amount of freedom to interpret this life and this person and access to anything I needed in terms of music and some connections to some people and so forth. But I remember a situation where we needed to extend the rights to the project, because the writing was taking some time.
And I called up Jeff. And I had to talk to him. And I was just like, you know, Jeff, I feel like this awesome responsibility. I'm doing the Dylan movie. And I want it to really convey Dylan to the world in a way that I felt was really honest and truthful and is as fair as I could do. And that was hard.
And he said, oh, Todd. You don't have to worry about that shit. This is your own weird unique perspective on Dylan. And that's all you have to worry about.
[LAUGHTER]
And I just thought, when do you have that, those conditions? You know?
J. HOBERMAN: I had heard that there were two managers, one whose job it was to say no and one whose job it was to say yes. Is that--
TODD HAYNES: And they were both played by Jeff, but by different actors, right?
[LAUGHTER]
J. HOBERMAN: So you're saying that the concept started with the multiple actors. Why only six characters?
TODD HAYNES: Yeah, exactly. Actually, I always conceived of it as sort of the number seven, which recurs in Dylan's songs, which had a kind of, you know, look to the Shakespeare's seven cycles of man. It felt like a comfortable number.
And in my mind, it is seven characters-- Christian Bale occupying two of them playing two very different aspects of Dylan in his two characters, but bound in the same story in that one documentary. But, yeah, of course. One could go on and on. And I've been asked many times where and why did you stop, you know, or how did you determine to kind of-- and everybody, often, has their own way of defining where I stopped.
Why did you stop in '74? Why did you stop in-- you know, they have a specific way of reading the Richard Gere story or reading the Christian period as long as the end bracket of a very long and on-going creative life. And I guess I just sort of felt kind of that these were my distillations of Dylan and that they all sort of had their roots in the '60s or the '60s era.
And that made sense to me. I felt comfortable with that. With a subject as broad and dense and with so much of his own work to go through and try to understand or familiarize myself with, I felt like I needed limits. I needed some formal and creative and rational limits of how to contain it.
And for me, the '60s era made the most sense. And I found that most of these selves or identities had their roots in the '60s era and were recycled, perhaps, arguably later into the '80s and '90s in Dylan's work, but that you can find traces of where they came from in that period.
J. HOBERMAN: Where do you find the Marcus Carl Franklin? And did you know you were looking for him before he found him?
TODD HAYNES: That's a good way of putting it, because I think I underestimated--
J. HOBERMAN: He plays--
TODD HAYNES: He plays Woody.
J. HOBERMAN: [INAUDIBLE]
TODD HAYNES: He plays Woody. Yeah. I mean, in so many cases with this film, it wasn't until we actually did find Marcus or I had the experience of witnessing Cate's performance in front of me, that it's only after the fact that you kind of go, you know, what was I ever-- you know, the fact that we had found it brought up the shock of how I could ever have expected to, you know, that these were really difficult things to ask actors to pull off, particularly a young child actor.
But I think all directors blindly proceed. They just go forward or you die. You know, you turn to salt the second you look back at the risks you're taking.
And this film certainly pushed that to a certain limit. But, yeah, we just kept looking. And Laura Rosenthal found this kid in New York, the New York area, who'd been initially seen in the Charles Wolfe production of Lackawanna Blues that was an HBO production that he played opposite S--
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]
TODD HAYNES: What?
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]
TODD HAYNES: Yes, Merkerson. Yes. And he was amazing. But he was pretty much a witness to a series of amazing cameo performances in this film. And so you really didn't see what he was capable of. And he read for us and was incredible.
J. HOBERMAN: And then you saw Cate Blanchett as Katharine Hepburn, and you realized that she could play Bob Dylan.
[LAUGHTER]
TODD HAYNES: Exactly, that eureka moment. Actually, it really was more when I saw her-- I knew she could physically do it. But I think I was convinced when I saw her on stage in Hedda Gabbler in Brooklyn.
There was something about seeing her scale on stage. And she was dressed in a Victorian costume that was very tight bodice. And she'd lost some weight for it, I think, or was already, you know, sizing down for her return to Elizabeth and this film.
And the scale of her head to her body in one quick turn, like severe look across the stage, was so riveting. And I just sort of saw an image of Bob Dylan from the '66 period superimposed. Don't you guys all?
[LAUGHTER]
J. HOBERMAN: Well, it's interesting. Because now that you mention it, in that production it really is her dominating a scene--
TODD HAYNES: Yeah.
J. HOBERMAN: --the same way. I mean, everything sort of--
TODD HAYNES: Yeah.
J. HOBERMAN: --revolved around her in that.
TODD HAYNES: Yeah.
J. HOBERMAN: I mean, even to the degree that she's on for the last--
TODD HAYNES: Yeah.
J. HOBERMAN: --for the shooting, which usually--
TODD HAYNES: Right.
J. HOBERMAN: --happens off--
TODD HAYNES: Off screen.
J. HOBERMAN: --stage.
TODD HAYNES: Off stage, yeah.
J. HOBERMAN: Has this movie entered into Dylan mythology or Dylanology? I mean, have people, you know, spotted him, you know, like masked and anonymous going into screenings, or is there a theory that he's actually in the movie somewhere?
TODD HAYNES: I've heard all of those, all of that stuff, basically. And what's very funny is when I was doing the DVD commentary recently for the release of the DVD. And I wanted to just double check.
I couldn't remember after so many years where some things came from, some line, some quotes in the film. And I remember googling them, you know? And usually--
[LAUGHTER]
So I could get the source really quickly. And I could just have it on the paper while I was reading my notes for all the Dylanologists out there. And, you know, I would be look-- like, "seven simple rules for a life in hiding, I couldn't find where the original-- it took me a little while to find it.
It's from the 11 epitaphs that he included when he was writing notes for Joan Baez and in '64, I believe. But I was first looking for it. And I kept getting I'm Not There, Cate Blanchett, Carl Marcus Franklin.
[LAUGHTER]
And you're just like in this hall of mirrors. You know, you can't escape.
[LAUGHTER]
J. HOBERMAN: You know I was struck, also, by your connoisseurship in your choice of what Dylan songs you used and, also, which performances of his you used. Because there are a lot of things which are for many people, if you're not really hard core, would have been pretty obscure. I'm not even sure that the title song was available in any form.
TODD HAYNES: No, it wasn't. It's been long bootlegged, the song "I'm not there," which came from Dylan's bootleg-- basement tape recording, sorry-- from 1967 that he did with The Band famously in a couple different basements in Woodstock. But, I mean, for people who wanted to get that stuff, they could get it, you know?
I got it from friends. And you get the full five CDs worth of recordings that happened in those sessions. And it's a completely different experience from the officially released--
J. HOBERMAN: This was a bootleg of the bootleg in a way.
TODD HAYNES: Yeah.
J. HOBERMAN: Yeah.
TODD HAYNES: Exactly. But in a way, what's so interesting about Dylan is that those recordings and the Royal Albert Hall that was called the Royal Albert Hall recording, but was at the '66 live concert that was actually recorded in Manchester and misnamed, was the beginning of bootleg recordings. They started the bootleg tradition. As soon as Bob Dylan had this many recordings that were not going to be released to the public, it surged, this intense desire for people to get their hands on them.
And so the whole history of bootlegging began around those discs with I think The Great White Wonder.
J. HOBERMAN: The Great White Wonder, yeah. [INAUDIBLE]
TODD HAYNES: --was a collection of both--
J. HOBERMAN: Yeah.
TODD HAYNES: --selects from basement tapes and that show.
J. HOBERMAN: It's very nice. You could buy them, you know, in head shops.
TODD HAYNES: Yeah.
J. HOBERMAN: [INAUDIBLE]
TODD HAYNES: It was all in one.
J. HOBERMAN: Yeah.
TODD HAYNES: One stop shopping.
J. HOBERMAN: Yeah, that's right, with the sort of translucent red vinyl.
TODD HAYNES: Right.
J. HOBERMAN: You know?
TODD HAYNES: I remember going to record-- it was a little later, I guess, in the '80s. But I'd go to record swap meets in Hollywood. And you'd find amazing stuff.
J. HOBERMAN: Todd, were there any Dylan songs that you felt that you couldn't use personally, because there was too much emotion in the song?
TODD HAYNES: There were some that I loved that I couldn't find a place for. There were many personal favorites--
J. HOBERMAN: Yeah.
TODD HAYNES: You know, "Love Minus Zero/No Limit," songs like that that always moved me that I just didn't really find a place for. But I really felt I couldn't really use "Like a Rolling Stone" in the body of the film. I wanted to save it for the end of the film. But I really didn't feel like dramatizing that particular song or making it part of a narrative sort of work of the film.
J. HOBERMAN: Was I'm Not There always the title?
TODD HAYNES: It was pretty much always the title. I flirted with Seven Curses, which is another bootleg recording that came out later on the Columbia bootleg first three disc bootleg series. It's a beautiful song.
And it was this idea of seven characters that I was working with. And then was there another working title I had? I can't remember. Seven curses-- Alias, before that show came out.
[LAUGHTER]
That's how long I've been working on this thing. Because it was the name Dylan assumed in the Pat Garrett Billy the Kid, a Peckinpaw film that he appears in as Alias. But everyone loved I'm Not There.
Christine loved it so much. And I kept kind of going back to it. But it was the very-- it was the way I titled the proposal that I sent Dylan. I'm Not There colon Suppositions on the Film Concerning Dylan.
And when we began our relationship with Paramount, which developed the script and then passed on it when I was done--
[LAUGHTER]
--that title got out. And it's funny how you can't ever retrieve a misnomer like once it's out in the world. And so for years, literally, everyone referred to this film as I'm Not There, Suppositions on the Film Concerning Dylan, which I chose as the most sophomoric, like purposefully obscure thing to send to him to make him sure that it wouldn't be some commercial sellout movie, you know, which I guess I succeeded in--
[LAUGHTER]
--not making.
J. HOBERMAN: And so far as you know, he's never seen it or commented on it.
TODD HAYNES: Officially, no. I've heard mounting rumors. And--
J. HOBERMAN: Oh, what have you heard?
TODD HAYNES: I can't even say, but it's good. It's good.
J. HOBERMAN: It's good. It's all good.
TODD HAYNES: It seems good.
J. HOBERMAN: OK.
TODD HAYNES: Yeah.
J. HOBERMAN: It should be. I mean, I would say that this is really the movie that he wanted to make in some respects and could not make. I mean, I should ask you as a filmmaker. What's your opinion of Eat the Document and Renaldo and Clara?
TODD HAYNES: I love Eat the Document. I think that's a film that Dylan is sort of titled as one of the directors of and editors of that never was released. And it was the footage that you saw. A lot of the footage was remastered for Scorsese's documentary No Direction Home that shows Dylan in '66 in that great color footage of him performing with the band that year.
And it was the year after all the beautiful black and white footage that became Don't Look Back. But this was a film that it was actually after his motorcycle accident. He settled in Woodstock. And he started editing this movie.
And I think he had various influences and people helping him out here and there. But what resulted was this highly experimental strange elliptical documentary that basically was a sort of anti-rock doc. Because as soon as he would start a number, there would be cutaways to weird people on the street of Scotland and crazy people holding signs many of which appear in my film.
"It is appointed unto man wants to die" is something that's in the documentary that we put in the Billy story. And then it'll just cut off one of the songs. Just when you're, like, really ready to hear your rock idol, you know, perform it, he just cuts it off. I love Eat the Document. Renaldo and Clara, what do you think of Renaldo and Clara?
[LAUGHTER]
J. HOBERMAN: Well, in a word, you know, I thought it was kind of a disaster.
TODD HAYNES: Yeah.
J. HOBERMAN: I haven't seen it since 1978, but I'm not really anxious to revisit it.
TODD HAYNES: See, you didn't have to go back to it, but I did.
J. HOBERMAN: You did. OK. But it's interesting that, you know, Eat the Document seems that it's quite crucial to the No Direction Home, the Scorsese--
TODD HAYNES: Yeah.
J. HOBERMAN: --film. But it gets naturalized there. Because it's used there, if I'm remembering correctly, really as concert footage.
TODD HAYNES: Yeah.
J. HOBERMAN: --and not in this--
TODD HAYNES: No, exactly.
J. HOBERMAN: --sort of subjective montage that--
TODD HAYNES: Yeah.
J. HOBERMAN: --Dylan was working on.
TODD HAYNES: I think my film's much more truer to its spirit than No Direction Home. But that wasn't its project, obviously.
[LAUGHTER]
No, I love that movie. I watched it over and over again. Every time I'd see it, there'd be some whole thing that I'd forgotten was in it. It's packed to the gills. It's actually pretty much made by Jeff Rosen. I mean, Scorsese--
J. HOBERMAN: Yeah.
TODD HAYNES: --came in and finished the film, but Jeff had been working on it for 10 years.
J. HOBERMAN: Yeah. I was going to ask you. At what point did you become aware that there was this other movie in the works?
TODD HAYNES: Yeah, right away. Jeff showed me his cut, his long cut of what would be No Direction Home when we first met up. And it was astounding to see some stuff that had never been released before that now we all have access to.
But, no, it wasn't a surprise. And it never felt like a competing project by any means. There's just such an interest. There's been such a resurgent interest in Dylan's work that's only been fueled by the quality of his recordings that he put out and the publication of chronicles.
J. HOBERMAN: By he, you mean Dylan or Jeff Rosen?
TODD HAYNES: No, no, no, by Dylan.
J. HOBERMAN: Yeah.
TODD HAYNES: I mean, there's been such, you know, valid and understandable interest in Dylan that Scorsese's documentary could satisfy and leave plenty of room for my film to interest people later. So I never felt like-- you know.
J. HOBERMAN: And, also, I would put a plug in for the Murray Learner film, The Other Side Of The Mirror, which I think is showing--
TODD HAYNES: Absolutely.
J. HOBERMAN: --here later, which is footage of Dylan at three successive Newport folk festivals. And it is a concert. I mean, it's the most extensive concert documentary of his. But it also is a drama. It's a three act drama.
TODD HAYNES: Completely.
J. HOBERMAN: It's quite something.
TODD HAYNES: And it proves the conceit of my film--
J. HOBERMAN: Of course.
TODD HAYNES: --better than any--
J. HOBERMAN: Yeah.
TODD HAYNES: Really.
J. HOBERMAN: Yeah.
TODD HAYNES: Because it's just watching him change in front of you--
J. HOBERMAN: Yeah.
TODD HAYNES: --in unedited documentary footage and watching the relationship that he had with his following change, too. Because the reactions, the audience, the sense of the audience, and the relationship that he had with them is palpable in all three sections.
J. HOBERMAN: Yeah. You know, it seems to me that in many respects Dylan is what you would call a hero of adolescence in the same way that Rambo is. I mean, there's something particularly in his mid-'60s albums that really speaks very strongly.
And I can't be objective about it for historical reasons, since I actually was an adolescent at that period. So it had a tremendous effect on me more than anything else that he ever did. But I'm curious. Because it seems to me that, if I'm guessing correctly, you were probably in high school in the late '70s or early '80s, which is kind of the heyday or just past the heyday of punk rock, which--
TODD HAYNES: Yeah.
J. HOBERMAN: --was quite a compelling thing--
TODD HAYNES: Sure.
J. HOBERMAN: --in his own right and that Dylan was, I think, in his gospel--
TODD HAYNES: Yeah.
J. HOBERMAN: --phase then, which from my perspective would have been kind of the nadir of his career. So how did you get involved in Dylan and when?
TODD HAYNES: In Dylan. I was a little older. It was high school. Yeah. It was '79 when I graduated from high school in Los Angeles. And it was really my high school year starting probably in ninth grade that I fell in love with Dylan's music. And it was the '60s period. It wasn't--
J. HOBERMAN: It wasn't the gospel.
TODD HAYNES: No. Obviously, not initially.
J. HOBERMAN: Yeah.
TODD HAYNES: You know, it was initially Blonde On Blonde and Bringing It All Back home and Blood On The Tracks. But I remember the releases. I vaguely remember the release of Desire.
And then I fully remember Street Legal and then Slow Train Coming, the first Christian record, the first collection of gospel recordings. And that was the time I saw him. That was the first time I saw him was on that tour. So it was a strange window to encounter him in first. But that's a fantastic record and really beautiful solid recordings.
And that's an example of all the songs on Soul Train Coming I probably prefer to song "Pressing On" that we chose to use as the penultimate song for Christian Bale's character. But it was, again, a choice of what was best serving the narrative, what really was needed for the film at that point in its progress. And I also found it was exciting to find discoveries and to reinterpret them with new bands that would give them an extra sense of life and kind of keep reinventing and keeping this amazing body of work alive.
J. HOBERMAN: Well, you also did something that I'm not-- I mean, I had never thought of this. I don't know whether it was logical for people to make a connection--
TODD HAYNES: Oh, yeah.
J. HOBERMAN: --between the Christian Dylan of the early '80s and the finger pointing--
TODD HAYNES: Right.
J. HOBERMAN: --Dylan of the early '60s. But--
TODD HAYNES: Yeah.
J. HOBERMAN: --by casting the Christian Bale in both roles--
TODD HAYNES: Yeah.
J. HOBERMAN: --this movie creates a theory around that aspect which is very persuasive.
TODD HAYNES: I think we all struggle with understanding-- many of us who identify much more easily with his political associations in the protest years than we do with the political implications of fundamentalist Christianity that he fell into-- it wasn't just some hippie Christianity. It was Pentecostal, you know, Evangelical Christianity. And it was fire and brimstone time.
And he was conducting mini sermons before these concert performances in the late '70s and early '80s. And that's when many of his fan base, which was most identified with leftist politics, of course, were horrified and bewildered. And I really found that that was the thing that needed explanation more than the first half. And I felt that I was just so interested in how these were two periods of Dylan's life that shared more similarities than I think we were able to see initially and that they were both driven by moral persuasion and a sense of having the answer and a curious and uncustomary lack of humor--
[LAUGHTER]
--in both cases, something that's been evident in Dylan's work from the beginning of his very first record till today. And in these two times, a lot of that went away. And there was a sense of strident righteousness in both cases and, also rare for him, a sense of him having the definitive answer.
And they were completely opposite answers. But they were equally strident and solid, you know? And they provoked incredibly passionate work, music and performances. And it helped me just personally to understand the Christian period better by making that link, I guess.
J. HOBERMAN: Although, I'm not sure that he didn't have a sense of humor in the earlier period. But I mean--
TODD HAYNES: Well, you're right. In the talking blues--
J. HOBERMAN: --in his talking blues.
TODD HAYNES: --stuff, yeah.
J. HOBERMAN: Yeah. And you have that couple. Is that supposed to be Harold-- you know, the--
TODD HAYNES: Oh, yeah.
J. HOBERMAN: --producers--
TODD HAYNES: Yeah.
J. HOBERMAN: --saying that what's so great about him. He can give you the pathos thing.
TODD HAYNES: Right.
J. HOBERMAN: He can do the Chaplin thing.
TODD HAYNES: Right. Yeah. Exactly. No, you're right. The talking blues, obviously, have a sense of humor. But I almost associate that more with his Woody Guthrie dust bowl kind of persona.
J. HOBERMAN: Yeah.
TODD HAYNES: And when he got topical-- I mean, you know, they're exquisite recordings. But I think it was the climate, the sense of being indoctrinated--
J. HOBERMAN: Yeah.
TODD HAYNES: --to a following that was very strong and very decisive in both cases and definitely serious.
J. HOBERMAN: Yeah. And, also, possibly submerging himself in something that seemed larger--
TODD HAYNES: Yeah.
J. HOBERMAN: --than he was, which for somebody who comes across and not least in this movie as such an isolated--
TODD HAYNES: Yeah.
J. HOBERMAN: --individual, that that's--
TODD HAYNES: Or events.
J. HOBERMAN: Yeah.
TODD HAYNES: Yeah. And things that he couldn't persistent in, like maybe everything else.
J. HOBERMAN: Yeah.
TODD HAYNES: But with particularly strong ramifications of his both entering these worlds and then deserting them, yeah.
J. HOBERMAN: You know, people who are cineastes think of this not only as a film about Bob Dylan and the character Bob Dylan, but also a celebration of the movies from that period and, most specifically, Jean-Luc Godard, who is referenced throughout. But I think that this, again, was an example of doing something that Dylan wanted for himself and couldn't do-- I mean, you know, to appear in a new wave movie somehow.
TODD HAYNES: Be the star of his own new wave movie.
J. HOBERMAN: Yeah, yeah. I mean, not to bring back Renaldo and Clara again, but, you know, there's an interesting interview with Sam Shepard, who had been sort of--
TODD HAYNES: Right.
J. HOBERMAN: --imported into this project, you know, to write, you know, like a screenplay about what, you know? And, you know, Dylan told him he should look at Children Of Paradise, because it was the only movie that stopped time and shoot the piano player. And then Sam Shepard's saying, oh, you want something like that? And Dylan said, you know, didn't really say anything, you know? But--
TODD HAYNES: He was also really into Fassbinder during that time.
J. HOBERMAN: I remember--
TODD HAYNES: [INAUDIBLE] those quotes, right?
J. HOBERMAN: Well, that's what Scorsese said. That's what--
TODD HAYNES: Yeah.
J. HOBERMAN: --specifically, Beware of a Holy Whore, a movie about--
TODD HAYNES: About--
J. HOBERMAN: --making--
TODD HAYNES: --making
J. HOBERMAN: --a movie, yeah.
TODD HAYNES: --movies that totally self-reflect [INAUDIBLE] film.
J. HOBERMAN: Yeah, yeah. But how much were you thinking about the movies that Dylan might have seen or probably liked or produced at that time?
TODD HAYNES: I sort of took it as an assumption-- and maybe you did the same, Jim, in your book The Dream Life-- that there was something-- and I don't know if you would say. I'm curious what you'd say to this. If there was something-- well, maybe I do know what you might say.
But there was something unique about the '60s in that its cinema and its politics, its events, had a kind of, you know, mirroring aspect, that there was something cinematic about the political events that were happening and something extremely personal and interactive about the cinema and the popular culture that was being made. And I mean, I think for me I guess I would just see it as that there was-- I love the book The Conquest Of Cool by Thomas Frank.
J. HOBERMAN: Yeah.
TODD HAYNES: Because it's a book about, basically, the '60s, but seen through an analysis of the advertising culture of the '60s. But it deflates this idea that radicality came from the margins, that a sense of experimentation came from a counterculture, and then mainstream America absorbed it and copied it. This, basically, starts with the premise that a kind of repudiation of the '50s was happening at every level of society as early as 1960 and talks about those amazing Volkswagen ads that appeared first in Life magazine in 1960, where an entirely different assumption about the intelligence of the consumer was entering the advertising world.
And all of a sudden, they were like, don't talk down to the everyday reader. But realize that they're three steps ahead of you. And you can be witty and ironic with them.
And you can be minimalist and have these empty white pages with a tiny Volkswagen in the middle of the page and a catchphrase that says, ugly, isn't it? For the first time, this whole idea of treating the consumer as someone smart and with it entered mainstream America. Now, I was just so interested in this.
And my visual notebooks for this film, I have all these pictures of the Volkswagen ads next to images of Bob Dylan shot against white seamlesses five years later with his crazy hair as the silhouette against the white seamless. Ugly, isn't it?
[LAUGHTER]
There was something that still looked incredibly modern. And it still does today and with a sense of-- I mean, something happened in the '60s that still looks more modern than anything that's happened since. And we copy it. We copy that simple, minimalist graphic and that sense of-- anyway, I'm completely going off--
J. HOBERMAN: No.
TODD HAYNES: --off course.
J. HOBERMAN: I'm trying to see if I agree with you. I think that, actually, the thing that changed people's perception, both, you know, let's say, that at the margins and also in the center by which we'd mean these advertising agencies, was pop art is what caused that, introduced that ironic appreciation of, you know, the vernacular landscape and the fact, oh, we're all being manipulated. So let's make the manipulation--
TODD HAYNES: Right.
J. HOBERMAN: --you know, out front and fun. I mean, even introducing the idea of fun--
TODD HAYNES: Yeah.
J. HOBERMAN: --in this.
TODD HAYNES: But even saying that suggests that everybody was interested in art, you know? In other words, the collapse of high and low was something that was affecting the fine art world and the business world and the counterculture world.
J. HOBERMAN: Yeah. Because that was the thing with pop art. I mean, how could you not get it? I mean, you could hate Andy Warhol's silk screens, you know.
TODD HAYNES: Right.
J. HOBERMAN: --or his Brillo boxes. But it's not like you wouldn't-- you couldn't look at it and say, you know, like a Rothko, and go, what's this? I mean, you knew what it was.
TODD HAYNES: Yeah.
J. HOBERMAN: Yeah.
TODD HAYNES: But I just think there was this sense of the new--
J. HOBERMAN: Yeah.
TODD HAYNES: --that definitely coincided with the Kennedy Administration--
J. HOBERMAN: Oh, yeah.
TODD HAYNES: --with a whole young generation of people who decided for the first time to not be intimidated by the idea of a Cold War that should stop you from speaking out and stop you from having a sense of humor and stop you from living your life, basically, and being young and being, you know, curious and assuming that other people felt the same way, not assuming the contrary, you know? For the first time, not assuming there was this stupid mainstream, but assuming that the mainstream might be smart and cool, like you.
J. HOBERMAN: Well, that was Allen Ginsberg's point. I mean, that's--
TODD HAYNES: Yeah.
J. HOBERMAN: I'm assuming that's an invented exchange. Or was somebody there taking notes when they spoke?
TODD HAYNES: At the-- oh, in the car?
J. HOBERMAN: Well, when he talks to him about bringing art from the jukebox.
TODD HAYNES: Oh, from the jukebox? It's a quote from Ginsberg.
J. HOBERMAN: Really?
TODD HAYNES: Yeah. People were literally asking Ginsberg about had Dylan sold out and what did it mean before-- well, no, they they'd probably met by then. I forget exactly when they met.
J. HOBERMAN: Well, he's on Bringing it--
TODD HAYNES: He's on Bringing It Back Home in '65.
J. HOBERMAN: Yeah.
TODD HAYNES: It might have been before. It was around that time, you know?
J. HOBERMAN: Yeah.
TODD HAYNES: And they did visit a big-- I think when they went to Kerouac's grave in Jersey-- is it?
J. HOBERMAN: It's in Massachusetts.
TODD HAYNES: Massachusetts maybe?
J. HOBERMAN: Eh?
[LAUGHTER]
Someone? Lowell, Massachusetts, yeah.
TODD HAYNES: Lowell, Massachusetts.
J. HOBERMAN: Yeah.
TODD HAYNES: But is there a huge-- I think they visited some huge crucifix and had a dialogue with Jesus together--
J. HOBERMAN: Yeah. Yeah.
TODD HAYNES: --at that point as well.
J. HOBERMAN: Yes.
TODD HAYNES: There's nothing original in the film.
[LAUGHTER]
J. HOBERMAN: Well, but this actually brings something-- I remember we had a conversation when Far From Heaven came out, you're most normal film I guess.
[LAUGHTER]
And you said to me that it was a movie that I could take my grandmother to. It would've been difficult.
[LAUGHTER]
You know, but I got your point. But watching this and even watching it with an audience, which I can tell you was really with the movie throughout, I wonder-- you know, it's so rich in detail and reference-- how it plays outside the [INAUDIBLE]? I mean, this is, in a way, a test case for what you were describing in terms of this new attitude in the '60s that something could be popular and difficult--
TODD HAYNES: Yeah.
J. HOBERMAN: --at the same time.
TODD HAYNES: I know. I mean, that's what's so inspiring about that period. And I guess I just felt like what was amazing about Dylan and so many people at this time is that they could decide to completely burden a popular form, or disposable form, like the popular song, with whatever you wanted-- poetry, politics, ambiguity, vagueness, you know, humor, absurdity, epic, epic ambitions, and then minimalist, you know, nods to the old weird America.
And that people would follow you wherever you went with it, that the mainstream would just go where you went no matter how crazy and unprecedented. And that's what happened with him. That just doesn't happen very often.
And I just had to keep honoring that, those experiments. It was my little kind of whipping to myself. Just like, you know, don't dumb it down. Don't just make it like, you know, so everybody can just eat it up and make it stupid.
Like, just, you know, respect the genuine weirdness of Dylan. And if people don't dig it, it's OK. I can't make the 2008 into 1966.
That isn't my job. My job is to honor this artist and his uniqueness and his range of experimentation that just so happened, coincided, with an audience and a populous hungry to have their minds blown or at least changed or at least, you know, diverted. So, yeah. I just--
J. HOBERMAN: I mean, this is something-- you don't have to answer this if you don't want. Because I assume this is different for everyone who creates or writes. But did you have a specific ideal spectator in mind? I mean, even if it was you, was it Dylan? I mean, was there some internal viewer?
TODD HAYNES: It's a good question. I don't really think of a type of person. I just think of the person watching it. Like, I don't really brand them or put them into a group.
I just think of like-- and I guess that's me. I guess that's me watching it. But I also don't presume everyone will know what I know. I mean, the thing that I knew is I was going to jam it, as you say, with all these references and all this stuff that no one could possibly get, you know? But every movie is full of stuff.
And sometimes it's stuff you really want to learn more about. And sometimes it's stuff you really could care less about and you feel like you've seen a million times before. I always remember, you know, it's like when you're a kid and you're really moved by something or you're really affected by something.
You can never totally grasp it. It's always stuff that's a little bit beyond you that has more, you know, traveling in there that keeps you going, keeps you interested. And I've never understood all the words in a Bob Dylan song in some of my favorite of his songs, his most lugubrious.
J. HOBERMAN: Literally or figuratively?
TODD HAYNES: Well, like, you know, depends on the record I guess.
J. HOBERMAN: Yeah.
TODD HAYNES: But, really, almost any of them.
J. HOBERMAN: Yeah.
TODD HAYNES: I mean, I can't think of any that just-- it's just not what it's about. It's not about mastering them.
J. HOBERMAN: Yeah. But, of course, this, you know, flies in the face of certain, let's say, the conventional wisdom of the media world as we're experiencing now, which is that people don't want to be necessarily in the presence of something that they don't completely understand, or they have to work to understand or they know that they're not going to ever necessarily understand. They want things, supposedly, that are easily digestible and don't--
TODD HAYNES: Right.
J. HOBERMAN: --complicate. You know, they're thinking about, you know, where their paycheck is coming or whatever.
TODD HAYNES: Sure. Well, I felt like Dylan's experimentations were always harnessed by specific very basic traditions of music--
J. HOBERMAN: Yeah.
TODD HAYNES: --blues traditions and country traditions and all of that that he just added his stuff on to and mixed up. He didn't change musical form. He used traditions.
And then similarly, every story as a story you've sort of seen before. They're generic. And to me, as I got further into Dylan, I realized that all of these sort of people and places he occupied were these sort of American tropes that are ingrained in our culture.
And so they have a familiarity that's basic and that's constantly recycled and revised, whether it's, you know, the story of the famous person struggling with their personal life against their fame or the rebel teenage, you know, person who's questioning society, or a person who finds faith, or a person who is looking for betterment of other people and struggling politically to find solutions, the ambitious child who wants to break into the world and find his footing. These aren't strange or obscure stories in and of themselves, you know? And each of the tropes come with their own history and traditions.
And they're very American, especially in their combination and in their weird and fascinating contradictions to each other, the way they kind of unwrite each other, you know? But the thing about Dylan which is so funny, and I think it's very American, is that each of the places that he occupies-- and this is different from the way, for instance, the Bowie-esque character in my film Velvet Goldmine changes costumes and identities--
J. HOBERMAN: I was going to ask you about that real quick.
TODD HAYNES: --with kind of, you know, English self-consciousness and sense of wit and irony about it. Instead, the American version of this multiple identity is sort of intensely innocent every time, like with a sense of almost amnesia about wherever he was before, this kind of persistent thing that they just discovered it fresh today. And it's incredibly frustrating.
It's valid for all those people to be angry at Dylan when he chucked folk music and said, I didn't care about that stuff at all. Because he just produced all of these records and all these songs and put all this work into it. And then he's saying, ah, I never even cared about that stuff, you know?
Of course you want to, like, rattle him, you know? But I think that there's something very American about that.
J. HOBERMAN: Well, I mean, that's very interesting what you said about David Bowie and, also, the David Bowie character, more or less in--
TODD HAYNES: Right.
J. HOBERMAN: --Velvet Goldmine. It reminds me of the sort of standard difference between American acting and British acting, between Brando and Lawrence Olivier.
TODD HAYNES: Oh, yeah. Right.
J. HOBERMAN: You know, like British actors, you know, they vanish into the role.
TODD HAYNES: Right.
J. HOBERMAN: They accept the role. They play the role. They vanish into the role. But, you know, Brando has to find the role in himself.
TODD HAYNES: Right, yeah. Yeah, living inside. And it's even a weird deviation from Stanislavski.
J. HOBERMAN: Yeah
TODD HAYNES: It's like even more, you know, self-absorbed and kind of, you know, like completely-- you know?
J. HOBERMAN: Well, you know, it's actually a creative misunderstanding of Stanislavski. It's an interesting story how that happened.
TODD HAYNES: That-- oh, oh, yeah. That it was--
J. HOBERMAN: Well, the Group Theater sent their emissaries to the Soviet Union to-- or maybe Stanislavski was in Switzerland there to speak with him. And their--
TODD HAYNES: When?
J. HOBERMAN: In the '30s.
TODD HAYNES: In the '30s.
J. HOBERMAN: This is the Stella Adler.
TODD HAYNES: Oh, yeah.
J. HOBERMAN: Because she probably understood some Russian, but she's not understand enough.
TODD HAYNES: Right.
J. HOBERMAN: You know? So they just came back with their own, you know, take on it.
TODD HAYNES: Wow.
J. HOBERMAN: Yeah.
[LAUGHTER]
But that's how things happen in this world, some creative misunderstanding.
TODD HAYNES: Yeah, exactly. Misinterpretation.
J. HOBERMAN: OK. So I had had-- oh, you answered that one so well, I don't have to-- that was a question that had been emailed to me after--
TODD HAYNES: Oh, really?
J. HOBERMAN: --we did a press conference in--
TODD HAYNES: About like Velvet Goldmine--
J. HOBERMAN: Yes.
TODD HAYNES: --versus this?
J. HOBERMAN: Do you want to hear?
TODD HAYNES: Yeah.
J. HOBERMAN: OK. "The way the Dylan folkies in the film react to his betrayal of the Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger acoustic tradition reminded me of how-- you, or he, meaning you, Todd-- in Velvet Goldmine characterized David Bowie's betrayal of glam and the spirit of Oscar Wilde. He's an opportunistic hollow man who doesn't care what his Ziggy Stardust image meant to people-- adolescent gays and bisexuals whom the movement liberated. The Bowie figure is so unsympathetic that, in the end, he's even revealed to have had plastic surgery and allied himself with an Orwellian fascist culture. So why does Bowie's shifting persona represent the ultimate sellout and villain, the mark of a pure spirit? But--
TODD HAYNES: It's a good question, though. It's well--
[LAUGHTER]
--pointed.
J. HOBERMAN: But you--
TODD HAYNES: Sharp.
J. HOBERMAN: I know. I think you have the American revolutionary on one hand--
TODD HAYNES: Yeah.
J. HOBERMAN: --and the, you know, colonial oppressor on the other.
[LAUGHTER]
Well, let me just wind up by asking you now that you've finished this, something which was in the works for how many years?
TODD HAYNES: So many.
J. HOBERMAN: Yeah. I mean-- through something that you began, had to put down, return to--
TODD HAYNES: Yeah.
J. HOBERMAN: --and so on, which is very difficult. And after having already addressed the number of popular culture texts-- Karen Carpenter, not just David Bowie, but glam rock in its largest sense, Douglas Sirk the director-- what are you thinking about now?
TODD HAYNES: Rest.
J. HOBERMAN: Rest.
TODD HAYNES: I don't have-- it's funny. I've come to the end of a big cycle. When this project first came to me, it kind of took me by storm, a kind of return to Dylan. Because I first was exposed him in high school, and then really didn't listen to him for about 20 years. I listened to a lot of different kinds of music and found myself at a late point at the end of my 30s.
And at the end of what would become the end of my years in New York, planning to get back-- I was trying take a little break after Velvet Goldmine and go to and do my melodrama. You know, almost begrudgingly I was sort of like-- you know, I loved working with Julianne on Safe. So let's do a Sirkian thing together.
It will be good. And it'll be good to get back to work. But I wasn't totally just-- you know, I wasn't impassioned.
And sort of on the side-- it always sort of happens when you're not looking, that this desire to hear Dylan's music sort of took me over. And it was at this time that I was leaving New York to visit Portland, Oregon to write Far From Heaven, get away from the city. But all I wanted to do was listen to Dylan-- Dylan, Dylan, Dylan.
And I was so obsessed. I became obsessed. And it's such a delicious thing to be, especially when you get older and especially when you're looking for change in your own life.
And there's no better person to turn to than Dylan. And, ultimately, this project became about change as a radical sustaining kind of creative strategy that I saw marking him, defining him. And it ended up changing me, changing my place.
I end up settling in Portland and writing Far From Heaven right when I got there, but conceiving of this film. And then I knew like, God, I had this Dylan-- and then, by the end of that year, we had gotten rights from Jeff Rosen. So I looked ahead and said, my god, I'm going be doing the Far From Heaven thing and the Dylan thing.
And I knew that was like embarking on a big cycle ahead. I didn't know it would take quite this long. You never know, do you?
But I've come to the end of it. It's an interesting time. Because I've sort of-- I'm emptied out, you know? There's a Freud-- I want to do a film about Freud eventually.
J. HOBERMAN: Ah, OK.
TODD HAYNES: But I need a little time, man.
J. HOBERMAN: Need a little rest.
TODD HAYNES: I need a little rest.
J. HOBERMAN: OK. Well, this turned out magnificently. So we look forward to that.
TODD HAYNES: Yeah.
J. HOBERMAN: Thanks.
TODD HAYNES: Thank you so much.
[APPLAUSE]
Todd Haynes broke onto the film scene in 1987 with Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story, a biopic of the anorexic 70s singer acted out by Barbie and Ken dolls. His breakthrough work was the Oscar-nominated, Douglas Sirk-inspired melodrama Far From Heaven, the story of a 50s-era housewife who begins an affair with her black gardener after discovering her husband is gay. In 2007 he released the Bob Dylan biopic I'm Not There. Known for making provocative films that subvert narrative structure and resound with transgressive, complex eroticism, Haynes' work has helped to expose and redefine the contours of queer culture in America and beyond.
This Cornell Cinema event was made possible with the generous support of the Atkinson Forum in American Studies.
