‘Awards Chatter’ Pod: James Mangold on ‘A Complete Unknown,’ Genre-Hopping and Why He Works So Well with Actors
James Mangold, the guest on this episode of The Hollywood Reporter’s Awards Chatter podcast, is — and for 30 years has been — one of the most dependable filmmakers in Hollywood, always good for an entertaining and solid, if not showy, film, featuring great performances, regardless of genre.
Indeed, Mangold has directed dramas (Heavy and Girl, Interrupted), biopics (Walk the Line), westerns (3:10 to Yuma), crime/thrillers (Cop Land), action movies (Ford v Ferrari), rom-coms (Kate & Leopold), action/comedies (Knight and Day), mystery/horror films (Identity) and franchise films (The Wolverine, Logan and Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny). But because he does little to call attention to himself as the auteur of a film, he has, for much of his career, been overlooked, in terms of conversations about top filmmakers and awards.
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That changed this awards season with his latest film, A Complete Unknown, which chronicles four years in the life of Bob Dylan, between Dylan’s arrival in New York in 1961 and the Newport Folk Festival in 1965. Three of the film’s stars — Timothée Chalamet, who plays Dylan, Edward Norton, who plays Pete Seeger, and Monica Barbaro, who plays Joan Baez — have been nominated for acting Oscars for their performances in it. And Mangold himself has been nominated for three Oscars: as a producer of the film, for best picture; as a writer of the film, with Jay Cocks, for best adapted screenplay; and as the director of the film, for best director, marking his first ever Oscar nomination in that category.
Over the course of a conversation at Santa Barbara’s El Encanto, a Belmond hotel on the American Riviera, the 61-year-old reflected on how, at a very young age, his career took off like a rocket, then crashed, and then was rebuilt; how he learned to work with the biggest names in the business, from Sylvester Stallone to Tom Cruise to Chalamet, and came to be such a strong director of actors, having already guided two, Angelina Jolie and Reese Witherspoon, to Oscar-winning performances; why he essentially wrote A Complete Unknown on spec, and how a film made by one of his late mentors, Milos Forman, influenced his approach; plus much more.
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