‘A Complete Unknown’ recreated an iconic Bob Dylan costume design fit for the film’s finale: ‘A great rock archetype that still echoes to this day’
Receiving a single Oscar nomination would be an incredible personal achievement. But the four nominations A Complete Unknown costume designer Arianne Phillips has earned over her career extend “beyond my wildest 8-year-old dreams,” she tells Gold Derby in the final days of this year’s awards campaign.
Her bid this year for Best Costume Design is a full-circle moment. Phillips received her first nomination for James Mangold’s Walk the Line, a character-driven musical biography about Johnny Cash and June Carter Cash. Now, she’s back in competition at the Oscars for the Bob Dylan film A Complete Unknown, another Magnold feature about a legendary musician. To further add to the symmetry, Johnny Cash is a supporting character.
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“This nomination resonates in a way that is similar to probably my first nomination,” Phillips says. “Plus, it was a year of great costumed movies – very vivid costume movies, big costume movies. A Complete Unknown is really a character piece, and so it is with great humility and excitement that I’m nominated. But really the greatest thing about being nominated is that it is really a nomination for my team, for Jim Mangold, for my community, my family, every person I’ve ever known. That’s the beautiful thing: the excitement extends beyond me to my community of friends and family and all the great people that helped us get to this point.”
A Complete Unknown is Phillips’s sixth feature with Mangold. Their longtime collaboration was key to her success in creating the costumes for the Dylan movie. As part of the story, Phillips not only recreates several famous looks from the era but adds her own creativity in sequences where the characters — like Cash, Pete Seeger, and Joan Baez — are shown in private settings.
“It starts with permission from my director, Jim Mangold, and, from what I’ve heard secondhand from Jim, the permission Bob gave Jim when Bob gave notes on the script. So that is very freeing,” she says. “Having the trust of my director and the benefit of working with Jim over the years helped that process and released me from the neuroses of being super exacting.”
Still, the bulk of her time went to research. “Of course, authenticity is everything,” she says. Phillips created storyboards for almost every scene and found as many photographs as possible of Dylan, Baez, and the other stars. Rather than source the wardrobe, Phillips estimates that she and her team made and built two-thirds of the clothes — including famed pieces like Dylan’s signature leather jacket, which star Timothée Chalamet wears in the film’s final sequence at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965.
“That costume represents so much in our story; it represents his departure from being the solo folk music musician with the guitar in those earthy colors he wore earlier. Now, he desires to be in a band, which is at the crux of our story of him – plugging in and going electric. So, the visual mirrors the desire of a young artist. Where we leave him is, I believe, that great rock and roll American archetype that Bob still echoes to this day.”
A Complete Unknown received eight Oscar nominations this year, including Best Picture, Best Actor for Chalamet, Best Supporting Actor for Edward Norton (who plays Seeger), and Best Supporting Actress for Monica Barbaro (who plays Baez). Mangold is a three-time nominee as director, producer, and cowriter.
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