Edward Norton on Playing a Folk Legend, and Foil to the Hero, in ‘A Complete Unknown’: ‘Pete Seeger’s Integrity Can Coexist With Dylan’s — I Love the Lack of Judgment in This Film’
“Edward Norton is Pete Seeger.” How likely was it that much of the moviegoing world would be thinking or saying those words at the end of 2024 and beginning of 2025? Or that Norton’s portrayal in the Bob Dylan biopic “A Complete Unknown” would even be leading younger generations to find out more about who Seeger was? Some moviegoers consider Seeger the most sympathetic character in this ensemble piece — even if he is the one with the biggest vested interest in keeping the hero from expressing himself in the loud and brash way the audience is hoping and waiting for.
In this Q&A, Norton, who looms large in the awards conversation this year, talks about why he had reservations about tackling real-life material that he felt might be “too sacrosanct,” and what filmmaker James Mangold said to change his way of thinking. He also praises his primary scene partner, Timothée Chalamet. And, in response to a “process” query, Norton offers a spirited and eloquent defense of why some things about the moviemaking process are better left behind closed doors. That’s his general philosophy about revealing too much, but in this case it’s also his answer to the question: What Would Bob Dylan Do? (For our earlier Q&A with James Mangold about the film, click here.)
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Many of us in the sort of Dylan aficionado world are surprised — even giving James Mangold some credit for what he’s done before — that it would be possible to make a movie that felt real about this scenario and this dynamic. So what were your feelings when this film was brought to you, and did you have complete faith that the period and milieu were something that could be captured on film? Or did you have any moment’s hesitation about: How real is this movie gonna be?
I don’t know if real is the word I would use. But I absolutely had more than a moment’s hesitation. That period and those people, that music, it was all a very big part of the soundtrack of my own young life coming to New York. “Song for Woody,” I used to play for myself; I used to think that’s the narrative of coming to New York, to walk in other people’s footsteps. And Dylan’s early records from that time in New York, I was very steeped in it and maybe almost held it too precious. So there was a burden I was carrying, the burden of feeling maybe that this was too sacrosanct, that you don’t do this.
At the same time, of course it’s very tempting, because I love the music and I love the people. And I think Timothée’s terrific. I’ve known him for a while, and I’ve long thought… there’s not that many people, I think, that are literally genetically equipped to try to play Bob Dylan. And I knew he could do that; I didn’t think no one could do that.
But the thing that really got me over was more the way Jim was radically opposed to the idea of a biography, or even the idea of trying to pick the lock and understand Dylan per se. He said to me, “I’m interested in the cultural anthropology.” We know this headline: Dylan plugged in at Newport and that was the end of the folk scene, and it was the beginning of rock (commanding the focus)… And he said, “Why were there such stakes in that?” Like, what was going on, in the stakes for that as a cultural moment. And he talked about back-building from there to assess the stew of people who were colliding with each other and affecting each other that created this moment around this emergent protean talent. And I really liked that. I thought, that’s hard, but if you pull it off, you’re not only not doing a biopic; what you’re really doing is an immersive experience in what a certain time felt like. And that’s hard to do. I think that it’s hard to abandon a narrative and focus on milieu and characters and relationship and cultural context and show how it produced a moment. This is all a long way of saying that the more I understood what I felt Jim was really engaged with, the more interested I got in it.
Now, on the back end of it, objectively I’ll say, I am so admiring of Jim’s artistic sophistication in pulling that off. Because if you think about it, there’s really only two acts in this movie. And the truth is, the second act doesn’t start until two-thirds of the way through the movie, with that real shift to 1965. And that’s wild. It is very difficult to break away from the structural tropes and demands of not only biopics, but (conventional) filmmaking, and to hold the attention through the collisions of people. Because really all he is doing is this person’s talent is propelling him through encounters with people, and those encounters with the archdruid, Pete Seeger, and a competitor or lover, Joan (Baez), and an angel (the Sylvie Russo character), and his romance with Johnny Cash, and all these things. It’s really wild to make a film that’s not about plot in that way, and to leave people feeling that they’ve understood something.
I am pretty deep on that history, I have to say. I watched the film and it really brought home to me… like, I tend to think of the early ‘60s as the civil rights movement, but you forget about the Cuban missile crisis. You literally forget about the anxiety of a nuclear war that permeates songs like “Masters of War.” And my hat is off to Jim for the richness of this non-linear, non-life-structured story.
Can you talk about your thoughts on Pete Seeger and how he comes off in this portrayal? If you read the Elijah Wald book about Newport ’65 that the movie is partially based on, there’s real-life nuance to that relationship as well as all the relationships, really, and Mangold captured so much of that. And of course he is a smart guy, and therefore was never going to make Pete Seeger the villain. But he is antagonist to the anti-hero. And you sympathize with both of them in the film.
Yeah. I’ve heard Jim say, and I agree, that he was extremely committed to the idea that there is no antagonist like that. Dylan’s a protagonist, but Pete Seeger’s integrity and value system can coexist with Dylan’s, in a weird way. I love the lack of judgment in the film.
I know it’s a weird analogy, but for me, “Do the Right Thing” was an extremely, extremely important movie in my coming of age. And it was one of the first things that really dealt with all the juicy difficulty of American life. At the end, it has this quote from Martin Luther King and then a quote from Malcolm X, and they’re diametrically opposed, and (director Spike Lee) puts this picture up where they have their arms around each other and he just leaves it in your lap. And I remember being so energized by that way of ending a movie. I kind of think that’s what Jim’s done here.
Pete Seeger is Pete Seeger, and he’s got all kinds of admirable integrity in his lane of the type of person he was. And Dylan has an artistic integrity, and for a while, they were in the same lane, and then they weren’t in the same lane. It’s like the breakup of the Beatles. It’s bittersweet, but at the end of the day, that’s life and it has to happen. And I love the messiness, and I love Jim allowing competing ideas to coexist.
Because you can feel deeply loyal to someone… If you listen to Dylan today, he reveres Pete Seeger and admires and appreciates him. But you can love and appreciate and revere someone and need to break away from them. And (like Seeger) you can be proud of someone and still have expectations of them, that they might owe you something… These things can all coexist. And I think a lot of people who had relationships with each other in this time loved each other, and they were competitive, at the same time. You can love someone and be competitive with them too. And the messiness of it all, I found that to be very adult. Very adult.
It’s almost like a thwarted buddy movie in a way, where people that you like for different reasons naturally drift apart, though it’s been set up in a way that you kind of wish they could be close for the rest of their lives, for whatever reasons that brought them together.
Yes. To me, you should always hope that a film can be something that people can see themselves in it, whether they’re folk musicians or not. And I think that everybody’s been young and trying to move, and you have to make decisions about what you hold onto and what you leave behind. And that’s true if you’re a doctor. It’s true if you’re part of any cohort of people has dynamics that are like this. So I think maybe the way that people are connecting with it is not just simply because of it being about the people, but because it’s about youth and the propulsive kind of energy of youth, and brothers and sisters and parents and children and the way we try to hold onto each other. And I think it’s applicable. I think it is applicable outside the world of folk stars.
If we can speak for a minute about what you did to prepare for this role… It seems like this whole process went pretty quickly, as far as your involvement. It was announced that you were cast in January. You shot in summer. It was at one point projected as a summer 2025 release, yet here it is coming out six months earlier than that, which means Mangold really hustled. For your part, when you were talking about “Glass Onion,” you said, maybe jokingly, that you had been cast because there was a short guitar-playing scene in that and you had already played guitar before. So we know you have some musical ability. But doing Pete Seeger’s banjo picking is another thing, and getting the voice right to the extent that you want to get the spirit of it right.
You know, I’m not trying to shine it off, but I think process is like… There’s always some kind of alchemy to figuring out the blend of it all. And then you get inputs from costume and stuff, and you have to cobble it together, sort of piece by piece, and you have to mine the source material in some ways for nuggets of insight.
And the work is what it is. I find myself… well, I mean, you are writing for Variety, so I think I’m gonna make a comment, which goes outside your question, which is: I kind of think that we might be getting into this era where it’s like the old thing of the snake that eats its own tail. I think we’re getting so hung up on process and the behind-the-scenes thing that we’re blowing the magic trick of it all. I actually think we’re starting to have this tendency to talk about how we did it before we’ve even put it out. I had an experience recently where there was something I was sort of interested in seeing, and I saw so many goddamn clips about the makeup process, I was just like: It’s just cooked for me now. They’ve cooked it.
It’s like if David Blaine came out in Vegas and said, “Let me show you this thing I keep in my pocket that lets me magnetize a thing, and this is how I pull that card and this is how I bend that coin… OK, now I’m gonna walk out and do it.” Then he’d walk out and do it, and you would just go, OK —that’s not why I went to that show. I went to that show to have my mind blown. And when you and I saw “Raging Bull,” it just puts you in the back of your seat. You just went, “What the actual fuck? Like, is that that guy?”
And Timothée did something I thought was really, really mature. Because they said to him, “We just want to set up a time-lapse thing to watch you get into Dylan in the thing.” And he said, no. (First) he said to me, “What do you think?” I said, “Absolutely not.” And they were like, “But for social, for behind the scenes…!” No, absolutely not. I’m like, why? Why do you want to take away from an audience the opportunity to experience the mysticism, the trick, the suspension of disbelief? It’s like, if we don’t stop fucking talking about how much time we spend in the makeup chair or how we learn the guitar, or whatever… I’m just starting to feel all of us should just leave people alone. Like, leave ’em alone; let ’em watch the piece. Because I am an audience member, and I want mystery. I want illusion.
And I don’t want anybody to hear Timothée talk about this (process of transformation). I just want them to go and see him do what is a “Raging Bull”-like performance. I mean, it’s that good, and it’s transformational, but you need to invest in it. And the studios, I know they’re trying to sell the film, but I think people have started to think that letting people behind the curtain before we’ve put the movie out is a good idea. It’s a terrible idea. Like, imagine when “Close Encounters” came out. When I saw a taste of that movie, I wanted to see that movie so badly. And if I had seen a featurette on the models before I saw the movie, it wouldn’t have been magical.
And maybe it’s because this is what Dylan himself was almost like a wizard about: He knew not to let people behind the curtain. He knew not to talk about meaning. He said: You figure out what it means. And I don’t know what’s happened. I don’t know if it’s the corporate machinery. Social media certainly doesn’t help. But I think we’re almost getting to this point where we’re privileging process over magic, and I worry about it a little bit. In this case I feel very defensive, in the case of these characters, but also of Timmy in particular. I think people should just go see it and get lost in it. You won’t like it more for seeing behind the curtain. You know what I mean?
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