How They Tuned Up 8-Oscar Nominated Bob Dylan Biopic ‘A Complete Unknown’
EXCLUSIVE: The journey to bring Bob Dylan’s formative story to the screen took more than a decade. The film had a coterie of producers as it wound its way to production. Fred Berger and Alex Heineman got the PGA mark along with writer/director James Mangold. The other producers are Bob Bookman, Alan Gasmer, the film’s star Timothee Chalamet, Peter Jaysen, and Jeff Rosen. Here, Berger and Heineman explain the road to bring to screen the evolution of Dylan from the future from folk to rock icon. The Searchlight film tonight competes for eight Oscars including Best Picture.
DEADLINE: When Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2016, he didn’t show up for the ceremony. What was the process in getting him to play ball here?
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FRED BERGER: Alex and I started talking about this movie in 2017 before either of our seven and a half year old kids were born. Alex has a deep and encyclopedic appreciation for Dylan and we found ourselves in London by coincidence and having dinner. I had just had La La Land released and was shooting a little pop jukebox musical, so I was focused on the power of music in film. He started talking to me about Bob Dylan and really believed there was a story there.
You inferred Dylan can be difficult, but his story is an inspiring one. He is influenced so many people over such a long period. As a young boy he became the voice of a generation, but then changed the culture and somehow preserved his own relevance by evolving at each step. Alex felt it was something universal to be told there and he invited me to join him and try to produce a Bob Dylan movie. I was like, wow, this is so generous. It’s so rare that someone has the rights to such an unbelievable story and is going to invite another producer in. I said, so how did you get the rights? He said, oh, I don’t have any rights. I have nothing. I loved it. Alex and I both come from the New York School of Producing. We were both born and raised under that school of Killer films, and this was in the spirit of that, and Focus and Good Machine.
The daunting challenge began. We got lucky. Through Bob Bookman, a legendary lit manager who’s longtime friends with Bob Dylan’s manager Jeff Rosen, we got an introduction to Jeff. Before we sat down with him, we understood that movies like this are certainly built on their filmmakers, but you really actually can’t make them without the central actor if there’s no one at the right time to play Elvis or Leonard Bernstein.
At the time, Timmy had just finished Call Me By Your Name, and it was just clear he had this spark and this versatility and a physical resemblance to Bob. We went out to his team and Brian Swardstrom, his agent at the time now manager, thankfully pushed him to take the meeting with Alex and me because Timmy was not particularly familiar with Bob, or a huge fan, at the time.
DEADLINE: Judging from his performance of obscure Dylan songs on SNL, that changed.
BERGER: Now he’s the lead disciple in the church of Bob. Bob has changed his life. We had this amazing four-hour meeting with Timmy where he was kind of bouncing off the walls and we were just vibing. We spent most of the time talking about Bob’s mischief and his ability to never succumb to the pressures and expectations around him. And when someone tried to box him in, he was able to shatter that and reinvent himself. That really hooked Timmy’s curiosity and Alex sent him a ton of material to immerse himself in.
We started meeting with Jeff Rosen every three months, giving him our approach and talking about why Bob is not only significant culturally, but why that story could be significant and meaningful to a new generation of people who don’t know Bob. He shared with us that the rights were tied up at HBO. He’d been developing a script with Jay Cocks, the twice Oscar nominated writer. They had been working on it since 2011, so the story for him dates back in almost 15 years. He was working on the same timeline of Bob’s life, and we agreed to try doing it together.
DEADLINE: Why did he trust you?
HEINEMAN: Jeff is a cinephile and a great producer in his own right so he was aware of Timmy. But this was pre-Dune, pre-Wonka, but he had a track record of betting on talent as opposed to weight in the marketplace. He told us that the rights were going to expire in about 18 months from HBO and that the movie had stalled there and would become free. We kept meeting with him every three months, developing the approach. And luckily we partnered with him and Bob Bookman and Searchlight. This loose marriage catalyzed with the entrance of Jim Mangold. None of this had any real concreteness until Jim came to play. Searchlight’s David Greenbaum and Matthew Greenfield from Searchlight were on a plane from Telluride to Toronto with Jim because Ford v Ferrari was there and they had a movie. They asked what does he want to do next? He said, well, I might want to get back to a Walk the Line music story.
DEADLINE: The Johnny Cash movie he made with Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon…
BERGER: They asked if he liked Bob Dylan. He’s like, oh my God. He read Jay Cocks’ script on the plane and he started writing immediately without a deal place, without any kind of relationship to the movie in a formal way. We happened to all be in Toronto. Timmy, Alex and I saw Ford v Ferrari there. Timmy met with Jim, and that’s really the moment that cemented Timmy’s interest, when he heard Jim’s approach and vision for the movie. And then we were off to the races, we were making a movie. It’s 2019, let’s go. And Covid had other plans and suddenly many false starts later we started shooting in ‘24.
DEADLINE: Dylan must have had countless movie overtures. Hearing Timmy sing his songs, I gotta say, I was better able to understand what Dylan was singing about. What was the biggest challenge in getting Bob Dylan to say, alright, make this movie, and okay, Timmy, sings those songs.
HEINEMAN: Bob knew about the book Going Electric, and he always thought that was a great account of what happened at Newport. He had always loved that book, and he had approved the development of that Jay Cocks’ script back in 2011. So he understood that was happening and approved that version of the movie. Jim deserves all the credit for getting Bob’s approval because Bob read Jim’s script that Jay wrote and Jim rewrote, and he met with Bob several times. The two of them had a collaboration understanding, and Jim is the one who got Bob’s ultimate approval.
BERGER: Bob is a fan of Jim’s work, and they met several times. They’re neighbors in Malibu, and they had these incredible meetings where at no point did Jim compromise his creative intent, but he was able to derive a huge amount of information and value from Bob. They just went through it all. Bob felt comfortable that there was a steady hand in place. But to your point, Mike, it’s crazy to tell a story like this about someone who’s still living and for someone to be comfortable with that. The lucky thing for us is Bob is Bob, and Bob doesn’t actually think that any of the ink that spilled about his life or the movies that allude to him, or the documentaries, are really truth. They’re just all part of a fable that surround him. Even his own autobiography is poetic but also elusive. His superpower is not actually letting anyone define him and he was comfortable knowing that this is just one addition to the storied fable of his life.
HEINEMAN: Jim’s vision was not just to make a movie about Bob Dylan, but to a making a movie about a time and a place in ’60s Greenwich Village. Jim was a young boy during that time, but he did grow up in that time period overall, and that was something that really attracted him. And Jim really brought into the movie Joan [Baez] and Pete [Seeger] and Johnny Cash and this whole world and the culture clash that was happening in Greenwich Village. All these colorful characters that were literally changing the culture, rewriting it and changing the world ultimately. Jim brought in this kind of ensemble piece to go into the movie that supported Bob and the world. People use the term world building in movies, and Jim built, constructed this whole world of these characters and it was really exciting to watch that.
DEADLINE: Did Timothee ever play for Dylan?
BERGER: Timmy and Bob have never met, he’s never played for him. Jeff Rosen, we’ve spoken to him every day for the last seven years probably. And we were really nervous to play Timmy’s music or even Jones or Pete’s for Jeff. He’s spent his entire life alongside Bob in recording studios and concerts. We snuck Jeff on set because we didn’t want to freak Timmy out while he was performing a big concert in Newport. Jeff watched Timmy play in front of this crowd as Bob. I could see him get very emotional and was like, wow, this kid’s unbelievable. He was very candid with us. He didn’t expect to be blown away. Bob’s voice is so hard, and his essence is so hard.
What Timmy does brilliantly and what Jim really liberated Timmy to do, is not to impersonate Bob, not to do an impression, not to match him spot on. He can actually get even more Bob than he does, but the key was to blend Bob with himself so it just feels natural like he’s embodying him and that he’s taken on a whole persona. So that moment, I know we told Timmy later Jeff was there and he was blown away. That was the only validation that really mattered to Timmy and Jim in the whole process, because that was as close as we were going to get to validation from Bob. Worth mentioning that the second Jim and Timmy met in Toronto, he literally was like, we’re sending you a guitar right now, start training, and we’re going to do it for real. Timmy also is the kind of actor who is so focused, so hardworking, and always wants to jump in without a net.
HEINEMAN: Timmy was rehearsing in Dune outfits and Wonka outfits. I ran into him at a hotel in New York and he was like, come up and see, and he is playing. He went everywhere with that guitar, that harmonica, and he also worked with a movement coach and a dialect coach, and he’s got to evolve his music and his movement and his dialect across ’61, ’63 and ’65. Those are three different Bob Dylans, musically and as a human. So it was extraordinarily impressive and we benefited a lot from that time, but only because the actors took advantage of it to keep working.
DEADLINE: Outside of the Will Smith slap of Chris Rock, the craziest modern Oscar moment was La La Land being called for Best Picture, with the prize quickly rescinded and Moonlight declared the winner. You were on the losing end of that as La La Land producer How does that play back to you and are you at all bitter?
BERGER: We never felt bitter. There was a lot to process. The pain was that Moonlight was robbed of their moment. We were prepared to lose that night. We were prepared to win that night. We were not prepared for that slow motion car crash and not really understanding in the moment what was actually happening. We all felt terrible that Moonlight didn’t get to have their clean celebration, the beautiful part of that moment. And we spent a lot of time hanging out with the Moonlight team. They had been our closest friends from Telluride to that moment. We were really on the ride together, we’re all just indie film kids that were really young and had come out of nowhere with these movies that were born on real passion.
You’re in that race, but we really were so close throughout the whole journey. These can become heated and become political campaigns that others project to pit us against each other as if we were rivals. And we were so hungry to show people that wasn’t true and we did that. . We loved, I mean, we’re such huge admirers of their movie, and they were really kind about ours. And so the one really nice moment that happened was when we were able to hand them their Oscars and give them hugs and say, congratulations. I think we were able to show that this group of scrappy indie film kids loved each other, and that all the kind of noise around us was artificial and created by others. So that was really special. And it was a weird time because producers like to be in the shadows.
What it’s really all about, and that includes this movie, is to try and touch the culture. Bob Dylan did that, and La La Land did that to a much smaller way. La La Land changed the lives of everyone involved and it was the most joyful experience I’ve ever had. To see the way Bob’s music has returned, I mean, I get videos all the time about 12 olds and eight year olds playing Bob Dylan vinyl records…there’s a little ripple of culture change that Timmy and Jim, Monica Barbaro, Edward Norton, Elle Fanning and the other actors in this movie have done, and everything else is gravy. To the extent that we get any recognition [tonight], it’s only a reflection of the power of the movie.
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