Dive into the extraordinary journey of Timothée Chalamet as he transforms into the legendary Bob Dylan for "A Complete Unknown." From mastering Dylan's unique vocal style to learning 30 songs on guitar, Chalamet's dedication shines through. Discover how he immersed himself in Dylan's world, visited his childhood home, and worked with top coaches to bring this iconic figure to life on screen.
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00:00You know, similar to Bob, again, you hear stories of people that
00:03their upbringings are way more dramatic than mine, you know.
00:07And then you start to go like, well, what is my drive, you know?
00:09Welcome to Ms. Mojo, and today we're breaking down the rigorous, years-long process
00:14that Oscar nominee Timothee Chalamet engaged to play the one and only Bob Dylan.
00:19If you go with snowflake storm,
00:25when the river's freezing, summer ends.
00:40To understand Timothee Chalamet's complete and utter transformation into,
00:44well, the complete unknown himself,
00:46we have to take a deeper dive into the subject of director James Mangold's 2024 biopic.
00:51The future Bob Dylan was born Robert Alan Zimmerman in Duluth, Minnesota in 1941,
00:57eventually rebranding himself in homage to the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas.
01:01You came here with nothing but a guitar.
01:03You never talk about your family, your past.
01:06People make up their past, you know what I mean?
01:07They remember what they want, they forget the rest.
01:10Dylan dropped out of college in 1960 to move to New York City
01:13as a way to pursue a career in music,
01:15and crucially, to meet with his idol, folk legend Woody Guthrie.
01:19Over time, Dylan's unique songwriting POV,
01:22which often found him tackling hot-button issues of the day,
01:25raised his profile, and music fans and other performers sat up and took notice.
01:30Of his second album, 1963's The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan,
01:35famed critic Janet Maslin wrote that,
01:37his mixture of moral authority and non-conformity
01:40was perhaps the most timely of his attributes.
01:42I see no one wants to hear what a kid wrote last month.
01:45Well, I like your songs.
01:52Who wrote this?
01:54He did.
01:54What was the Electric Dylan controversy?
01:57For anyone who's gonna hold your attention on stage,
01:59you have to kind of be a freak.
02:01You can be beautiful, or you can be ugly, but you can't be plain.
02:04Although Dylan himself has consistently downplayed the label,
02:08it doesn't feel inaccurate to say that he was largely considered
02:11the spokesman of a generation by the mid-60s.
02:14Dylan, ever the provocateur,
02:16formally rejected the moniker with the 1965 album Bringing It All Back Home,
02:20which has retroactively been regarded as one of the greatest,
02:23most influential rock albums ever recorded.
02:26I ain't gonna work on Maggie's farm no more.
02:31Notably, the album's first half featured electric instrumentation,
02:35new territory for Dylan, and for American folk music.
02:38Dylan's decision to quote-unquote go electric
02:41was met with widespread controversy from folk fans and Dylan's peers,
02:45who felt that the musician was selling out and thus abandoning his roots.
02:49Once upon a time, you dressed so fine,
02:51through the bumps of time, in your prime.
02:54Dylan's 1965 headlining set at the Newport Folk Festival
02:58was infamously met with boos from the audience,
03:00who felt betrayed at the sight of Dylan wielding an electric guitar.
03:04This controversy would ultimately serve as the subject matter
03:07for A Complete Unknown.
03:08200 people in that room, and each one wants me to be somebody else.
03:12They should just let me be.
03:14Let you be what?
03:15Whatever it is they don't want me to be.
03:17Why A Complete Unknown took almost five years to make,
03:22So now that we've laid the groundwork,
03:24let's fast forward almost 60 years to January 2020,
03:27when director James Mangold announced that he would be making A Complete Unknown,
03:31and that Oscar nominee Timothee Chalamet would be playing Bob Dylan.
03:35At the time, the film was announced under the working title Going Electric.
03:39Can't argue with that.
03:41I'm not sure they want to hear, but I want to play, Johnny.
03:43Unfortunately for Mangold, Chalamet, and literally everybody else,
03:47March of that year saw the COVID-19 pandemic enter full swing,
03:51shutting down countless industries.
03:53Little news about the project emerged until November 2022,
03:57when Chalamet confirmed that the film was still in production.
04:01A few months later, in February 2020,
04:03he announced that he would be making A Complete Unknown,
04:06and that he would be playing Bob Dylan.
04:09A few months later, in February 2023,
04:12the film's official title was announced,
04:14and it was confirmed that A Complete Unknown would be Mangold's next project,
04:18following Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny.
04:21The Bob Dylan story in itself is a story about being an artist,
04:26and how we find our way in the world.
04:27One of the things that's most important to me are the performances,
04:30as the collaboration with the actors.
04:32How Timothy became a, quote,
04:34Never let it be said that Chalamet is a slacker.
04:37While A Complete Unknown languished in COVID-19 development hell,
04:41the Call Me By Your Name and Dune star was hard at work
04:45honing and perfecting his Bob Dylan impression,
04:47as well as researching the film's story.
04:50He was also able to get a lot of attention
04:52for his role in the film's opening credits,
04:54and for his role in the film's opening credits.
04:57He was also able to get a lot of attention
04:59for his role in the film's opening credits,
05:02as well as researching the enigmatic singer-songwriter's long and storied career.
05:07I'm now deep in that church of Bob,
05:09and I feel like I got this opportunity to kind of be a bridge to this music.
05:14As Chalamet noted in a wide-ranging Rolling Stone interview,
05:18he initially expected only four months to do that work.
05:21Thanks to COVID, he got five years.
05:24Brian Hyatt, who interviewed Chalamet for the article,
05:27wrote that, quote,
05:28Chalamet never quite left Bobland.
05:31On his phone is a video of him on the set of Dune,
05:34singing Don't Think Twice, It's Alright
05:36in Paul Atreides' intergalactic pajamas,
05:38and a photo where he's playing guitar in his Willy Wonka outfit.
05:43Has better understanding what he went through,
05:46has it changed you?
05:47Like Bob says at the end of Don't Look Back,
05:49I feel like I went through the thing,
05:51and it was like a new guiding light to how I want to feel when I work.
05:55Yes, that's really him playing.
05:57There's 40 songs in the movie that he performs live,
06:00on guitar and harmonica and singing live,
06:02take after take after take.
06:04I had goosebumps.
06:05You can see how much love and how hard he's worked
06:08and how much he cares about getting this right.
06:11For a complete unknown,
06:13Chalamet ate, drank, and bled Dylan,
06:16even visiting Dylan's childhood home,
06:18which has since been converted into a veritable Dylan museum by its current owner.
06:22As Hyatt writes in the Rolling Stone article,
06:25Chalamet worked with a, quote,
06:26vocal coach, a guitar teacher, a dialect coach, a movement coach,
06:30even a harmonica guy.
06:32There's an energy and chemistry to the interaction
06:36between a performer and a live audience that's just different.
06:39We're set up to record all of the performances for real.
06:43All of the microphones are real period microphones.
06:45All the instruments are real period instruments.
06:47We have done this movie 100% live.
06:49There's no earpiece.
06:50There's no timing mechanism or anything.
06:53The actor was adamant on preserving a sense of realism for the film,
06:56and you'll see it all on screen.
06:58Chalamet, who was originally set to learn just 13 songs for the film,
07:02ended up learning 30,
07:04some of which are played live by him in the film.
07:07Said Chalamet, quote,
07:08You can't recreate it in the studio.
07:10If I was singing to a pre-recorded guitar,
07:13then all of a sudden I could hear the lack of an arm movement in my voice.
07:16There's a lot that has to happen to feel authentic to them on stage.
07:19It has to feel real, like a live show.
07:21And a lot of Bob's performances are improvised.
07:23So for Timmy to be up there and make each performance his own is incredible.
07:27How he benefited from a lot of coaching.
07:30When I got approached with this project five years ago,
07:33or six years ago, let's say, this was 2018,
07:36and I had just done Call Me By Your Name,
07:37Bob Dylan was this name I knew was held in reverence,
07:41and I knew I was supposed to respect.
07:42If you were in the in crowd, that's a name you get behind.
07:45But truthfully, I didn't know anything about it.
07:47Speaking to Apple Music's Zane Lowe ahead of A Complete Unknown's release,
07:51Chalamet revealed that he had worked with dialect coach Tim Monick
07:54to approximate Dylan's inimitable nasal wail.
07:57This was in addition to vocal coach Eric Vitro and movement coach Pauly Bennett.
08:02And I also felt like my voice had like a baritone.
08:04It all sounded clean.
08:05And I was doing vocal warm-ups with Eric Vitro,
08:07who was this vocal coach who helped me on Wonka and helped me sing grand on Wonka.
08:12And then here I would listen it back and I'm like,
08:13man, this sounds too clean, you know?
08:15It wouldn't be the first time this particular trio had worked together
08:19to help a young actor bring a rock legend to life.
08:21They had previously done so for Austin Butler in Elvis,
08:25which saw him Oscar nominated.
08:26Oh, lord.
08:27I knew you were the right guys for this job.
08:30You know, back when I was starting out,
08:32some people wanted to put me in jail, even kill me, because of the way I was moving.
08:40So they cut my hair, they put me in uniform, and they sent me away.
08:45However, while it's inarguable that Chalamet was surrounded by a winning team,
08:49you also have to give him and his work ethic credit.
08:52According to Larry Saltzman, Chalamet's guitar teacher for A Complete Unknown,
08:56quote,
08:57If I presented something to him like,
08:59OK, this is the real way, but there's a little bit of a shortcut.
09:02His answer to that was always, don't show me the shortcut.
09:05It was the first one we shot in the movie.
09:07You couldn't do it to a playback because it's such an intimate scene.
09:09It's in a hospital room with Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger.
09:12And I did it live, and it went, it clicked.
09:16Great, you know?
09:17And I'm making mistakes in the guitar a little bit here and there.
09:20You can kind of fill those in after.
09:22I went home and I wept that night.
09:23Not to be dramatic, but it's a song I've been living with for years.
09:42Why Timothy Chalamet was the only choice to play Bob Dylan?
09:46The best feedback I got over the course of the shoot,
09:48and this is the first shoot I've really turned my phone off the entire time.
09:51You know, I was watching this Ed Bradley interview with Bob Dylan the other day,
09:5460 Minutes, one of his famous 2004 interview.
09:57And Bob in it says,
09:59his connection to a sense of destiny was fragile.
10:02I like that he used that word, fragile,
10:03because I always felt my connection to Bob was fragile.
10:05With his star still on the rise,
10:08it's hard to argue that Chalamet has the makings of a future Hollywood legend.
10:12Still under 30 at the time of A Complete Unknown's release,
10:15the actor already has an Oscar nomination under his belt,
10:18as well as numerous collaborations with high-profile auteurs
10:22like Christopher Nolan, Denis Villeneuve, and Greta Gerwig.
10:25I can't love anyone else, Joe. I only love you.
10:27Teddy, it would be a disaster if we married.
10:29It wouldn't be a disaster.
10:30We'd be miserable.
10:31Joe, I'd be a perfect saint.
10:32I can't. I've tried it and I failed.
10:34Why does everyone expect it then?
10:36Why does your family and my grandpa expect it?
10:37Why are you saying this? Say yes.
10:40Let's be happy together, Joe.
10:41I can't say yes truly, so I'm not going to say it at all.
10:45Clearly, we aren't the only ones who think so.
10:48In the aforementioned Rolling Stone article,
10:50Chalamet revealed that none other than Tom Cruise
10:53had given him advice on how to properly be an old-school leading man.
10:56Chalamet also discussed how he could relate to Dylan in his early career.
11:00You feel boxed in, and you feel like you have something more to say.
11:04With A Complete Unknown,
11:05the young actor is at the perfect stage in his career to embody the legendary folk singer,
11:10and we can't wait to see what he'll do next.
11:12I felt like I came into his music at a time where pop culturally,
11:17not a lot of people around me would come into Bob Dylan,
11:19so I felt very connected to it.
11:21I had to learn how famous he was in the 60s and 70s.
11:24At first, I thought he was like the treat I found.
11:27Are you excited to see A Complete Unknown?
11:29Do you think Timothee Chalamet is up to the task of playing the Rolling Stone himself?
11:33Let us know in the comments below.
11:40Do you agree with our picks?
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