How ‘A Complete Unknown’ Director Earned Bob Dylan’s Approval

James Mangold, director of Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown, has detailed the moment he pitched the film to the legendary singer.

Inspired by 1984 movie Amadeus, which explored the life and times of 18th-century composer Mozart, Mangold wanted to examine the nature of people dealing with someone who’s a genius, and the challenges they endure in doing so.

In a new interview with the Guardian, the director recalled having to explain his concept to Dylan himself in a coffee shop, knowing he had to provide as brief an outline as possible.

READ MORE: Bob Dylan ‘Bootleg Series’ Albums Ranked

“I thought very carefully, because I knew he didn’t want a 20-minute answer,” Mangold explained. “I said: ‘It’s about a young guy in Minnesota who’s suffocating and feeling desperate and who leaves everything – friends, family – behind and, with just a few dollars in his pocket, makes his way across the country and creates a new identity and makes new friends, finds a new family and blossoms, becomes successful, then starts to suffocate again and runs away.’”

Mangold was pleased with Dylan’s subtle reaction.

“He smiled, and that was all,” the director recalled. “Like, he didn’t have anything more to say, but I knew that meant… he didn’t take issue.”

Mangold went on to discuss Milos Forman’s Amadeus, describing it as “a film about genius and the way all of us react to genius, which is with admiration and some resentment; where the characters around Mozart are really significant and the wake the genius leaves upon them is as important as anything we learn about him.”

Bob Dylan Was ‘Threat’ to the Folk Music Scene

When applied to Dylan, the director said, a similar approach also involved “tribal politics and tribal cultural issues.” He presented the folk music scene as a form of establishment, despite having had its battles with the political establishment of the time.

Dylan, he argued, was a “threat” to the folk scene. “Obviously, the movie is about a lot of people on the left, but it’s also about intolerance for anyone who breaches the code, whether you’re on the left or the right,” Mangold noted.

He accepted the suggestion that the Village neighborhood in Manhattan was almost another subject of his movie. Calling it a “magical place” where he’d grown up in the ‘60s, Mangold remembered it “before every apartment was worth $10m … when there was no such thing as cell phones or computers.” He added: “You wanna be there, right?”