Part I: An interview with Larry Charles by Trev Gibb.
In 2003 Sony Classic Pictures released Masked and Anonymous, a film directed by Larry Charles and written with Bob Dylan. The film idea grew from Dylan's cameo appearance in ABC's Dharma and Greg in October 1999, when having enjoyed the experience he apparently expressed interest in developing something for TV. However, plans to develop a TV special based around Dylan soon evaporated.
Everything he does is about moving to the next
stage, to something different and it’s very the case with this movie you’ve
made with him.
What other plans for the DVD as such do you have, such as
extra scenes and so forth?
People say he isn’t a good singer or a good musician, but
if you take away what people say, he is very much a Jazz musician. He works
with improvisation, with phrasing. Even his melodies… He sings his songs
differently each time, does counter melodies in opposition to the original
tune.
In 2003 Sony Classic Pictures released Masked and Anonymous, a film directed by Larry Charles and written with Bob Dylan. The film idea grew from Dylan's cameo appearance in ABC's Dharma and Greg in October 1999, when having enjoyed the experience he apparently expressed interest in developing something for TV. However, plans to develop a TV special based around Dylan soon evaporated.
Dylan was introduced to Larry Charles through a mutual friend and after having pitched ideas to a couple of newtorks, finally the idea of a film - Masked And Anonymous - emerged. The cast is a who's who of Hollywood talent, including John Goodman, Jeff Bridges, Jessica Lange, Luke Wilson, Mickey Rourke, Bruce Dern and Penelope Cruz. None of whom would be amiss in either a Woody Allen or Coen brothers feature.
In 2002 when rumours surfaced about the film and shots from the set leaked in the media I began setting up a fan site called the 'masked and anonymous database', which sadly is no more and which sought to compile press shots, clippings, reviews, critiques, sources and references and finally the screenplay variations and potential interviews with the cast and crew.
Larry Charles was generous enough to give a couple of hours of his time one night in the autumn of 2003 to talk to me about all things Bob Dylan and all things Masked And Anonymous. At the time I had no idea Larry Charles was also a co-producer, director and writer for Curb Your Enthusiasm, nor did I know he had been involved in the writing and producing for Seinfeld and Mad About You. He would go on to direct Sacha Baron Cohen's Borat, Bill Maher's Religulous.
(TG)Have you visited
the ‘Masked and Anonymous Database’?
(LC)Yes I have its
amazing!
I’m happy you like it…
Oh I’m very pleased,
I’m very touched actually.
I've got so much to ask, I'll try to filter through, but how
I’ll approach them I’m not sure... I’ll plunge ahead…
We’ll just riff around
and I’m sure that something interesting will come out of it.
I think the movie speaks much truth. Did you intend it to be a social
commentary?
Well you know, it’s
interesting, we never had any intention at all or any concern about results or
consequences. We really started from a very purely organic place, just
exchanging ideas thoughts; sometimes a word or an expression in a very almost
unconscious, automatic, writing it up technique, without imposing any order on
it and letting the order and patterns emerge out of it naturally.
The film is very poetic in feel, the way phrases are spoken seem philosophical and profound...
I agree, that’s you know…
Bob inspires you to reach these heights you didn’t think were possible.
It must’ve been an experience meeting Bob Dylan?
There’s nothing to
describe it. It was the most life changing experience of my life…its just
meeting your guru, just holding a mirror to you and the world and saying look.
That’s what it’s like being with him, just surprising you at all times,
confounding you at all times, confusing you. But all with the end result of cracking
open your head and just seeing more deeply and more clearly.
Dylan always seems discreet, but his discretion speaks a
thousand things at the same time, he seems to evoke and provoke so much…
He does and he’s very
enigmatic and very complex and very dense, which is no surprise. And so he will
never say, “This is what I think”. He will have something and he will say it
and I will say “Wow you really feel strongly about that!” and he’ll say, “Well
somebody does”.
The film is so layered; it’s colourful, provocative, like
a puzzle…
Yes, the last piece of
the puzzle was you. That to me is the key. When I go around the country to
these screenings I tell people it is a puzzle and the last piece is you. You
have to kind of be involved and interact with it. And wherever you are in your
life at that moment you’re gonna see certain things in that movie like you do
in a Bob Dylan song. And you may come back a year from now or ten years from
now and be in a different place and see the movie in a different light as well.
The film has only really played in America. Is it going to
play England any time soon?
Yes it should be opening.
I know there’s a film festival in England that it’s gonna open at. BBC films,
was one of the financial partners, so it’s definitely meant to open in England.
It’s gonna open all over Europe now; over the next couple of months, actually.
There have been rumours of a DVD release coming out soon,
is there any plans finalised for what will appear on the DVD?
There is a DVD that’s
going to come out I believe in February, with some deleted scenes and some
other bonus stuff. But that’s not the definitive version there’s still yet my
directors cut somewhere down the line, if we can get the financing together
we’ll put that out too, that’s kind of more expensive to put together.
Will there ever be a definitive version? There’s so much
going on and so many scenes that didn’t make it.
Well right. By definitive
I only mean like… everything, we shot everything that’s in the script. And
there is a version of that, that from a historically archival position might be
worth having out there as well… I also have hours and hours of bob rehearsing.
And I kept a camera rolling while he was doing all the music, never cutting so I
have all the between song patter and warm-up stuff, and I feel like there’s a
great historical archive there not to be exploited commercially, I think that
would be wrong, but at some point down the line, way down the line perhaps, it
should have some historical value.
It’s very intimate… Most of those live scenes with the
band. The camera perspective creates such an intimate feel.
As far as the music goes,
one of our earliest conversations was how to shoot the music. Bob had some very
specific ideas about how he thought music should look and what’s gone wrong
with music on film and why he has felt that he had never actually been well
represented performing on film. And we went back and looked at some things we
both liked a lot. Like old Johnny Cash shows, and even Ed Sullivan
and The Grand Old Opry shows with Hank Williams and we found they
basically used one camera and put you right there and there was an intimacy
created between the musician and the home audience And we really responded to
that, and nowadays people are afraid to stay on that one shot – and we cut and
we cut, and this kind of MTV style – and we made a conscious decision to go
back to this more pure version of presenting the music and it wound up being
very dramatic.
You get right in perspective-wise. It’s very direct. The
cinematography on the whole is so rich. One frame is like a photograph with so
much going on in every part of the screen.
I’m glad you noticed
that. Thank you very much, that was an effort to… we were both attracted to
density and I tried to just fill the frame up at all times with a lot of
information. The way Bob’s songs filled with references and allusions so that
you could go back over and over again and listen to and never get tired. I
wanted this to have that same quality.
There appears to be layers at every level in the film. One
of the sections on the website actually deals with the idea of allusions and
references.
Yes I've read that, it’s
great. The thing is again I've been to
about 20 cities where I've hosted screenings and answered questions and what’s
so great is that the audience, as I said, the audience being part of the
puzzle, and the puzzle pieces can be moved around and create a different puzzle
each time. Also, besides the last piece being you, the puzzle itself is
constantly shifting. But people see things in the movie beyond even what was
intended and those are valid quite often. I've heard interpretations of aspects
of the movie that were certainly not conscious on our part. But when I looked back,
I go “absolutely! That’s a very valid interpretation of what’s going on there”
The film is like a living thing in the sense that it will
grow through time and have a resonance like Dylan’s songs do. Even politically
some of the references in there could apply to now or ten years ahead.
Or a hundred years ago,
Yes. Well that was one of the themes. We didn’t intend for it to be as
prophetic as it turned out to be, it was again no intention to comment or be
topical in any way, we were more interested in talking about the idea of the
cycles of history and how history repeats itself. We think we’re unique, we
think we’re in a unique time but really this is just another cycle of history
that resembles every other one that’s come before it and as it turned out it
winded up being very prophetic and topical as well.
Were you thinking about W. B Yeats and “Turning and
turning within the widening gyre”?
Yes, well when you’re
with Bob again you with a Bard on that level. Someone who is… whose job it is
in life to be thinking about those things and commenting and writing about
those things, so you’re in that state of mind when you’re with him and
inevitably in the way Bob has throughout history – his own history – your
tapping into things, into a certain psyche again almost unconsciously but
inevitably.
I've seen this film countless times, I found it initially
very overwhelming but it made me more willing to engage with it and to explore.
Yeah, well people who are
willing to engage with it, that’s usually the reaction. What happened with some
of the critics was that they were so overwhelmed at first that they checked out
and they never got to engage with it and see all the levels and the layers and
all the different things that were available to them in the movie. But people
like you, and again, I've gone around the country to all kinds of obscure
places and the audience is very willing to engage and they have that sense of
being overwhelmed. And then they let it wash over them and they enter into it
and experience it and they wind up having a great experience from it.
How do you feel the film sits amongst the more mainstream cinema we see?
Yes, well most movies
today are very cut and dry. It’s a very risk-averse business now because there
is so much money involved. They need people to come in and move on. And this is
not a movie that’s intended that way. This is a movie that’s intended to be
savoured and revisited like something you’d see in a museum or a poem you’d
read in a book, rather than mass-market entertainment.
I do feel it will gain a cult status somewhere along the
line. As I’ve said it has richness and a resonance.
Bob was very clear about
that. And his work, often a lot of his greatest work, has been met with disdain
when it comes out. And then later on people go, “Wow! You know ‘Slow Train
Coming’ is a brilliant album”, or whatever... You know what I mean? And I look
at this that way also. This is not done for a commercial acceptability; this is
done to make a statement. And it’s out there and people will find it and it
will always be there for them.
I think Dylan said, “What’s wrong with being
misunderstood?”
Yeah that’s Bob. I mean
when we were working on it he had a line that he wanted to put in and he said
he had a line and I said, “Bob I have to say even in the script I don’t think
people are gonna understand that line”. And he said, “Well what’s so bad about
being misunderstood?” And I think he was saying… He’s a person; he’s been
understood, he’s done that, he’s now willing to risk being misunderstood in
order to reach a deeper level of understanding. And that’s a very courageous place
for an artist to go.
I think that’s true artistic temperament.
Exactly, well that’s why,
this was conceived, financed, produced… Everything about this movie was done
outside of that system. I mean again there was no intention, no result that was
desired. There was no commercial consideration in making this movie. This is a
purely instinctive process which is really an anathema to the making of movies
today.
It is such a shame that the critics could not engage with
this movie.
Well Bob again in his way
told me that the critics wouldn’t get this movie, but the audience would if
they had a chance to see it and that has been born out buy my own personal
experience. I think the critics are now sort of for the most part, part of a
larger system, a more corporate system. And this (the movie) just doesn’t fit
into any niche that they can really relate to. They don’t have time anymore,
there’s not that kind of serious film criticism that there was 20, 30 years
ago. They don’t have time to write the kind of detailed soft pieces about a
film, even if they wind up rejecting it, they don’t have time to even think
about it before they reject it. Here it’s just so easy to go “Oh Bob Dylan, Oh
Larry Charles… Oh it’s a difficult movie, how dare they make a movie. I’m not
going to engage in this” or “I’m not gonna try to look into the movie I’m not
gonna try to be part of the movie.” And the end result is a lot of bad reviews
obviously.
‘Masked and Anonymous’ has a mood of the Carnivalesque,
for example, ‘Desolation Row goes to the Movies’. The colour, the lighting, the characters and so forth… There is a
circus feel, especially in the case of the main soundstage.
Yes, well it was a great
synthesis of various things that were going on in our heads at the time and if
we started today it might be totally different, you know.
One of my favourite
performances is that of Luke Wilson, who seems to have a more moralistic voice
in the movie.
Luke was great.
He just gets the part down perfectly, so real, so
convincing.
Luke is also one of these
people. He travelled with me quite a bit on this tour I did and he’s one of
these people also who totally gets it. I mean people either understand how cool
it is to make a movie with Bob Dylan or they don’t and he was one of the
people, he was the first person to commit to the movie. He just called me up
and said look “I will do anything in this movie,” and he and I became very
close friends through the making of this movie.
Yeah he appears to be a really good guy.
Yeah he’s a great guy
All the actors who contributed all provide really great
performances. John Goodman’s performance for example.
It’s fantastic… It’s a
great performance.
All the characters to me have this underlying cynicism
that’s rounded off with satire. In fact the film is full of dark humour and
black comedy.
Well right, the dark
humour and black comedy, which is so much a part of Bob’s music also, was
missed by a lot of people, a lot of the critics I think. Whereas, the audience
was able to see it and I think by the same token the performances are so
monumental, but very distinctive and unique and non-naturalistic in a way and
yet they also give dimensions of the characters, at the same time that it was
again hard for critics – used to a straight ahead naturalistic performance – to
kind of gage what this performance means, you know Jessica Lange or John
Goodman.
This is no normal movie and the actors are really absorbed
into the characters.
Yes they committed and
that’s the kind of actors they are. If you look at Jessica Lange and John
Goodman and Jeff Bridges body of work, Penelope Cruz… you see, they’re very
risk taking actors, they’re willing to go out there and they work. They were
all great.
One of the scenes that only got to me later on was the
scene in the movie about the shooting gallery of world leaders. That’s
hilarious!
Yeah, yeah that was
really funny, I agree. Well again we initially set out to have different
look-alikes and I couldn’t find good look-alikes of the versions I wanted and
finally we started to, well at a least there’s a good Ghandi, and it was like,
let’s use that. So it was again, you know, the synchronicity of it. You had to
be very open to the synchronicity of it to take advantage of it.
A lot of key scenes in the film take place on staircases,
such as Jack Fate's release from prison, his conversation with Oscar Vogel and
his visit to his mother's grave. There are also references to stairs in the
dialogue, like when Pagan Lace says, "We'll take the stairs" or when
Fate says, "My fall from grace didn't end at the bottom of those
stairs." What was the logic behind the staircase motif running through the
film?
Yes, Yes, absolutely.
Right that’s true. You know something. What you just said actually was one of
those things that happened at the screenings, I hadn’t thought about that.
There’s a lot of staircases imagery in the film. I just was attracted when I
went around scouting I was attracted to staircases in around LA there are a lot
of dramatic staircases hidden from view. If you ever seen Laurel and Hardy’s, The
Music Box, there were incredible staircases in L.A., on the side of
hillsides and I’d be struck by them as we drove by. And I’d say we could do the
scene here, we could do the scene there.
Something unconscious was drawing me to them. That’s a very interesting comment, I hadn’t even thought about
that. But I actually see it now. It’s totally valid.
The poetic feel of the movie and especially some of the
lines in the movie is astounding… lines such as: “Hospitals built as shrines to the diseases they
create” and “Vietnam War lost in the whore houses of Saigon”, and
importantly “We spend our time trying to kill time, but when all is said and
done time ends up killing us”…
I know. Sometimes Bob
would come in with a line a like that and say do you think we should use that
and I’d go, “You crazy!!?? It’s such an amazing line, you just changed my life
with that line”, you know. But Bob is very irreverent in relation to his own
work and he’s very willing to… he doesn’t like it to be pretty, he likes to
twist it and push it and make it sound wrong, you know, ‘Only time will tell
who has fell and who’s been left behind’. You know, he really likes to sort of
flirt with the wrongness of it, to see what might be elicited by that and with
a lot of these lines he would play with them and you know where I might be
really satisfied with the pretty version of it, he would want to push further
and deeper and see if we can kind of twist it around somehow. It was a fascinating
process to go through.
‘Masked and Anonymous’ totally subverts the notion of how
a film should be. It isn’t a movie as you would define a movie, it isn’t a
conventional movie, but that’s why it’s so great. Once you get into it there’s
so much.
I totally agree, I mean I
want to almost not call it a movie, because it’s so Brechtian and so theatrical
and so literary and so poetic… It seemed almost limiting to call it a movie.
So is it a work in progress? Every time it expresses something slightly different.
Yes, well one of the
things that I've said and I've felt a lot about this, is the concept of the
finished product. We’ve come to believe in this society that something is
finished, but that’s really an illusion and this is a movie that really can be…
if I could I would work on it for the rest of my life and change it and play
with it and re-do it, and take the pieces apart and put it back together.
Really it’s a flowing fluid thing rather than a finished product.
The passion that watching the film creates seems to last
and especially in your case
Well I feel
responsibility to it. I feel that it was something that was born out of a very
organic, pure process and I feel like it’s my responsibility to take care of
it. It’s a very precious thing and yet it’s a very resilient thing and I want
people to experience it. I really think that everybody who winds up
experiencing it is glad they did. But its been hard to get it to people, that
been the biggest obstacle really.
Well again, that’s the
inspiration that he has been to me, I mean he is a purely instinctive person,
he doesn’t judge his thoughts. These are my thoughts and they might have levity
they might not, lets find out. He really just follows his instincts. Look, they
made him Bob Dylan so he has reason to trust those instincts and so that was
the philosophy I adopted. It was like, “we’re just gonna trust our instincts
here and see where it takes us”
One of the phrases that strikes me, and seems to resonate
through the movie is the phrase “As long as I keep talking I know I’m still
alive”. All the characters seem to be governed by this idea, this frustration,
in finding something real, such as Pagan Lace’s tragic pleas of, “Save me, save
me”.
Yes, exactly. That’s
exactly right. There is a sense of the film on one level being about communication
and the breakdown of communication and how do we even hear, what do we hear?
What is the process by which we hear someone else, when the words come out of
someone else’s mouth? Things like that we were interested in. We’re interested
in language itself. Language itself becomes a theme of the film. What is the
purpose of language? How is language used to transmit ideas? These are kind of
interesting, complex themes that are there again, part of the fabric as well.
Of course the film itself uses language in many different
ways, not just musically, or vocally, but its there visually, it’s in what you
hear and what you don’t hear. It’s everywhere. It’s often only suggested. In
fact there are suggestions everywhere in the film. And all of these things going
on simultaneously can lead you off in so many different directions.
Right, and even when your
seeing a visually dense frame you are also hearing a cacophony usually in the
background of that frame as well, that could be peeled away as well to hear a lot
of different things going on too.
Well. even the reference to “Evil Doers” as spoken by
Edmund certainly has a resonance with the ‘here and now’.
Yeah and at the same time
there’s a kind of, almost a quaintness to that expression. And Bob is very interested
in that and I think if you listen to ‘Love and Theft’ its there too. And I
think this is part of that same period in his work which is the juxtaposition
of the old and the quaint and the old fashioned with the post-modern. He’s
trying to really juxtapose those forms and see what happens.
I was wondering is there any connection
between ‘Love and Theft’ and ‘Masked and Anonymous’? Did either/or inspire the
other? Did some of the lines from ‘Masked and Anonymous’ appear in ‘Love and
Theft’ and so forth?
Yes, what happened was,
he was working on ‘Love and Theft’ at the same time and in fact I had the
privilege of going to the recording studio and what happens is, a lot of lines
that didn’t wind up in ‘Masked and Anonymous’, winded up in Love And Theft and
vice versa. Again we’re mixing and matching and sort of making our own puzzle.
And so there were quite a few things like that, that emerged. Again, it was
part of his interest at the time. I think from ‘Time Out Of Mind’ through this
movie you can almost look at now as a period, like the born-again period,
or the electric period. And I think that now he’s done that, the
culmination is maybe the movie, now I think you’re going to see him drift for a
while until he finds that next thing that interests him.
This movie explores the idea of things that are not
defined, in many ways and Dylan doesn’t go for perfection.
Right, he very much
embraces the imperfect, and the beauty of the imperfect, the beauty of the flaw
and he’s not afraid of that. And that’s part of his courage as an artist. Also,
you know, he recognises the illusion of perfection… This goes back to the idea
of the finished product also, which is why there is such a wealth of Bob Dylan
bootleg material also.
And ‘Masked and Anonymous’ is as much an example of this
performance art.
Yes
As Pagan Lace says about the songs, “They may not be recognisable”,
the idea of change and the thing with ‘Masked and Anonymous’ and even Dylan as
a performing artist is that you may see something once, but the next time you
see it, it won’t be the same.
That’s right; it’s
constantly fluid and ever changing. It’s like a natural bi-product of who he
is. Very interesting that way… he’s very comfortable also – and inspired me to
be more comfortable – with the concept of ambiguity. He is willing again to
court ambiguity, court confusion, in order to explore the ambiguous nature of
whatever it is we’re talking about and when people are finally able to straddle
that ambiguity they get some deeper level out of the work and people who don’t,
people who cant handle the ambiguity, turn away and those are the people that
don’t wind up benefiting from him.
The film will continue to grow I know that in maybe ten
years time a line in the film will jump out like never before, it will have a
resonance. This even applies with ‘Love and Theft’. I don’t know if Dylan or
anyone else is aware of this, though he probably chuckles to himself over it,
but there are lines in ‘Love and Theft’ that come from…
The Japanese book?
Yes
Yeah, the ‘Confessions of
a Yakuza’… Yeah, well a couple of things about Bob: First of all, he is like
one of the last of the well-read people, you know what I mean? He’s so well
read and well read in the sense that he can quote anything. He can quote the
Bible, he can quote Rimbaud, he can quote Yeats, he can quote whatever it is
and he has just a really innate knowledge of literature, no matter what the
source, in many different languages also. By the same token, he is constantly…
he has these fragments, these bits rolling round in his head all the time and
he’s constantly – almost like a roulette wheel – trying different bits together
and seeing what happens and so when people say, “Oh this is from ‘Confessions
of a Yakuza’, I think he laughs, because he’s taken a totally non-poetic
sentence, perhaps out of the middle of a paragraph of ‘Confessions of a Yakuza’
and turned it into art.
The album itself conjured up the feel of the America South
in places, so how can you take a line from a Japanese book about a gangster and
make it part of what appears to be a vision of the American South or the lost
American South?
Exactly, taking these
seemingly mundane lines from this Japanese book and totally re-imagining them
in this other context. It’s the way art is actually made and I think again it
was a quick little glimpse into his process, which is fascinating.
In ‘Masked and Anonymous’ that whole idea applies also,
references, allusions and so forth and I guess therefore there’s a lot linkage
to people like T. S. Eliot.
Absolutely, well again
we’re talking about juxtaposing a lot of different forms, almost stripping them
together, one after the other; a biblical reference might be followed by a
reference to Shakespeare, which might be followed by a film-noir reference.
Just constantly pushing and mixing and matching and seeing if they hold
together, it’s an experiment to see if they hold together.
There is definitely a noir influence there…
Yes, that was a big
influence. We talked about movies like ‘Key Largo’ and I've described it as
‘sci-fi-film-noir-musical-comedy’. And I see Bob as this kind of post-
apocalyptic Humphrey Bogart or Clint Eastwood. Yeah and I think Bob is very
much of that era also. Those were movies that probably really made an impression
on him.
Well, ‘Empire Burlesque’ is made up of lines from ‘The
Maltese Falcon’ and so forth.
Yes, yes.
And of course while watching ‘Masked and Anonymous’,
watching the performances and watching Dylan’s performance as well as the use
of lines in the film harks back to that whole idea.
Absolutely, that was
again, very intended, very intentional.
Most of the critics who see the film don’t see an art
form. They have resentment to its experimentative nature and this whole Yakuza
situation with ‘Love and Theft’ only fuels their negativity and fuels
controversy.
Right, well people
thought they had something, again, this sensationalistic aspect of the media
today. People thought, “We’ve caught Bob Dylan somehow”. But instead what they
did was – and this is why the story fell apart – because it was so much more
complex and so much more enigmatic and ambiguous then the way it was presented,
that the media couldn’t handle it after a while. It’s like, if you really want
to enter this world, the world of Bob’s head, you better take your shoes and
get ready for a long journey.
And “You’ve got to be born on my side”
That’s right, that’s
right, and the media was not prepared to do that, and of course this movie is
also a movie where Bob really confronts the media and this is another reason
why the media have been somewhat resistant to it.
The media in many ways controls the minds of people. It’s
destroying art, and there’s a lot of lines in the film that apply to that idea:
“They have a reach and resonance more than even they themselves realise”.‘Masked
and Anonymous’ also addresses this issue of the media and corporate powers.
It creates an anxiety and
makes it much easier to make people vulnerable and therefore controlled
Truth again...
Well when you’re around
Bob that’s what’s coming out of him. You know, he’s somebody who’s seen more
than you have and knows more than you know and if your wise you listen and he
will tell you everything you need to know, but your gonna have to do the work
of interpreting it and that’s how the movie is also, its like Bob is telling
you everything, this is another aspect of the movie. This is Bob telling you
everything about himself also, but it’s not laid out clearly, you have to do
the work of kind of putting the pieces together.
I think it may have been Andrew Motion, or perhaps Sean
Wilentz who spoke of how in ‘Masked and Anonymous’ Bob is able to say the
things that as Bob Dylan he cannot say, but it can be done as Jack Fate.
Absolutely, well there is
an aspect of Bob, you know, he needs to be called Bob for instance, because
‘Dylan’ is our problem. Dylan is what we’ve imposed on him and he holds on to
his Bob-ness his humanness in way, his realness, because if he gets sucked into
the Dylan part, that’s the mythological part that everybody has kind of
created, that is almost too gigantic a burden for him to carry.
Yes, it must be hard to retain any form of reality or even
normality when you’re faced with that.
Yes...
In a documentary made about ‘Hearts of Fire’, Bob talks
about looking through the windows of a pub and seeing people being very real,
but once he’s walked into the room, he knows that will disappear.
Right, right. Well I
think also when the time comes people will start to see the connection between
Bob’s cinema work. One of the things I realised after the fact, I was watching
‘Don’t Look Back’ recently and I realised that the scene where he has the
argument with the English journalist, that’s Jeff Bridges character forty years
ago. And then wow! It started to connect to me and then also and I’d seen
‘Don’t Look Back’ five times and I watched it again recently and at the end of
the movie, there Bob’s sitting at the back of a limousine after a performance,
staring out the window, driving away and the camera just stays on him and I’m
thinking that’s a parallel ending to the ending of our movie.
Yes, the end of ‘Masked and Anonymous’ where he’s
handcuffed in the van.
Yes and I thought to
myself, you know, when I had the idea of that last shot of Bob’s face in the
movie, you know that image just popped into my head and I loved that image. And
then when I saw ‘Don’t Look Back’ I thought “God, that’s a beautiful companion
piece now”, and again, blurring that line between fiction and reality, and
despite the mythological fable-like quality of the movie, there’s also a
documentary-like quality to it as well. And I love that idea of blurring that
line.
Good, good, thank you.
Also with Jeff Bridges there is a connection to the Dylan
of 65-66, these characters all representing different things at once.
Yes, yes, and those connections
work on some levels and they’re more apparent on some levels than others and
its there for you to favour and explore and examine and analyse.
How did it feel to be moving form the territory of ‘Curb
Your Enthusiasm’ to ‘Masked and Anonymous’?
Well it was great, it’s
just an expansion of who I am. ‘Curb Your Enthusiasm’ taps into a lot of wonderful things and Larry David
is brilliant in a very parallel way actually to Bob. I often compare them,
because they’re both sort of visionaries, they can do what they do, they can’t
alter their vision based on the market place. This is what they have to offer,
if you like it, great, if you don’t like it, this what they have, there’s no
choice in the matter.
Learning how to
collaborate with Larry was good preparation for working with Bob in a lot of
ways. In fact I’m about to give Larry, for Christmas, the 15 CD set.
The Remaster Series?
Yes, the Remaster Series.
I’m gonna give him that, because he was not that conscious of Bob and he came
to see the movie and he liked it and he liked the soundtrack, so I’m giving
that as a gift.
The soundtrack itself is very clever, it has this
multicultural aspect. The mixing of cultures is very apparent, That L.A., South
American feel. Why did you go for that whole feel?
Well what I went for was
a combination of things. First of all, I collected images photographs;
journalistic photographs from third world countries for a couple of years. And
I just saw similarities in them and at the same time I really spent a lot of
time in downtown L.A. which is this juxtaposition of various culture, the sort
of crossroads of numerous cultures, African, Spanish, Mexican, Central America,
South America, Eastern European, American, poor, rich and then I would look at
the these pictures of third world countries and they looked a lot like downtown
Los Angeles and I started to sort of get this idea of the cacophony of this
country, that if you look at one direction in Los Angeles you see Beverly hills
and the beach, but if you look in the other direction it’s a third world
country. This kind of weirdly cacophonous, multi-ethnic, third world country
and so I loved that idea of exploring that a little bit more deeply, and then I
started thinking about the cover songs in different languages and then Jeff
Rosen was generous enough to just open the vaults to me and give me access to
all those covers. There’s thousands and thousands of these foreign covers and I
just started listening to them and some just drew you in so powerfully like the
Japanese version of My Back Pages, yeah and “this is such a natural here”. It
also makes a statement in the movie that people don’t realise the impact Bob
Dylan has had on their lives, he’s so pervasive its almost overwhelming.
Do you have a favourite cover?
Well I think the Japanese
version of ‘My Back Pages’… I was looking for a song to open the movie with and
that song somehow combined the energy and the force and the power and the
confusion and lucidity, it just said everything all at once to me. It really
was a very inspiring moment and I recognised that could be the first song. So I
love that, I really like almost all the music, there’s so much that we couldn’t
put in the movie and so much we couldn’t put on the soundtrack. And again it’s
amazing when you think about it that Bob has such a gigantic Japanese
following, yet the difficulty of translating him into Japanese is monumental
apparently, and yet there is this incredible powerful cult around him in Japan.
Well when he goes to Japan it’s always a huge thing.
It’s a huge thing yes.
My favourite is the song that is used when Fate goes to
visit his mother’s grave and I think its Sertab’s ‘One More Cup of Coffee’.
Yes ‘One More Cup of
Coffee’, fantastic also.
It has this real transcending feel, it rises, it has an
almost synthetic, yet organic orchestrated feel to it.
Yes it’s very dramatic
that’s one of my favourites as well. It has a dram to it a kinda Middle Eastern
exoticism to it; a mystery. Again it captures the best of Bob’s music, it
reinterprets it.
Even the original has that Hebraic or Middle Eastern feel:
Yes, yes, it does
Was the closing song going to be ‘City of Gold’?
No. You know, again I
only had a certain amount of input into the soundtrack and they felt they
wanted to put some bonus tracks on that were not from the movie and I argued to
put more stuff from the movie on the soundtrack. ‘City of Gold’s’ a great song,
which I loved, but I felt there were also songs from the movie we couldn’t put
on as well. They were pieces of songs that we used that we didn’t get to put on
the soundtrack. And maybe at some point again there will be a more, quote,
‘definitive’ version of the soundtrack.
Apart from complimenting the movie, the soundtrack is also
works brilliantly as separate entity, but when you listen it enhances the
vision you have of the film.
It’s definitely a great
album, I love the album and again you almost want more and there is a lot more
out there obviously.
The soundtrack also works as a nice covers compilation.
Yes, yes, well I mean
just the American stuff alone, the Jerry Garcia stuff and The Grateful Dead
stuff and I mean I didn’t even bother trying to use the Jimi Hendrix version of
‘All Along The Watchtower’ or Neil Young’s ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’, Neil Young
does an amazing version of ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’.
Neil Yong did ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’? I've never heard
that.
Ahh it’s on one of his
live albums. It is absolutely breathtaking. And there’s a great version that I
almost used of Bruce Springsteen doing ‘Chimes of Freedom’. That is an amazing
cover and so some of the American covers that are not quite as prevalent are
amazing and intense.
What were the songs you shot for the film that didn’t make
the cut?
Yeah, well as I said when
we filmed the music we kept the camera rolling. He was supposed to do six songs
and he wound up doing 22. I think there are four of his performances on the
soundtrack. So that leaves like 18 songs that I have, fully filmed. There’s
probably a handful of those that are traditional songs that he reinterprets with
the band.
‘Dixie’….
Yeah well ‘Dixie’ was
done initially as a warm-up song for whatever the next song was and it was just
so stirring, it was like, “let’s film this!”
Yes and the theme of that
song and the history of that song says so much and resonates throughout the
film as well. That was again one of those happy, quote, accidents, these
synchronistic moment, where it’s like wow you’re justifying the movie with this
song.
What other plans for the DVD as such do you have, such as
extra scenes and so forth?
Well that’s about all I
know about it really. I mean again my input on things like the soundtrack and
DVD are: They come to me, they ask me my opinion, I give my input, my very
impassioned input and then other people make final decisions about it and I had
to let go of it to some degree on that level. And I’m sure it will be very high
quality. You’ll see a really high quality transfer of the high def, which is
good.
What was it shot in again?
It’s called 24p. 24 frames
progressive scan. Its high definition and it’s gonna look great in that format
actually, so I’m happy about that. And in terms of stuff I know they’re gonna
put on, there’s a lot of material that didn’t make it into the final movie,
some whole scenes that were cut and in a version of the movie that eventually
didn’t make it into the final version and those will be sort of added as bonus’
as well as at least one song that we shot.
Did he record ‘Standing in the Doorway’?
Yes he did and I think
that will… I think that’s going to make it onto the DVD actually. Beautiful
version of it…
Well it took him a few years to perform it live, so when
it happened it was a big thing.
Yeah it’s a great version
of it actually and also you’ll see the uncut ‘Cold Irons Bound’ which is also a
stirring version of that song.
Yeah, he has a great band too.
Yeah those guys are
amazing. And again even that era, kinda is over in a sense. The band has gone
through some personnel changes and so it captures that period with that band
which was tremendous band for him, they were just really tight, really
together, really knowledgeable, and you see them as you do in the movie,
musically communicating with each other through the movie.
There’s an understanding among them, as there is with the
actors in the movie, an understanding of what needs to be achieved.
Right, well you have to
get lucky sometimes. We had very game, risk taking people involved in the movie
who were ready to commit, ready to take a leap and it produced an amazing thing
you know.
Was, ‘Tryin’ To Get To Heaven’, recorded for the film?
Because it was suggested in the screenplay...
‘Tryin’ To Get To
Heaven’… I’m trying to remember frankly… ‘Wicked Messenger’… It may have been.
I can’t remember right now... I think we did ‘Tryin’ To Get To Heaven’; yes I’m
pretty sure we did it. Hold on one sec (leaves to find out)…
I think there’s a section where….
Where Luke and John are
talking about it.
Yes where I believe they’re talking about life and death
and applying it to ‘Drifter’s Escape’, but I think in the screenplay it applies
to ‘Tryin’ To Get To Heaven’.
Yes, that’s right, I’m
pretty sure. Well again it’s one the things, it’s part of the ambiguity and as
Penelope says, “The songs are imprecise and open to interpretation”. And that
was one of those moments yes.
The fact that in the screenplay it says ‘Tryin’ To Get To
Heaven’ and you use ‘Drifter’s Escape’ is interesting, but still acceptable,
because it still applies to the song.
Well, and Bob loves the
idea of playing with that. I might say, “Well you know the song’s going to be
fragmented” and he’d say, “Good, let’s do that then”, he’s also for
fragmenting, deconstructing whatever’s constructive. “Let’s see what happens if
we break it apart, lets see what happens if we turn it upside down, lets see”.
Absolutely, he phrases
things differently each time, he changes his voice. He has so much more control
over his music than people recognise. Even now, he’s doing this voice now,
that’s a kind of wizened old mans voice. Like a Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf
voice. But it is a voice.
The thing about this voice is that, the words and the
music if even 30 years old, they resonate completely differently, they take on
wisdom and an experience, they become convincing. The voice adds the depth that
the songs only hint at.
Exactly, it changes the
meaning of the song and that’s one of the things he’s always looking to do is
reinvent the songs for himself, he never listens… I was with Jesse, his son one
day and I was talking about how on ‘Love and Theft’ he doesn’t really play harp
and that I had been listening to ‘Pledging My Time’ on ‘Blonde on Blonde’ and
he does this avant-garde, Miles Davis sort of harp solo, and how brilliant that
was. And Jesse says, “From the day he walked out of that recording studio for
‘Blonde on Blonde’, he has never listened to that record again”. And that’s the
way he is you know, he needs to keep it fresh, keep it looking forward, don’t
look back. He needs to be constantly reinventing it; he can’t get sucked into
the nostalgia of it. This is the curse of Bob Dylan in a sense, in that he
can’t really enjoy his music like we do, he has to be continuingly be
reinventing it and that’s an interesting dilemma for him.
Dylan can do something amazing on guitar, harmonica, or be
it his vocal style and then a year later, or a month later, or a week later he
does something else completely different which ruins what happened previously
and people will say, “Dylan cant play guitar, he cant sing”, but sometimes he
can play guitar beautifully and he can sing beautifully, it depends on how you
catch the moment and what he’s doing.
And I think he’s – as I
was saying before – the whole thing about being misunderstood: He’s played the
good guitar, he’s sung the songs nicely already, he’s done that. If you look at
‘Dont Look Back’, you see him just standing on stage, him and a guitar, he’s
amazing, he can play that guitar, he can play that harmonica, he can sing the
songs, hit the notes, he’s done that now, he’s looking to explore what would
happen if he risks going almost off, if he risks almost getting to the edge of the
expectable version of the song. What will happen, he’s curious about that
process and he’s willing to risk it. And of course the audience, who loves him,
is willing to go there with him you know. And cynical people who aren’t willing
to go there are gonna look at it cynically and he’s learned to live with that.
Well, what you said about Miles Davis totally applies, and
Joni Mitchell has said that Dylan and herself as well as Miles, are pioneers,
the willingness to experiment, to change the boundaries of what it is your
working within, or outside of even.
Well this is why in my
opinion – look I respect deeply Paul McCartney and The Rolling Stones – but
they have essentially become nostalgia acts and Bob is not a nostalgia act, he
is still a vital artist, recreating and creating new work all the time, night
by night, and that’s one of the reasons now, over the last few years especially
with this band he had, he became a great concert draw, again because I think he
was inspired by groups like The Grateful Dead to come out every night and
reinvent the show. So you never knew from night to night what you were gonna
get.
Well this band was very important. Charlie Sexton in
particular seems to work on a deeply emotional level. So he would feel the
song, feel the emotion and then transcribe it, whereas Larry has all the riffs,
all the clichés and all the genres and he pumps them through. He has the
scientific side and then you have Charlie Sexton weaving within that. And then
on the other side you have Dylan who’s on a completely different level again,
totally trying to subvert it, each time.
Well watch Charlie, watch
Bob during the movie and you see... Charlie really was… played a really crucial
role in channelling Bob for the rest of the band and kind of waiting on Bob to
see where Bob was going and then he would then almost musically explain to the
band and then the band was kinda able to follow along. Charlie was a really
important conduit in the band as well; because he is such an intuitive
musician, that he was able to join with Bob and then he was able to also
communicate that musically to the band. Tony has that also, Tony also in his
way is doing the same thing.
A lot of musicians such as McCartney have to a certain
extent stayed with the same mould and that’s the great thing with
Bob, he doesn’t.
Well I mean look, The
Rolling Stones and Paul McCartney, certainly have amazing songs and it is great
to hear Paul McCartney can still sing the songs like he did in 1964, it’s
amazing and my hats off to him and The Rolling Stones too. I saw them recently,
here in L.A. and they sounded great but they are basically recreating the
records at this point and they’re not really stretching, I’d rather Paul
McCartney do ten less songs and stretch… I had the same experience with John
Fogarty, I went see John Fogarty about two years ago and I love John Fogarty
and I'd never seen him live. He came out, he did every Creedance Clearwater
song exactly as it was on the record and he did them perfectly, but when it was
over you never felt you needed to see him again.
Paul Simon is very similar in that aspect.
Yes exactly, you don’t
feel you’re… You feel like your getting a pre-packaged event. That if you went
back next year you’d get the same thing, instead of next year maybe he’ll do a
whole different set of songs, a whole different way, which is what Bob offers
you. And I think that its hard for these massive acts to sort of do what Bob
does, which is, really experiment and really extend his range, it’s a scary thing,
a very risky thing.
Now Bob’s out of the constant media scrutiny he’s able to
experiment without worrying.
Yes and have this fervent
following that is willing to be there with him and be part of that with him.
There
are certainly many performers out there now who has been co-opted, who
are merely agents of corporations, knowingly and unknowingly.
Well even the idea of the
protest songs that they want him to sing, we made that list, it’s the irony
that these protest songs are owned by large corporations, you know, how much
impact can they have? The counter culture has been co-oped. So here are these
great songs, these great protest songs but they’re owned by the media
conglomerates who use them to make money and there’s kind of a bitter irony to
that. I think that we’re exploring there.
Returning to some scenes in the film. The scene in the bar when Luke is
speaking to Fred Ward and there’s a line in there which in the context I find hilarious.
“If you want the world to
be round its round, if you want the world to be flat its flat”… “Who’s
presiding over this slaughter house, me or you?”
Yes there’s that and when the guy replies with “I know
some things too!”
Yeah, yeah, and then Luke
says, “The more you know, the more you’ll suffer”.
Which is like a mantra
really, “The more you know the more you’ll suffer”, that almost explains Bob’s
psyche to a large degree, he knows so much, you know, that it’s a burden to be
him on a lot of levels.
That whole period from ‘Time Out Of Mind’ to the film
interestingly deals with the whole essence of time. One of the lines Dylan
says is “We try to kill time, but in the end time ends up killing us”.
Yeah well and that’s Bob,
you see him exploring that theme in ‘Time Out Of Mind’ and ‘Love and Theft’ and
this movie. And you see that in contrast to ‘Dont Look Back’ or ‘Highway 61’,
where mortality is kind of an abstract concept. Here there’s a reality to it, a
gravity – no pun intended – to it. And that’s a big difference; you’re seeing
his thoughts through that prism.
The experimentation with time is something prevalent
especially in ‘Time Out Of Mind’ and in particular for me in my favourite Dylan
song, ‘Standing in the Doorway’ which kind of stops time.
Yes, that’s really true.
And we talk about time and dreamtime and things like that in the movie too and
we’re playing with that idea as well in the movie.
“In my dreams I’m walking through intense heat”.
Yes, and then he said, “I
don’t pay any attention to my dreams”. I mean Christian Slater has a line and
its been cut down now. There’s a longer version of that scene where Christian
Slater says to Chris Penn, “Have you noticed when you dream a dream seems to
last many hours, but only lasts a few seconds?” and Chris Penn says, “No not
really”. So we’re discussing it and we’re also having fun with it at the same
time, we’re playing with those ideas and exploring those ideas.
How do you feel about the scholarly response to the film?
Well I think that whether
it be Andrew Motion, or Sean Wilentz or Greil Marcus, I think anybody that’s
willing to step back and think about this movie and then enter into it, and
dive in and explore it and wander around in it the way Bob sort of does, is
gonna be rewarded with a lot of very interesting cross-references and allusions
and ideas and themes that you don’t normally see in a movie and so in a lot of
ways, you know, like Art Form chose it as one of their ten best films.
It seems it requires people who are not working as movie critics to have the
patience and time to explore the movie.
Do you have a favourite Dylan song, although that’s
probably a difficult question?
Yeah it really is. I was
listening to ‘Hard Rain’ as I was coming in today, and I was thinking about
‘Desolation Row’, and I was also, I always loved and wanted to put in the
movie, ‘The Groom’s Still Waiting At The Altar’, which is one of my favourites
and another favourite of mine is from ‘The Bootleg Series’, and its called
‘Angelina’. It depends on my mood to a large degree. But those are some of the
song I tend to go back to.
The songs that seem to strike you are the epics and they
fit into the mould of ‘Masked and Anonymous’ in many ways.
Yes and that’s why I
didn’t use more of those kinda songs in the movie. It seems superfluous almost
to use ‘Desolation Row’ in this movie. There are a lot of great obscure songs.
He has beautiful simple songs – the ‘Blood On The Tracks’ period – about
relationships are so resonate, ‘Brownsville Girl’… I love ‘Joey’. There’s just
a whole range. I love… This is a song I wanted him to do and for a long time he
was going to do for the movie, was, ‘Senor’, but we wound up using the Jerry
Garcia version, which has a beautiful guitar solo. So I could probably be naming
favourite songs forever.
Interesting you mention ‘Brownsville Girl’, there’s
supposedly a script for that somewhere.
Well there is one. I
believe that Jay Cocks has written a script.
I don’t know what the status of the film is, but I know that a script
does exist and has been floating around and I hope that it gets made.
Are you hoping to experiment further with Bob?
Oh even as we were
finishing this movie we started working on a sequel so we have been talking
about that for quite some time. Whether we will get a chance to sit down and
get to work on it any time soon, I’m not sure. But we talked about that not
long before we finished this one… we started talking about the next one. I mean
he had a great experience making the movie and I think he’d like to do it
again.
Well he’s obviously found the right person to do it with.
Well we had a very good
collaboration, it was very fruitful I mean the fact that we managed to get this
all the way through the system and out there on the movie screen was the
miracle really. That’s what I tell people.
The promotion for the film perfectly suits it also, not
too much and not too little and also going on tour with the film and talking
about it is also a great help.
Yes exactly. Yeah it
helps contextualise it for people too, which I've been happy to do.
Of course most Dylan fans were bound to like this film but
overall I think the response has been warm and receptive.
I think so, I've been
very… It’s been very moving actually to be at these screenings and have people
thank me for making the movie and that’s a tremendous personal experience to
have and I’m grateful to Bob for giving me that chance.
At Sundance you seemed hesitant and expecting a backlash.
Yeah, but you know, it
was even reported that I said, “Aren’t there any questions?” and I was even
doing that with humour, and but it’s reported at a certain angle and it sounds
like a totally different experience that it actually was. I mean I actually
tell people and I’m quite honest about this, that Sundance was a tremendous
experience. At the first screening there was so much expectation and so much
backlash and so much controversy. But there were two more screenings that were
also just amazing, and the audience responded tremendously to those. But those are
not really reported about and I was there with Luke and a bunch of people and
we went to those screenings and I talked at those screenings. Those were a
little more intimate and a little less pressure on them and I almost wish we’d
started that way, instead of this big centrepiece premiere with all the stars.
Bob showed up on form as usual, complete with woolly hat
and a blonde wig.
Yeah, yeah. [laughs] Always masked and anonymous with him, yes.
Dylan's humour is so underplayed. Once when Dylan performed
with Joni Mitchell, the press the next day said "Dylan Smiles" as if
to point out that he has no sense of humour. The straight-faced Sundance performance is proof of this.
Right, exactly, exactly.
No he was having fun. The making of the movie pleased him. He enjoyed the
process, he enjoyed the challenge, he enjoyed the interaction with the other
actors, again he found another thing he wanted to understand and he was a quick
learner obviously and really observed the lessons quickly and wound up having
these amazing experiences with these other great actors.
What was it like between scenes?
Well first of all because
I shot on 24p, I also was not even cutting, I was just kinda jumping on the set
and making some adjustments and going back in.
Maybe my most brilliant directorial touch was saying to Bob right at the
beginning, “Listen, we have 20 days to shoot this movie, if you go back to the
trailer after each shot, each take, the crew is just not gonna care, but if I
get you a comfortable chair and you sit on the set between takes and so as the
crew walks by carrying the cables, carrying the ladders, they can go “Hi Bob”
and you can nod at them, these people will die for you” and he said “ok”. And
so he sat on the set throughout the entire movie and never went to his trailer.
So everybody who worked on the show was able to have a personal relationship
with Bob and so those people then were willing to do whatever had to be done to
make this a great movie, every single person on the movie, and he was just
available and accessible to them and that worked out great.
The director of ‘Hearts of Fire’, tried to get a similar
approach, because people normally approach Bob in a very weird and strange way
and you have to get away from that problem.
Yeah right, well Bob was
in a different place for this movie then he was for ‘Hearts of Fire’. And I
think he was more curious and more open and there was a lot of other great
actors hovering around. I mean I would walk onto the set and there would be Bob
and Jeff Bridges and Jessica Lange just kinda hanging out and talking and I was
like “Wow! I have to do something now”. So it was just a great environment to
be in, such a heightened environment.
Did he have much advice for the actors?
He would have instinctive
advice about movement, he would have certain things in mind in terms of
movement or the way a certain lines should be spoken occasionally and he would
suggest that very, very occasionally, but normally once around the set he was
an actor and did not try to impose his ideas on anybody else.
Bob’s acting I think is very natural in one sense and
perhaps this is because you said. “Just be”.
Yes exactly and that’s
not easy to do but he was able to do that.
There is still a layer between him and the camera, but the
acting is still really great.
There’s a certain level
of honesty to it that is very powerful and not typical and I think that also
threw a lot of people. It’s a strange and unsettling performance really and to
most people it comes as a shock, so I think that’s why some people had some
resistance to it, because again it was kind of like, “Wow this is something I
don’t really understand”, it strips away everything and adds new layers at the
same time.
When he’s shaving at the mirror in the trailer and Jeff
Bridges comes in I think that harks back to ‘Renaldo and Clara’ in one sense
where Renaldo is looking in the mirror. Very similar
Yes, yes, absolutely. And
then Jeff is looking in that mirror also and they’re both looking back at each
other and reflecting on each other, almost like alter egos. A lot of that is
almost Bob debating with himself in a sense. The journalist winds up being an
interesting shadow figure for Jack Fate and vice versa.
Yes, there’s an underlying dialogue between them…
Yes almost like one of
them is a ghost in a sense.
Who is it that plays the version of ‘Angelina’ near the
end?
That’s a man named Bruce
and I wanted to use the actual recording and we couldn’t make the instrumental parts
work. It didn’t seem to work with the words, it got intrusive, so we had him
come in and basically do an instrumental version that we were able to use and
he did it in a couple of other places in the movie as well. I was very
committed with trying to use actual songs from wherever, but there were a
couple of places where I just couldn’t make it work, we couldn’t make the music
edit work, so he was able to come in and adapt for the specific space we were
talking about.
There’s also a part in the movie with a riff that sounds
like ‘Gotta Serve Somebody’ as well.
Yes, that also I think… I
had started with a gospel version of ‘Gotta Serve Somebody’. I think it might
have been Mavis Staples actually. But as the sequences got more polished, I
needed that riff and I dunno if we took the riff from the Staples song or
whether Bruce did another version of that there. But, there were a couple of
places where we were playing with that a lot, to fill in space in certain
places and where the actual songs themselves could not be adapted and we would
have to go back and create a piece based on that. Also in the hotel room when
the young Jack Fate meets up with Angela Basset for the first time, we used a
kinda dubbed version of ‘Political World’ there that was kinda very interesting
also, that was really fun to play with.
I thought that reminded me of something.
Very, very far under the
surface you’ll hear Bob’s voice going “Political world, political world”, but
it’s very mixed down.
Have you ever heard ‘Farewell Angelina’
I've heard ‘Farewell
Angelina’ too which is also amazing, that was the thing, there was obviously
this falling into Ali Baba’s cave or something, there’s a treasure trove and
you don’t know where to start sometimes, there’s so much great stuff to choose
from. I mean even the song on the jukebox in the bar; I experimented with so
many different songs before I finally decided on ‘He Was a Friend of Mine’.
It almost has a crackly LP feel to it…
Yes, well it is off an
LP, it’s the old version of the song that he originally did. So again I would
just like instinctively put different songs up against certain images and
seeing if it felt right… That wound up working great.
Did Bob ever think about recording his rarer songs and
using them?
Well I mean he… We
recorded so many songs that he recorded a number of older songs and redid them
in his way and a lot of that stuff just didn’t end up making it into the movie.
So there is a quite a bit of Bob music, that is just now in the movie right
now. In fact I was just thinking as I said that, there is a rehearsal take of
‘All Along The Watchtower’. Its like an ‘All Along The Watchtower’ jam without
a vocal that I didn’t find till after I finished the movie. I’d forgotten that
he had done it and I thought, “God, that alone is a fantastic kind of
instrumental”, almost like an Allman Brothers version of ‘All Along The
Watchtower’, that was just great.
I can imagine that being great, because what you tend to
see when a spontaneous jam moment happen is – although he’s not a
conventionally great guitar player – he’ll come up with a cool riff and
never go back to it again. He’ll do it once and then all of a sudden Larry or
Charlie would pick up on that riff.
Exactly, exactly and they
can elaborate on it and then suddenly it takes off. And then one of them will
start a lead off of that and then it starts to soar.
I can imagine this ‘All Along The Watchtower’ is like
that.
Yeah it’s really
something. I have to remember to mention this Jeff Rosen, because that’s something
that should come out at some point it’s really quite spectacular….
I think I’m gonna have to
get going, I’m enjoying this so much, I could do this all afternoon.
I have to go back to
‘Curb Your Enthusiasm’, but thank you very much
Well I never thought I’d be able to speak to you as long
as this.
Oh that’s my pleasure. I so deeply appreciate what you’re
doing and deeply appreciate your love for the movie and your devotion to it, I
mean its been a great experience talking to you, I can’t thank you enough for
all your hard work.
