Bob Dylan Insisted on Inaccurate Scene in Movie

During the making of the Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown, due Dec. 25, Timotheé Chalamet complimented director/co-screenwriter James Mangold on a particular piece of dialogue. “Bob put that in,” Mangold replied.

As Rolling Stone‘s new cover story reveals, Dylan and Mangold met multiple times before production began. “I felt like Bob just wanted to know what I was up to,” Mangold says. “ ‘Who is this guy? Is he a shithead? Does he get it?’ I think the normal questions anyone asks when they’re throwing themselves in league with someone.” Dylan offered a substantial amount of feedback on the script in those meetings, eventually marking up a copy of it. 

“Bob would have these one-off lines that were so fantastic,” Chalamet says. “Jim has an annotated Bob script lying around somewhere. I’ll beg him to get my hands on it. He’ll never give it to me.”

Dylan also personally requested that Elle Fanning‘s character be renamed — his real-life early-Sixties girlfriend, Suze Rotolo, a key influence in his political awakening, is known as Sylvie Russo in the movie.   As Dylan saw it, Rotolo was “a very private person and didn’t ask for this life,” Fanning says. “She was obviously someone that was very special and sacred to Bob.” 

The line Chalaet complimented seems to have been in a scene where Bob and Sylvie argue —   Sylvie laments the idea of returning from a European trip to “live with a mysterious minstrel,” and Dylan, whose first album flopped, shoots back: “Mysterious minstrels sell more than a thousand records. Maybe you just don’t come back at all.”

Dylan had at least one more mischievous bit of influence on the movie. Edward Norton, who plays the late Pete Seeger in the film, says Mangold told him Dylan insisted on putting at least one totally inaccurate scene into A Complete Unknown, though the actor wouldn’t reveal details. When Mangold told Dylan he was worried about viewers’ reactions, as Norton tells it, Bob stared at him. “What do you care what other people think?” he asked. (There are several possibilities for the scene in question, including the moment when an infamous shout of betrayal from the crowd — which actually happened a year later — is placed at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival.)

Norton, a longtime Dylan fan, notes the singer’s “obvious pleasure in obfuscation and distortion,” adding, “He’s such a troublemaker.”

Read our full cover story on Chalamet and A Complete Unknown here.