Haynes: A question of identity
TORONTO - No one explains Todd Haynes better than Todd Haynes himself. "Basically all my films challenge the idea of identity as something that's cohesive and complete," says the director of "I'm Not There," which opened Wednesday.
It's no surprise, then, that his version of a biopic would fracture the genre so that six actors - including Cate Blanchett - play incarnations of Bob Dylan during crucial junctures in his career.
At 46, the Brown-educated Haynes is no longer grad-student age, though in sneakers and a nonchalant sweater he could still pass for someone clinging to his dissertation. During the Toronto International Film Festival this fall, he articulated - ever so articulately - the aims behind a film he knows will challenge audiences weaned on "Ray" and "Walk the Line."
Q: Obviously, Dylanologists and completists will be decoding this movie, looking deeply for all sorts of connections and symbols. What do you want non-Dylanologists to get out of it, especially younger people for whom Dylan isn't a cultural reference?
A: I think it's easier on people like that than on the rest of us. When Dylan fanatics see this film they have a whole other dialog going on in their head that I think on first viewing obliterates the experience of the film. It's more possible to have a good time and not worry so much if you're not a Dylan fan. It's an unusual movie, there's no question about it, but you have to kind of go with it, you can't fight it and worry about understanding every single reference in the film. And I think that's true for any great Dylan song.
Q: So you put yourself in the category of the non-fanatic?
A: I never was beforehand. The serious ones are a breed unto themselves. I never was one of those people and I'm not now. I don't follow his concerts and what his playlists are. I've become a Dylan scholar as a result of this film. But that's quite different.
Q: In your scholarly research, what did you come upon that really helped unlock pieces of the movie for you?
A: There was never a single key that I turned that unlocked it - except for the basic concept, that this is somebody who really did transform and reject who he was before and make that a kind of life practice. That was the best key, but what that unlocks is an endless conflict and contradictions and voices taking different positions throughout this life.
Q: What's the challenge of making a movie that wants to bring people in to learn about a rock hero, but also in some way wants to deny them the wish to become infatuated, the way fans do, with that figure?
A: When you look at it as someone from the past who occupies a privileged place, one feels you can see it more clearly from a distance. It's a process of canonizing that person and reiterating the special, removed place that they occupy. In many ways the traditional biopic might help contribute to that, because it makes them completely visible in one bite. It makes them something you can hold in your hands at once. To be thrust into the '60s and to be thrust into the inside of what that artist was actually doing, one rarely feels that sense of cohesion and complete understanding,
To me, getting to the core of the Beatles, for instance, would be trying to understand what people mean when they say, "When I first heard the Beatles on the radio I pulled my car over to the side of the road because I'd never heard anything like it before" . . . To understand the shock of that, the newness of them - to me that's the challenge, and in an equivalent way that's what I was trying to do with Bob Dylan. It's why I wanted to cast a woman to play him in 1966, because at that moment, physically, the music he was producing, is one of the most famous Dylans. But the shock value of that, the strangeness of it, the weirdness of that body and [those] hand gestures and hair and the way he talked, is something that we've lost.
Q: Clearly you want to celebrate the way he shaped and reshaped his identity, but do you want appreciation of that to lead viewers back to what he was singing and writing about?
A: I don't know that he has messages, per se. I think his statements have everything to do with reactions to what was going on around him at the time. . . . He was a person who had messages at certain times and was giving answers at certain times to people who needed them. But he was just as apt to reject those answers when he came back around the next time. And ultimately I'm saying that's much more healthy. That's a much more radically positive way to be - to be able to change yourself, to dismiss yourself and move on to other things. And that, possibly, says more about who we are as a culture than some absolutely singular idea of what it means to be American. 