BTS: A Complete Unknown

IBC

All the talk will be about the remarkable lead performance but creating an environment for Timothee Chalamet to shine is as much down to the subtle camera, nuanced lighting and family on-set atmosphere that DP Phedon Papamichael achieves with regular directing partner James Mangold.

According to cinematographer Phedon Papamichael ASC, when director James Mangold talked to Bob Dylan about the picture he was hoping to make about him asked, ‘Well, what's this movie about?’

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“Jim replied, ‘It's about this kid who grows up in Minnesota in a Jewish family and because of the smaller community there he feels suffocated and so he leaves and goes to New York. There he finds a new family and new friends but after a while he feels suffocated by that. So he leaves them.

“And Bob was like ‘Yeah, I like it.’”

In the biopic A Complete Unknown, Dylan’s music is foregrounded in the pivotal few years from 1961 to 1965 in which he found staggering fame as a nation’s piped piper, but actually who he is, his motivations and even his family background remain as much a mystery as ever.

What we do get is a tremendous amount of music, played with extraordinary mimicry and no little skill by Timothee Chalamet in performances recorded live.

“The original plan was to record Timmy and then playback on set, which is how we made Walk the Line with Joaquin Pheonix,” says Papamichael who shot the Oscar nominated drama for Mangold. “As the movie progressed Timmy got so comfortable with the role. I mean not just his singing, but all his mannerisms and how he would pay attention to detail.  

“Typically, Jim and I don't like actors asking to watch takes back. In this case it was different because Timmy would come and ask ‘Can I see take four?’ I would observe him. We’d sit and watch playback and Timmy looked at his performance and then he’d glance over and ask ‘Can I try something? and he'd go again and just do a minor adjustment such as choosing to look up and make eye contact at a different time. All these subtle things were really inspiring to shoot.”

This is Papamichael’s seventh film with Mangold, following features including 3:10 to Yuma, Ford v Ferrari and Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny.

He calls Walk The Line one of the most fun experiences he has had behind the camera and that A Complete Unknown was similar. “When you have a performer like this covering songs of such emotional weight you know you are going to create images that strike a chord with so many people and that it will bridge the generational divide.”

He is talking the day after an industry screening which was the first time he’d seen the film with the final mix. “It’s almost like a concert experience. There’s so much music in the film you come out of it like you've been to a concert.”

Chalamet was able to perfect his performance, including learning guitar, harmonica and piano, thanks to extended breaks in filming caused by Covid and then the actors’ strikes. They finally got to shoot at the start of 2024, the whole film going through a rapid editorial and post schedule to get it ready and released for Christmas.

“Once he started performing, we abandoned the plan of playing pre-records because he kept asking to do it live. All the technical team of onset music supervisors tend to prefer playback because it's easier in post to time dialogue to the music correctly but we realised that a live performance really adds something special. There’s no timing mechanism and no earpieces.

“I also knew from Walk The Line that you never really know what you’re going to get from your star lead until they get up on stage. So, we needed to be very fluid and reactive with our coverage. I was very fortunate to have my great Steadicam operator, Scott Sakamoto (Maestro, A Star is Born). He had a lot of freedom to find the moments. I typically communicate with operators even during a take but because playback was so loud I trusted Scott to go find it and we told Timmy and Monica (Barbaro, who plays Joan Baez) to just do your thing and we’ll capture it. Scott is very instinctive knowing when to push in a little you know.”

Most of the film is shot single camera except for scenes of the Newport Folk Festival, filmed in a park near Westfield, New Jersey, where they had to maximise coverage so that the 150 extras looked like they were 10,000.

“On stage we tended not to do that many takes simply because you can't when you’re essentially capturing a live performance. The songs are being played all the way through. We’re not setting up different shots to build into coverage.”

A rerun of Dylan’s controversial Newport 1965 appearance features Chalamet playing three songs on electric guitar and a fourth on acoustic. “We shot that back-to-back, each song, without cutting and I think maybe even in the first three songs we rolled straight through. Even if you only have 150 extras, there was a real interaction between Timmy and the audience that he was feeding off.

“He's able to tune out the film crew and there's a great rapport and familiarity with Scott who is right next to him. That enables you to get these moments that don't feel very set up because they are organically integrated into the whole coverage.”

The film is lit with warm tones and a gold, red and brown palette in which Papamichael embraced the practical and stage lights of the period.

“As Bob discovers who he is and his music becomes more expressive, visually he also becomes more confident in his wardrobe with polka dot and orange shirts, a leather jacket, he puts on Ray-Bans on, his hair grows out, so we change to a darker and more saturated palette.

“I didn't really have to do anything photographically. The arc of the story dictates these changes. He does have more energy on stage, the venues are bigger and that dictates to the camera that it needs to be a little more energetic and move a little bit more, whereas the first scenes in the club the camera moves were a lot calmer.”

There's a transition in the movie where we move from the look of the 1950s to the look of the sixties, coinciding with Dylan’s rock n roll status. “The colour spectrum expands a little, we're saturated and more aggressive with primary colours and contrast. I'm also getting more aggressive with the stage lights.

“For the final Newport Festival footage I gave Tim a hard light. He's got an incredible face so I wasn't worried about beauty lighting or having to diffuse it so I embraced harsher light, shadows and contrast on his face and his band on stage fall more into darkness because it evoked more of the feeling that we get from the black and white footage that exists of the actual performance.”

The DP notes that stage lighting of the time tended to be a neutral white colour. “I learned on Walk The line from a roadie who worked with Johnny Cash that they didn’t introduce reds or blues on stage until the late sixties. Because we’re dealing with black and white references of the period you often have to guess your palette.”

Director and DP talked about the Kodachrome look of the 1960s and the way colour was captured on film stock back then. They decided to shoot with the Sony Venice 2 digital camera because of its high sensitivity to light and to request that Panavision custom-make lenses that are a hybrid of vintage B-series anamorphic glass from the ‘60s and ‘70s.  

“I was looking films from the sixties and seventies such as The French Connection. The Conversation and the work of Gordon Willis (Klute). Together with a lot of stills photography from the period, particularly from colour pioneer William Eggleston. I really wanted that look and texture for New York. The anamorphic aspect ratio allowed for close-up shots that still capture the surrounding environment, including blocking and interactions.”

To accentuate the film look after colour correction in the DI suite, he took the picture through FotoKem’s SHIFTai process, otherwise known as an analogue intermediate (AI). This transfers the digital neg by laser to a film negative before scanning it back to digital.

“Doing this picks up all the film grain and characteristics, It holds up really well because you’re creating grain organically in the AI so you have to do very little correction. I can do my night exteriors with minimal lighting, still have advantages of the digital camera and the speed of shooting by using minimal backlights. I could literally just put the camera on the street at night and have my AC following the actors holding a little Rosco light it which I control with by DMX remotely. I’ll use it for a little highlight, to supplement the light we’re getting naturally from the street light or some storefront. That gave the actors a lot of freedom.”

Early-1960s New York was blossoming with artistic and Boheme energy that Mangold was keen on resurrecting for the screen. “Jim imagined a textured movie that was gritty and grimy with peeling plaster and decaying walls and rust and soot and cigarette butts and trash,” says Mangold’s production designer of the last decade, François Audouy. “Modern day New York has a more antiseptic sort of quality now though. It’s been sandblasted and cleaned up, we actually found that texture and these fixed-in layers became a really big asset for us. It turns out that the other side of the Hudson River looks more like New York than New York does now.”

MacDougal Street in Greenwich Village is a central setting for the film, with storefronts dressed as famous spots like The Kettle of Fish, Café Reggio, Café Wha, Don and Elsie’s Music Box and Minetta Tavern. A number of old theatres and bars in New Jersey served as the interiors for places like Carnegie Hall and The Gaslight.

“The aesthetics are meant to convey what a creative melting pot the Village was back then,” says the Greek who is a child of the sixties.  “You had the first hippies starting to emerge, you had the jazz revolution with Miles Davies and Charlie Mingus, the explosion of pop art and Andy Warhol’s Factory Studio. There was a lot of political upheaval with Vietnam and the Civil Rights movement. It was such an incredible time with all these things brewing at the same time.”

Mangold spent a lot of time with Dylan discussing the story and the script then defining his character but the legend never visited the set. He did, though, insist that the character of Suze Rotolo have her named changed to Sylvie Russo (played by Elle Fanning). “It’s one of the few things Bob had asked us to change in the script because he was very close to her,” Papamichael says. “She’s on the cover of The Freewheelin’ album and was his girlfriend who really probably knew him the most and also the one who knew him before he became famous. So, she was a very intimate character.”

The last shot of the movie shows Dylan riding off on his motorbike presaging a motorcycle accident he had in 1966 which led him to gradually withdraw from public life.

“We didn't really want to do a traditional biopic. Our movie is an episode, but a crucial one, of his continuous reinvention of art throughout his life. He's constantly trying to go to a different place. We’re asking what makes this young man tick and where are these words coming from in his lyrics, what are his impressions of the world. Then, how he finds the whole folk movement suffocating him when he kinda wants to be a rock and roller, and express himself. That’s the heart of this movie.

He is an incredibly gifted child, in a way. Even when asked in recent interviews how he came up with his lyrics, he just says, ‘They just came to me.’”