Todd Haynes is the first filmmaker outside of the documentary genre to have ever landed the rights to Bob Dylan’s work. Seven conceptual years in the making, a $20 million budget (that took 5 years to raise), screenplay by Todd Haynes and Oren Moverman, and cinematography by Ed Lachman, I’m Not There made its debut in 2007. The film is ideologically indie, verging on a more mainstream appeal than others of Haynes’s work, with the exception, perhaps, of Far From Heaven.
Marcus Carl Franklin, Christian Bale, Ben Whishaw, Cate Blanchett, Heath Ledger, and Richard Gere each portray a different facet or thread that has defined Bob Dylan. The film focuses on the constantly changing character of Dylan rather than attempting to distill one “true” identity. Haynes said that Dylan was like a “sponge.” Instead of defining his time, he absorbed everything that surrounded him. Haynes maintains that he is always looking for a different way to tell each story in his films (he studied semiotics at Brown University), and in one interview stated, “All of my films question the idea of identity as something stable, consistent, and reliable, sometimes in the form of sexual identity.”
He also incorporates cinematic styles of some of the greatest films of the era, at times recreating scenes shot for shot: Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, McCabe and Mrs. Miller, 8 1/2, A Hard Day's Night, Weekend. Haynes often uses cues from other filmmakers to evoke certain emotions or to create specific landscapes. Irreducible to mimicry, Haynes wants to evoke and highlight certain important moments in film history, and he also understands that he is now an inextricable part of that history.
It is a community of artists, cultural events, experiences, politics that shape the mold of things, not the artist acting alone. This is significant in light of Dylan and other hugely influential artists. How often can they be said to be acting alone or as an outsider - someone that should be placed on a pedestal and made into a demigod? How much of this is seated in (American) culture? Is it instead that they have truly connected with a larger organic cultural mechanism?
