Thursday, November 29, 2007

Todd Haynes: Using 6 actors to play Dylan in "I'm Not There"

Rather than post another trailer of a film, I've located a clip of the director talking about the new Dylan biopic I'm Not There. If you're a serious Dylan fan, and if you're a Todd Haynes fan (I missed Far from Heaven, loved Velvet Goldmine), you will be in heaven watching this movie. Otherwise, probably not. But it's a great example of one no-shit-real-live-artist-and-not-just-an-entertainer crafting a work of art about another one. Go see it.

One other thing, because it seems relevant: I became a Todd Haynes fan at the moment in Velvet Goldmine when a UFO drops off the infant Oscar Wilde at a doorstep in the middle of the nineteenth century. This in a movie about the glam-rock scene of the 1970s. Simultaneously audacious and utterly apropos (and it wouldn't work if it weren't both), it's a sequence born of a vision rooted in a communal experience but willing to say something previously unsaid in quite that way. And that's how art gets made.

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