“There’s really no hiding a guitar; you can’t mime it, you have to play it”: Producer reveals why Timothée Chalamet really had to learn how to play guitar like Bob Dylan for new movie
It’s growing ever closer to the release date of A Complete Unknown, the Bob Dylan biopic in which the iconic musician will be portrayed by Timothée Chalamet. For the film, Chalamet really learned how to play guitar in the style of Dylan, and its music producer has now explained the reasons why.
In an interview with the Gibson Gazette, Executive Music Producer Nick Baxter shares how the most tricky scenes to film were intimate performances, when Chalamet was alone in a room with nothing more than a guitar. Baxter is an advocate for recording music on set, so audiences experience a real live performance rather than a mime.
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“You’d think that would be easy, but you really have to be comfortable with the instrument and with the scene to get anything usable in that environment. It’s incredibly exposed. And there’s really no hiding a guitar; you can’t mime it, you have to play it,” he says.
“It makes noise, you can’t mute it. A piano you can mute, which we do all the time on film sets; you can bang away on it and still get a really nice vocal recording. You can’t do that with a guitar! A ukulele you can mute and even a banjo I’ve actually found ways to mute. But the guitar? You’ve got to string it up and you’ve got to play it.”
Of the huge responsibility of nailing the authenticity of Dylan, Baxter adds, “It’s a huge weight, but we started with a clear directive from Jim [Mangold, director], which was really helpful. I went through the whole script with him and a lot of the emphasis early on, especially with the Dylan stuff, was on the rawness.
“Dylan’s guitar playing is so unique; it’s sort of messy and violent but also incredibly technically advanced, too. He’s a great player. When you hear some of these early recordings, you can tell he’d been playing guitar all the time, for many years. The technique is there, the playing is there, but there’s a rawness to it. If you don’t capture that, it sounds wrong immediately.”
He adds, “I was listening to a lot of music with Jim and with Timmy to try to pick apart some of the magic in these recordings. On the Dylan side, we were given a whole library of unreleased stuff from Dylan’s manager, Jeff Rosen, which was incredible. Hours and hours; I think it was almost 16 hours of recordings of him in hotel rooms, apartments, and studios – little tape machines that he turned on one day. I think Timmy listened through pretty much all of it, which is an incredible undertaking.
“We found alternate versions of all these iconic songs – Blowin’ in the Wind, Girl from the North Country, The Times They Are a-Changin’ – some of the first recordings. It was so cool to have access to all that stuff and to see the progression of the songwriting. I think you realise pretty quickly that he never plays the song the same way twice and we wanted to draw from it. The iconic version that everyone is used to hearing on those records was really just one moment in time for him.”
A Complete Unknown will be released on 17 January 2025.
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