‘A Complete Unknown’ director addresses doubts over Bob Dylan’s contribution to film

A complete stranger Director James Mangold is opening up about doubts that consulting Bob Dylan on the script meant the biopic would be iconoclastic.

It didn’t help that Bob’s manager is an executive producer on the film. However, the film has received mostly positive reviews and Mangold has been hailed for creating a biopic that people didn’t think was possible.

Addressing the speculation, Mangold said Variety: “Well, when I came in, I definitely felt that Jay Cox, who preceded me as writer, had his hands a little tied. He had written some beautiful things that I made sure to make it into the film, because it was just great work. But there was a level where the script skips the early years.”

He explained: “I really felt there was something to seeing the stages of Bob’s transition, but also the relationships, romantic, sexual, and otherwise, with the women in the film. And that’s what Bob’s management team was nervous about what I was doing when I got to the material.”

During COVID, the musician had time on his hands to read the script: “Let me read that script that you’re worried about,” Bob said.

Mangold continued: “And then he read it, and he loved it, and that changed everything. This then prompted the series of meetings with me and Bob, and Bob read the film you saw. I didn’t think he had a problem with how he was portrayed.”

The director even shared that he wrote many scenes that he thought End of the Line the hitmaker would have had a problem, but he didn’t.

Mangold continued: “…I’ve had a lot of places like that where I thought it would point things out. I wrote this thing where it goes, “You know, people ask where the songs come from, but they don’t really want to know where the songs come from. They want to know why the songs didn’t come to them.’ I was sure this was something he would put a big X on, and he didn’t.”