‘A Complete Unknown’ Craft Feature

When making a biopic about a famed artist and musician, you would think the research would come simple… Until the aptly named A Complete Unknown, tracking the meteoric rise of Bob Dylan – the enigmatic man with an unknowable past. Even though the film only tells of his life through a few years, culminating in the Newport Folk Festival of ’65, you’d be hard-pressed to find more than a handful of people who attended that festival with the exact same story of how everything went down.

Deadline spoke with five key craftspeople – cinematographer Phedon Papamichael, production designer François Audouy, costume designer Arianne Phillips and editors Andrew Buckland and Scott Morris – to discuss how they pieced together the life of a mysterious legend and payed homage to a revolutionary artist.

Though filming began in early 2024, A Complete Unknown started preproduction in 2019 before being delayed by COVID-19. Though everyone involved moved on to other projects in the meantime, this gave all of the craftspeople a bit more time to percolate on the film in the back of their minds.

“I’ve never had so much lead time on a film for research,” says costume designer Arianne Phillips. “There never seems to be enough time for research, whether it’s a real-life story based on real events or even if it’s a film that entirely fictional, the research part is really the inspiration.”

“We got to sit on all our initial thoughts and inspirations and, although we were shut down until we came back in spring of ’24, it’s in your head so you’re constantly mulling over all these things,” says cinematographer Phedon Papamichael. As someone who is less technical and more visual in his approach to his camerawork, knowing the cast and locations ahead of time was a definite lend a hand. “It’s nice when you can visualize as you read the script.”

For production designer François Audouy, he says the added time allowed him to go beyond the basic photographs and dig beneath the surface. “There’s a surface thing of literalism to research, like this is what the street looked like, but then you get into, what did it feel like? What are these photographs evoking? What did it feel like to walk down MacDougal Street in 1961… or listen to the jazz coming out of those clubs around the corner at the Blue Note?”

It wasn’t just the craftspeople that benefited either, as the actors had a lot more time to practice their music. “Timothée [Chalamet] of course got extra practice time and by the time we started, he was so good,” says Papamichael. “And then once we discovered how amazing he is at performing and able to play the guitar and the harmonica and the piano and just all these little mannerisms, that’s where the main inspiration comes from and what we react to on set.”

That level of performance led to something a bit unusual for everyone involved in the film – live performances rather than pre-recording. “Traditionally, you would have a click track and everyone singing to the same exact piece of music, even lip-syncing,” says editor Andrew Buckland. “It wasn’t the case with this, and initially it was a shock because it’s like a house of cards dealing with the music at the same time when each take is different. Scott and I are doing the initial music edit as we’re cutting, so there’s all these plates spinning.”

Though the original plan was to prerecord the music, it was actually Chalamet who changed everyone’s minds after a little insistence. “Timothée was just becoming more and more fluid and comfortable, and then insisting, ‘Let me do it live, let me do it live,’” says Papamichael. “It causes some technical panic for certain departments, but we also discovered that it just adds a little… you can tell when we go in on those closeups and he’s by the mic and he’s blowing his harmonica, it’s a little extra that you feel, you feel like it’s alive in certain scenes.”

Editing is where the technical panic sets in the most, since every live take results in a unique tempo that is tough to cut together. “In a lot of cases we have actor performance moments where there’s character building happening, but they’re not always in the exact same beat because of the way the music goes in the scene or maybe the lyric is different, so it definitely becomes more of a puzzle,” says editor Scott Morris. Though he says the puzzle was worth the effort to achieve an “authentic folk music quality”.

The number of takes weren’t restricted either, as Chalamet always wanted to check his performance to see if he could do better. While Papamichael admits he isn’t a fan of actors coming and constantly checking the playback, he says this was a very special case. “We’d be happy to engage because he always found something that just gave it another little detail, like how he would withhold eye contact and just give it to you at the right moment. I’m not just talking about dialogue or singing; all this man is – from how he would take his glasses back off and put them back on to how he would hold the cigarette and flick it.”

While Chalamet was busy mastering the performance of Dylan, the craftspeople were in charge of making the audience believe he was the man in every other aspect – something that Audouy says was a particularly collaborative experience in that regard. “We were all working shoulder to shoulder to create this experience for the audience to be a fly on the wall during this time. It required daily collaboration with Arianne, with Phedon… we were all working together to lift each other up and to find that truth together.”

For Phillips part, she divided Dylan’s visual arc into three separate beats – arriving in New York, becoming known in the folk scene, and the rock and roll archetype. “When he was 19 or 20, he looked like a really messy teenage boy, kind of haphazard with wrinkled shirts,” she says. Phillips did learn however, that every part of that look was carefully considered on Dylan’s part and modeled after Woody Guthrie. “He had the Pendleton shirts and the baggy carpenter jeans, which was the very proletariat Americana look that Woody Guthrie was known for.”

As he gets into the folk scene, his silhouette gets slimmer. “It’s encapsulated best on the cover of The Freewheelin’ album,” she says. “He’s wearing a 501 jean and a suede jacket that clearly was specially made for him, with a little striped shirt… You see him evolving, becoming more manly, less boyish, and you see a silhouette that is more thoughtful.”

The most notable change comes in ’65, when his style becomes heavily influenced by The Beatles. “He’s wearing very skinny jeans, the Cuban heel boots with military pea coats and slim blazers,” she says. “The one thing that I can say is that Bob consistently wore denim, he still does, and at the time this is the birth of the youth culture movement as we know it today.”

Audouy’s work was more focused on Dylan’s apartment, since a immense part of the film takes place there. “It was just the normality of the quotidian life that we were trying to convey in that space of a young man in his very early 20s, learning to be an adult basically,” says Audouy. “He’s just a kid really, who is trying to put it all together and dealing with relationships and his art and music, and also the fact that he’s becoming a celebrity very quickly, so those layers were apparent subtly in his space. I think his apartment in particular was so nuanced and layered that it became an extension of his performance.”

The extension of that performance was critical to Papamichael, who focused more on how the actor’s played in the space rather than creating a stylized appearance. “How are they going to use it? Where do they choose to go? Timothée was very much into this organic fluid process of discovering the space deciding, where is he going to sit and pick up his guitar? Is it by the window? And us really reacting to that as filmmakers and looking for those moments.”

Crafting that space in such an intricate way was imperative for Audouy, as it was critical for Chalamet to feel like he was living in the actual space. “Can you imagine being able to have a magic time machine to 1962 and be able to sit in Bob Dylan’s apartment? Timothée spent so much time in the space, he would come in and wander and sit by himself at the typewriter and he could even go through the record collection and play records.”

And there is no doubt it helped with the performances, like when Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro) and Dylan sing “Blowin’ in the Wind” together in his apartment. “There’s a moment before they start singing, where she’s like, ‘You’re an asshole.’ And he’s like, ‘Yeah, I guess.’ That’s the limit of his self-reflection,” says Buckland. “That’s sort of how he behaves throughout the movie. Even at the final scene, he is who he is and people just either love it or they hate it, and it’s just the sort of disruption that he causes just by being himself.”

That assessment of Dylan’s self-reflection is exemplified when he visits the Newport Folk Festival two times in the film, in 1964 and 1965. The location itself was created by Audouy to be a grassroots festival with no corporate sponsorships, set in an almost bucolic setting. “I was trying to convey this feeling of a world where they were pure of heart and people were connected and talking to each other and not on their phones, and there was really this sense of community,” he says.

The scenes at the festival also featured most of the characters in the film reacting to Dylan on stage as he sings “The Times They Are A-Changin’”, which presented a balancing challenge for the editors. “We joke about how the spinning plates metaphor Sylvie (Elle Fanning) used at the end of the film kind of applies to all the characters,” says Morris, who edited the scenes taking place in 1964. “We’ve got Bob relating to Sylvie, how is Sylvie reacting? How is the relationship with Joan playing out in this sequence? It was amazing to see if you held on a shot too long on a certain character, you cut to them three times rather than four, and that little adjustment might affect the overall balance of the scene. Drew worked on the final sequence, Newport ’65, and there are even more spinning plates in that scene.”

“That’s a scene where basically all of our characters are in one location and it’s having to balance everyone’s reactions,” adds Buckland. “Bob is playing this new music; the audience is reacting whether they hate it or they love it… it’s chaos in the audience. And then you have the drama in the wings of the stage with Lomax and Pete involved. It’s like all these plates and Bob’s the guy with the stick and he’s just spinning them all with what he’s doing on stage.”

A Complete Unknown is in theaters December 25th.