Bob Dylan is considered one of the greatest singer/songwriters ever. He has been a massive figure in pop culture for the past 60+ years with dozens of well-known songs that made him one of the best-selling artists of all time. The new film by James Mangold, A Complete Unknown is the story of his early days as a folk singer through to his breakthrough when he embraced rock music. Arianne Phillips is one of the top costume designers in the world in fashion, theater, music, and film with a vast array of iconic works. She recently spoke with Immersive via Zoom about her experience with the project.

[This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.]

What has been your personal experience with Bob Dylan?

I was raised in and around Bob Dylan’s music my whole life. I was born in the sixties in New York. My parents are the same age as him and we always had his music in our house. Bob Dylan has just always been there for me and has always been revered as a poet in my house. I really can’t think of a childhood or an adulthood without Bob’s music. He has this amazing ability to reflect what’s happening with social change and justice and he became an archetype for American Rock and Roll as we depict in the film. He’s part of the artistic DNA that has informed and influenced me and continues to.

What kind of challenges did you have on this film, this being a biopic? Obviously, you needed to match the cover of ‘The Freewheeling Bob Dylan’ but there’s the rest of his days to fill in…

I only knew some mythology about what happened at the Newport Folk Festival in ’65. My first entry point was to follow the events that are known that I was able to research. Bob Dylan was well photographed in the early years and lots of newsreels and course album covers during production, we got access to the Columbia Photograph Archive, which was super helpful.

And you worked with James Mangold before…

I had a similar challenge when I designed Walk The Line with Jim almost 20 years ago and was able to see kind of the onstage professional persona, but not really any private photos at home. So it’s really becoming fluent in Bob Dylan’s aesthetic, how he chose to dress himself and create this mystique, this persona.

Director James Mangold and Timothée Chalamet on the set of A COMPLETE UNKNOWN. Photo by Macall Polay, Courtesy of Searchlight Pictures. © 2024 Searchlight Pictures All Rights Reserved.

What did your research look like?

I read a lot of books about Bob. I learned the most through stories and accounts of people in his life, which is much like our movie. We know a lot about him through Pete Seeger, Joan Baez, and Sylvie – who is based on Suze Rotolo, who’s on the cover of ‘The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan’. She wrote a fabulous book called ‘A Freewheelin’ Time’, and she was a huge influence on Bob in terms of encouraging him to do protest songs. Becoming fluent in who he was and the costumes follow and underscore our story of a young man at 19, figuring out his way in the world as an artist and the clothes mimic that.

And the film captures his transformation from folk singer to rock star…

When we were forensically figuring out this arc, we broke the script down into three sections that would guide us through his evolution. One was arriving in New York in ’61-’62, becoming well known in ’63-’64, and eventually in ’65 you can see he’s really adopted the mod look, that would become the kind of beginning of this Bob Dylan, the icon we know today.

And in between all of this are the private moments…

There are certain things that we gravitate towards or that we go back to aesthetically. So creating the private moments was exciting, kind of stripping it back and becoming fluent in the research really helped. We create cinematically to help underscore what’s happening. We create a color palette with the kind of progression of his silhouette in terms of design and his costumes from this fuller-figured young boy.

I think one of the intriguing things about Dylan regarding social movements as he was always part of that and not part of that at the same time. I think his clothes reflected that even though he had those clothes, you look at ’em, he didn’t look like other rockers. He just looked like Bob Dylan.

Yeah, he has that hair. I mean, his silhouette in ’65 was really almost like a cartoon character, like a cutout with a wonderful, almost a pompadour, and the way that he had his hair got fuller and he has that beautiful textured hair. For the film in terms of the design balance, working with Jamie Lee Macintosh, the hair designer on the movie, and on how that silhouette, so many great pictures of Bob on stage with backlit, where you see the hair halo.

The silhouette is the poster. It’s perfect. You look at it, that’s Bob Dylan.

Timothée was able to embody that physicality, and it was a special, rich, and meaningful story to tell. Absolutely. Also inspiring, hopefully inspiring. I think the overall message that is very meaningful to me is that creativity survives, and that’s the way we come together in these times and have hope. And as long as we have that humanity, we’re going to keep going, hopefully make the world a better place through creative endeavors.

Artists make the most beautiful works of art during the absolute ugliest times.

It brings us together emotionally. I find Jim was able to really encapsulate, directing very emotional performances as well as kind of, yeah, underscoring the feeling, the emotion of the time, which I think transports us in a way and also kind of shortens the chasm between then and now, the humanity of, while technology’s evolved and so many things have evolved, we’re still human. And that humanity I think is in Bob Dylan’s music, and that’s what resonates for us.

Excellent. Let’s talk about Timothée for a moment. Playing Willy Wonka, Paul Atreides, and Bob Dylan in the space of a year is a remarkable achievement.

There’s a lot required of an actor for a biopic. He had like 67 costume changes, and that’s a lot required of an actor. It’s not like a regular movie. It takes place in a week or a day, of which there are plenty. His generosity with time was great, as also his engagement. When I met him, we were both asked to join Jim in this movie. I joined this project in late 2019, and he was already attached. So it became a passion project, I think for all of us. It’s my sixth film with Jim Mangold, and we all stuck with it after many COVID delays…

And then what was it like doing fittings, working through the project…

I think the desire to uncover all aspects of this story, whether it’s musically for Timmy or physically with the costumes, the visual side, he was game and he was a wonderful scene partner for me, just in terms of his accessibility and his fittings which can be tedious. It can be wonderful to find the character in a fitting, but it’s overwhelming when you have so many costume changes and you’re telling a story over time. So he was wonderful and very curious and very open and learning about what the sweet spot was between Bob physically and Timmy’s body physically because design is so much about balance—so figuring out what was going to work best and help the illusion and between what existed. I made a lot of his costumes, the majority of his costumes.

That’s my next question. I was going to ask you how much you’ve made versus how much you found.

I think I probably made about two-thirds of his costumes from shoes to the hat that he wears in the beginning and everything in between. I did hunt and gather some great vintage pieces that I felt were essential storytelling-wise. When you’re telling a story, this is 60 years ago, the textures and the fabrics and the weight of the fabric, you really can’t duplicate. So having vintage pieces was essential for me, and so mixing those in and figuring out which ones kind of helped our storytelling. We had 120 speaking parts and most people in our film, our principals had at least 10 changes, sometimes up to 25. We had over 5,000 extras. It was a lot of clothes.

It was a great Saturday afternoon movie. I was transported to the sixties for a couple of hours.

François Audouy, production designer and Phedon Papamichael, cinematographer. Those are my scene partners. The way the the film was shot, the kind of lenses, how he shoots the film, what aspect ratio, the cameras, the production design, and the context of where these costumes will live are everything. That was our goal to have an immersive experience and engage the audience in this magical world and do it hopefully without precious nostalgia, but a gritty realism. That was my personal goal.

I think you certainly pulled it off. What’s it like being on the other end of this now that it’s being released? It’s nice having it out in there in the world.

It’s fantastic. I’ve never worked on a film that turned around so quickly after shooting. We wrapped in June, and it’s thrilling because usually by the time a film wraps, it’s like a memory. It’s distant, but this still feels very present for me, and I’m happy to talk about it.

I can remember all the details because it is like, we just finished yesterday, we had our premiere last night. It was wonderful to be reunited with so much cast and crew, and I’m just excited for people to see it, and hopefully a new generation of people that can be Bob Dylan fans can learn about this incredible once-in-a-generation artist who’s provided us with so much soul and heart.

A Complete Unknown Opens In Theaters on Christmas Day.

Eric Green
Author

Eric Green has over 25 years of professional experience producing creative, marketing, and journalistic content. Born in Flushing, Queens and based in Los Angeles, Green has a catalog of hundreds of articles, stories, photographs, drawings, and more. He is the director of the celebrated 2014 Documentary, Beautiful Noise and the author of the novella Redyn, the graphic novel Bonk and Woof, and the novel, The Lost Year. Currently, he is hard at work on a book chronicling the lives of the greatest Character Actors.