The bizarre advice that made Cate Blanchett a better Bob Dylan: “I didn’t look back”
What better way to capture the life of an enigmatic man than with an enigmatic film? Before A Complete Unknown took a tried and true biopic approach, there was I’m Not There, a project dealing in the myth of Bob Dylan more than the man.
Across the two-hour, 15-minute run time, director Todd Haynes essentially just messes around with the idea of Bob Dylan. Split into different chapters, the figure goes through an Orlando-like evolution, morphing from different person to different person as a cast of actors take on some version of him or another.
Some of them are pure fiction, dealing in Dylan’s own habit of lying about his origins. While still somewhat, albeit incredibly loosely loosely tracing his career and history, the concept of Dylan is, at one point or another in this movie, Arthur Rimbaud, an outlaw, a hobo, a political obsessive, and then a folk musician who has just pissed off a crowd by going electric – although we know that story.
That’s the tale that Cate Blanchett takes on as the only woman playing one of the six representations of Dylan. Out of them all, though, and out of the powerful cast including Christian Bale, Heath Ledger, Richard Gere and more, Blanchett wins as a complete spotlight stealer.
She embodies an emboldened Dylan. It’s a Dylan who is getting high with the Beatles and caring little about journalists questions or claims of selling out. It’s a Dylan who is blowing his past folk reputation up to become a rock star, complete with all the arrogance and ignorance.
In short, Blanchett is playing a version of Bob Dylan who is kind of a dick, so it makes sense that the advice that made her performance was phallic too.
“I played him at the time when he went electric, when he was really giving the finger to the audience and saying, ‘I’m not a folk singer’,” she said when reflecting on the role on BBC Radio 4. The Dylan she was playing believed he was the man, so she had to get in that headspace, too.
“Playing a man,” she began, but then her mind wandered, adding, “Was it a man or was it a sort of musical force? You realise that in that particular film the character was made up of many different parts.”
Either way, she knew she had to embody the male confidence and ego of that era, and so a suggestion came in. “A friend of mine who’s a make-up artist said to me a few days into the shoot: ‘Put a sock down your pants!’ I said: ‘What?!’ She said: ‘You’re on the bed, put a sock down your pants,’ and I said, ‘Oh, OK’ and I did! And I didn’t look back,” Blanchett recalled, laughing.
“It absolutely helped,” she said as the simple trick and the fake bulge seemed to change the way she carried herself, allowing her to walk with the swagger of a Dylan who, at that time, had balls big enough to rebel against himself.
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