The Iranian film Martin Scorsese channelled for his Bob Dylan pseudo-documentary
It was a day of celebration for film nerds everywhere: Martin Scorses finally joined Letterboxd. The favoured platform for modern film reviews had finally grabbed the patron saint of American cinema. Scorsese wasn’t just logging his thoughts on Barbie either: he published an entire list of films that serve as companions to his own works. For movie buffs, it was the perfect mix of Christmas and homework.
While some of Scorsese’s most significant works had more straightforward inspirations, it was his deeper cuts that led to some interesting comparison points. For example, in 2019, Scorsese took footage that Bob Dylan had shot on his 1975 ‘Rolling Thunder Revue’ tour and worked with the legendary singer-songwriter to create a new documentary, Rolling Thunder Reve: A Bob Dylan Story. The only thing was that neither Dylan nor Scorsese had wanted to make a real documentary film.
Dylan was notoriously loose with the facts of his actual life. The only biopic that he would approve of, I’m Not There, featured six different characters playing variations of Dylan’s life story without much room for facts or linear narrative. For his part, Scorsese had already chronicled Dylan’s life in No Direction Home, so the idea of doing another conventional Dylan documentary was off the table.
“This was the second picture we made about Bob Dylan,” Scorsese wrote in his Letterboxd list. “Would it be No Direction Home II? Boring. So what to do? We decided to follow Bob’s lead in his own life and music, and create a film in which you were never quite sure what was reality and what was fiction.”
Scorsese had just the film in mind when forming the basis for Rolling Thunder Revue: Abbas Kiarostami’s mind-bending 1990 docu-fiction film Close-Up. “I had a great model in my old friend Abbas Kiarostami, the man who impersonated the Iranian director Mohsen Makhmalbaf,” Scorsese wrote. “Close-Up deals directly with loneliness and cinema as a community, a family.”
“That’s what happens when you make a film or a series of films. You become a family. That touched me. Hossein tried to become a filmmaker because of his loneliness, and this community of artists that he wanted so much to be a part of is like the travelling troupe of artists in the Rolling Thunder Revue. They’re the best of family and the worst of family, but a family all the same. Close-Up really represents that.
Check out the trailers for Rolling Thunder Revue and Close-Up down below.
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