Writer-director Todd Haynes (above, with Charlotte Gainsbourg) first attracted attention with Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story, which was staged with Barbie dolls. He later did a fanciful treatment of glam-rock, Velvet Goldmine. His new study of Bob Dylan, I’m Not There, is no more conventional in its approach. The film, which opens today, splits Dylan into six characters, an approach that baffled Hollywood studios when they first encountered the screenplay: “I knew if it if was conventional biopic script, with these actors, and Dylan’s approval, it would have been no problem,” he says. “But there would never have a script that was conventional, because Dylan would never had said yes to it, and I would never have wanted to write it.”

And you wouldn’t gotten the cast.

Well, we wouldn’t have needed six Dylans anyway. It would have just been Adam Sandler.

Have people complained that you don’t explain Dylan?

So much less than I thought I would get. All my films have a strong conceptual or experimental element to them. Usually when you market them, that’s the thing you hide. With this one, it’s the concept that sells the movie. Everyone knows that, [whispers] ‘Oh, it’s the movie with all those people playing Bob Dylan. Cate Blanchett’s playing Bob Dylan! There’s a black kid playing him!’ That’s actually what’s drawing people to the film. Anyone who goes to see it is going to know that.

How does your interest in Dylan compare to that in other musicians you’ve
treated in your films?

I was never a major Karen Carpenter freak. I loved those songs, but they were like little time capsules of when I was a kid. But glam-rock and David Bowie, and Dylan, were instrumental in my psychic, creative, and emotional development. They showed that identity is protean, mutable, and open. People say Dylan is like, an elusive series of shadows. He’s not! He’s mighty and ferocious. He’s just ferociously being this thing today, and then he’s ferociously being that thing tomorrow.

Do the film’s various cinematic styles reflect Dylan, or your own interests?

My own taste was always determining my choices. But the determining factor for me in the styles was always the music at that particular time in Dylan’s life. Like the Jude story, that Cate stars in, I wanted to be black and white. I thought immediately of Dont Look Back, which is a beautiful documentary that I love. But I watched it and I was like, ‘Wait a minute. This is about the music of Blonde on Blonde and Highway 61 Revisited. And yet this movie is cinéma vérité, and that couldn’t be further from what the music is doing at this time — it’s not social realism. I was looking at all the cinema of the ’60s, so I watched 8 1/2 again, and I was like, ‘Now that’s getting close. The baroque, urbane wit and distortion. The collapse of an artist at the peak of his insanity of fame, and his own dream and desires. And the film is about a director being hounded by the press to explain why his movies are weird, and they aren’t the way they used to be.’

Did you follow Dylan’s whole career?

I checked out for a lot of it. I first found Dylan for myself in high school. That was already the mid- to late-’70s. I definitely remember the release of Street Legal and Slow Train Coming. But I loved Blonde on Blonde and Blood on the Tracks and Bringing It All Back Home, and those films, uh, those movies –

Records.

Records! That’s it! But they were like movies, right? Those records, and that voice, will always be associated for me with the thrill of being young, and excitement about the future. Every adolescent should be exposed to that fearlessness in Dylan’s voice. And feel like they discovered it themselves.

Julien Temple began documenting the Sex Pistols and the Clash while in film school in London. Thirty years later, the director’s credits include several fiction films, but he’s best known for such rock documentaries as Glastonbury. Temple’s latest, Joe Strummer: The Future is Unwritten, is an account of a punk icon who became a friend. The film, which opens today, is warmer and less polemical than Temple’s most recent account of the
Pistols, he says:

The Filth and Fury was designed to try to fly the audience into the punk moment. To explain how the fuse was lit. The band to do that through was clearly the Pistols. The film about Joe is a very different thing. It’s following the story of a man’s life over 50 years. Seeing how the culture created him, but also how he changed the culture. It’s a more emotional film in a way, because it is a film about a friendship.

How did your relationships with Strummer and John Lydon differ?

I’ve never really lived with John in the way I did with Joe. I had an intense relationship with the Clash in ‘76, ‘77. But I had to choose between them and the Pistols. I didn’t see Joe very much for the next 20 years. By a strange accident, he came to live down the road from me in the English countryside. We were living in each others’ houses, looking out for each other’s kids, which is the way to get to know someone very closely. With John, I only see him when I go to L.A., or he’s in London, and it’s very intense.

It’s probably also a class thing, which unfortunately underpins life in Britain, still. I was from more of a similar background to Joe’s. As a result, I probably shared intellectual interests more easily. I do think John is a brilliant thinker. There’s something about his personality that’s unnerving to everybody. Which made him the one who could spark that
movement.

The first time I interviewed Strummer, in 1989, he described 1977 London as
stultifying.

In those days, the three TV channels turned off at 11 o’clock. Everything shut down. We were always very aware that New York City or somewhere was not like that. Britain was still very much a Victorian society, despite the attack on that in the ’60s. London was a white city with no respect for any immigrant culture. Punk helped break that down.

You largely skip Give ‘Em Enough Rope, the second Clash album.

Partly because I didn’t like it very much. It was worrying to me at the time. It sounded like they were going in a more heavy-metal direction. And I knew that Joe didn’t like that album was much as others.

You filmed reminiscences around campfires. That must have hard to shoot.

Yeah, it was. But I liked that it was quite a punk-rock thing. We didn’t have any electricians; we didn’t have any lights. We just lit it with the fire. Recording conversations was difficult, and at times I would take people to another fire, 30 meters away or something, and record it there.

The campfires started at festivals like Glastonbury. That’s one of the great things about Glastonbury; it’s a city of campfires, 180,000 when you look down the hill. Joe had one, which became very different. It was a kind of ideas factory, people exchanging their life experiences. An incredible mixture of people, and Joe would be DJing. That’s where the Mescaleros came from.

Why did you decide not to ID the participants on screen?

No one had name-tags around these campfires. “Hi, I’m Mandy from Hertz rent-a-car.” But more importantly, I like the idea that there’s a bit of detective work: Who is this person? Why do they look like that? It invites you think around it a bit more. I did suggest that, at the end, we put the photograph next to the credit, but we didn’t have the money, apparently. You could say “John Perkins, school friend.” But then you’d also have to say, “Bono, rock star.” There are some ironies in it.