A handful of movies nominated for Best Picture this year have heavy musical themes, including A Complete Unknown. The film, which charts the rise of a young Bob Dylan, features a whopping 40 songs — but unlike Wicked and Emilia Pérez, don’t call it a musical.
Sound is its own character in the movie, according to the Oscar-nominated team behind the film’s sonic element. Ted Caplan, Donald Sylvester, Tod Maitland and David Giammarco spoke with Yahoo Entertainment about how they approached the intricate and unusual sound of the film.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Something that struck me about A Complete Unknown before I had even seen it was how nervous Bob Dylan fans were for it. Some either didn’t want it to exist or desperately wanted it to be as accurate as possible. How did you all, as the sound team, strike the balance between authenticity and creating something new?
Ted Caplan: I think the guiding principle wasn’t to do a re-creation or reenactment of his life. It was to kind of get at the heart of what was going on with Bob. From a sound perspective, that is all about authenticity. It’s not that we didn’t try and gloss it up, but we didn’t try to make the world seem grander than it was.
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Donald Sylvester: I’ll be honest with you — a lot of these things were not really factual in the sense that nobody knows what really happened because they weren’t in the room when Dylan first sang “Blowin’ in the Wind” with Joan Baez. But it’s a pretty good idea of what happened. We kept reminding ourselves that we’re not making a documentary.
How did you make those concerts and live performances feel so authentic to the time period?
Tod Maitland: We sourced out 42 period microphones and put them in the movie in chronological order, because microphones at the time were changing very rapidly. Every year they got a little better.
Caplan: It’s true to the sound of the time as much as possible without being too true, because things sound better now. We want the fidelity of modern technology to have the texture of a vintage recording.
David Giammarco: We wanted to put the moviegoing audience in a place where they feel like they might be at a concert, putting crowds all around them and making the crowd active to tell the story of what was going on with Dylan onstage.
Sylvester: The people in the crowds — in cafés, on streets and at parties — were really influential to Bob himself. He heard them. He saw them. He reacted directly to them. They were a character in that movie. There’s a lot of people who are nameless and faceless, but they’re talking to Bob, and he’s hearing them.
Caplan: It was really important to us to do more than just say, “Here’s a performance!” and everyone gets quiet. The movie is about the dialogue between Bob and the world — how they’re playing off each other. It’s not a musical. It’s a drama with music. That’s a real distinction for this film that makes it unique.
Sylvester: People in our crowds were saying things like “Groovy, man!” and other things that would sound pretty stupid today, but in the context of the movie timeframe, shouting “far out!” works. We had to remove all the “whoops” because audience members didn’t know that people back then weren’t saying that.
I spoke to Timothée Chalamet and Monica Barbaro, who play Dylan and Baez, about how they had to learn to sing for this movie. Did the fact they were new to the craft impact your process?
Caplan: When they prerecorded all these songs, I could tell that Timmy had what it took. The actual production recordings were on another level. And that’s when you’re relieved because you don’t want to go in and have to fix everything. You’re shepherding something that’s brilliant rather than fixing something that’s flawed.
Maitland: When I was watching Timmy in rehearsals, I noticed he held the guitar in the same way Bob does, which is high up on his body. Normally, we would just put a lavalier microphone on him, but the way he held his guitar negated the ability to do that. So I told him in rehearsals that the only way we’d be able to capture his vocals during these acoustic pieces without performance microphones in the shot would be to wire a mic through his hair. That took a little bit of convincing for him and the hair department, but we ended up doing it about 14 times.
Edward Norton and Timothée Chalamet in A Complete Unknown. (Searchlight Pictures/Courtesy of Everett Collection)
How did you design the sound of New York City at the time?
Caplan: Bob’s first arrival on MacDougal Street [in 1961] is so important, because even though it’s subtle, it’s showing what’s so enticing to Bob. It’s the gateway to the universe he wants to be in — and that’s not just folk music. It’s an exciting smorgasbord of a sonic universe that’s inviting, and it’s contrary to the universe he feels in 1965 walking down the same street, where the music is oppressive and not as inviting.
Sylvester: I needed background actors who had a knowledge of New Yorkers and the fact they’re not afraid to talk to somebody they don’t even know.
Maitland: This was not a normal film. Normally in a film, you capture the dialogue clean without any music over it. But [director James Mangold] decided that there was going to be sound over every piece, including the scene where [a TV shows a Walter Cronkite broadcast about the] Cuban Missile Crisis. We created a soundtrack with sirens and people screaming that we pumped into the set to give actors the energy to help them feel like they were really in the middle of what was going on. We filmed the 1965 Newport Folk Festival scene as if it were a concert, filming in one continuous 23-minute take with over 40 microphones.
Timothée Chalamet and Monica Barbaro in A Complete Unknown. (Searchlight Pictures/Courtesy of Everett Collection)
That explosive moment at the end when Dylan plugs in his guitar and goes electric, much to the chagrin of the fans of folk music around him — what was that shift like from a sound perspective?
Caplan: If you just make it loud, you’ll assault the film audience, which isn’t what we want to do. Paul Massey worked his magic to create more energy without it feeling too loud. It’s a subtle magic of the mixing process.
Sylvester: We deliberately made this a loud movie, but it’s not a constantly loud movie like when you put a lobster in a pot and it’s boiling. You don’t know it’s getting louder and louder. At the beginning of production, we had a discussion with [production company] Searchlight where they said they recommend certain levels of loudness. And we said no, we’re not actually going to limit that, because theaters never really play anything as loud as you make it.
With that said, I know the best place to see this movie is on the biggest screen possible, but it’s out on video on demand on Feb. 25. Is there anything people at home can do to re-create that experience?
Giammarco: Play it loud!
