There’s the business of making movies and then there’s the business of marketing movies. Things seem to have gone well on both fronts for A Complete Unknown, as Timothée Chalamet’s Bob Dylan movie is performing well at the box office and earning rave reviews from critics and fans. That doesn’t mean, however, that the stars and the studio were in alignment the whole time, at least when it comes to the marketing.
Edward Norton recently sat down for an interview with Variety to discuss the movie and his stand-out role as musician Pete Seeger, which could earn the acclaimed actor his fourth Oscar nomination. During the conversation, the subject of Chalamet’s performance and how incredibly good it is came up, and Norton dropped a little anecdote about the proposed social media campaign. Apparently the studio wanted to record all the behind the scenes work of him trying to get into character as Dylan, and he was having no part of it, much to the excitement of Norton, who thought it was a terrible idea. You can read a portion of his quote below…
Timothée did something I thought was really, really mature. Because they said to him, ‘We just want to set up a time-lapse thing to watch you get into Dylan in the thing.’ And he said, no. (First) he said to me, ‘What do you think?’ I said, ‘Absolutely not.’ And they were like, ‘But for social, for behind the scenes…!’ No, absolutely not. I’m like, why? Why do you want to take away from an audience the opportunity to experience the mysticism, the trick, the suspension of disbelief? It’s like, if we don’t stop fucking talking about how much time we spend in the makeup chair or how we learn the guitar, or whatever… I’m just starting to feel all of us should just leave people alone. Like, leave ’em alone; let ’em watch the piece. Because I am an audience member, and I want mystery. I want illusion.
I love this conversation because, to me, this is a subject not talked about enough in Hollywood. We live in the age of the twenty-four hour news cycle. There is a bombardment of information all the time about seemingly everything, and that extends to Hollywood. You can't go a week on the internet without actors talking about the great lengths they went to in order to get into character.
Movies and TV shows compete every single day alongside everything else to try and generate interest, and in the service of that, actors spend a lot of time doing interviews, making appearances and trying to generate publicity so people will get inspired to watch their stuff.
But at what point is that ultimately doing a disservice to the actual work that’s being created? I don’t have an answer to that, and I don’t think anyone has the answer to that. Not knowing how a cinematographer pulled off a camera trick or how a movie pulled a stunt off without anyone getting hurt is fun. It forces you to use your brain and try to figure it out yourself. It’s also fun to have some actors in Hollywood that are mysteries, that are enigmatic in the same way Bob Dylan is.
In the interview, Norton compares Chalamet’s performance to Robert De Niro’s work in Raging Bull and says he just wants people to go into the movie and be shocked at the work. He doesn’t want them knowing ahead of time how long he worked on trying to get the voice down or whatever. I get that.
On the other hand, however, it’s easy to see where the studio was coming from with this proposed social media campaign. A time lapse video of Timothée Chalamet slowly getting better and better as Bob Dylan would have absolutely destroyed. I can imagine him singing something like “Don’t Think Twice It’s Alright” and having the first few lines be from when he first started practicing, progressing through the last lines being the ones from the movie itself. That would have been a fantastic video to watch, as even the cast has talked about how shocked they were by his voice when production started.
Would it have ultimately been better than just consuming the movie and not knowing any of the backstory though? The answer to that one is blowing in the wind and likely depends entirely on your perspective and how you like to consume movies. Personally, I’d probably prefer to have the video exist and have it come out years later, but that obviously would do nothing to help market the actual movie. That's probably why I love retrospective interviews so much though and why I frequently avoid trailers and try to go into stuff completely blind.
Fortunately, A Complete Unknown is doing quite well for itself. The movie has already grossed more than $35,000,000 at the box office, and it appears likely to generate numerous Oscar nominations when those come out later this month.
