Actor Timothée Chalamet has talked about the emotional impact of working on the upcoming Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown, which tells the story of the singer-songwriter’s controversial switch to electric instruments in 1965.
Speaking with Apple Music’s Zane Lowe (full conversation below), Chalamet talks about the shooting of a scene set four years earlier, when Dylan visits his hero, the folk singer Woody Guthrie, at Greystone Park Psychiatric Hospital in New Jersey, and plays him a song he’s written entitled Song To Woody. Guthrie, who had been a patient at the hospital since 1956, was suffering from Huntingdon’s disease, a genetic neurodegenerative condition.
“It was the first one we shot in the movie,” says Chalamet. “You couldn’t do it to a playback because it’s such an intimate scene. It’s in a hospital room with Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger. And I did it live in it and it went great. And I’m making mistakes in the guitar a little bit here and there, but you can kind of fill those in after.
“I went home and I wept that night, not to be dramatic, but it’s a song I’d been living with for years and something I could relate to deeply. And I also felt, I come back to this word a lot, I felt like it was the most dignified work I’d ever done. And dignity might be a weird word there, but it felt like so dignified and humble, we’re just bringing life to a thing that happened 67 years ago.”
Song To Woody – which was based around the melody of Guthrie’s 1945 song 1913 Massacre and features the lines, “I’m a-singin’ you this song, but I can’t sing enough / ‘Cause there’s not many men that done the things that you’ve done,” eventually appeared on Dylan’s self-titled debut album, released in 1962.
A Complete Unknown goes on general release on January 17.
