AVC: Having had some limited interaction with Dylan, do you get the sense that there's a "knowable Dylan" that those close to him encounter? A Dylan that's true to who he actually is?
TH: Well, I'm not close to Dylan. I've never met him. I've never spoken to him. I'm only a person he gave everything to, for some reason I'll never completely understand, and still feel shocked by. I don't even know if he's seen the film. He's had a DVD of it with him on tour for the last few weeks, but that's the last I heard. So I don't have any more direct firsthand evidence than anyone else. But I almost think that people make too much of this "unknowable guy." I think you find him wherever he is performing, and wherever he is committed to what he's doing. And we happen to have most of those performances recorded. With every studio release, he's made a series of live performances, and he lives and dies in the moment that he's performing his music. So you have these unbelievable, concrete examples of who he is at all of these different stages. How much more can you ask of somebody than that? Especially considering how much of it there is.
AVC: You've spent a lot of time around actors. Do you have a similar sense with them, that they're only "who they are" in moments of performance?
TH: Absolutely. It's a really profound question, especially given the context of what I was just talking about with Dylan. I'll never be able to totally explain or understand how actors are able to protect this moment of absolute relaxation and spontaneity, and to do it with so much technical rigidity and reliability. Musicians have to hit the right chords and pluck the right strings and sing the right lyrics, and that's a form of technical restriction as well, so I guess there's always "technique" at the heart of any creative process. But there's also always an element of surprise and something raw, and I feel like I'm at the furthest end of that ebb. Actors are amazing to me that way, because they really do have to create something alive, which then gets recorded and captured. And they all arrive at it in a different way.
AVC: Have you acted much, beyond cameo appearances here and there?
TH: Well, I liked to act in plays when I was a kid, and then in college. But that's the last time I really acted. I always loved it. But my interests were more in looking at the whole, rather than getting completely swallowed up in a single part of the whole.
AVC: How do you direct actors in a movie like I'm Not There, where a lot of the characters are symbolic? Do they still deal with their characters like they were real people, with real motivations?
TH: Definitely. You break it down to its components and play it out, for real, in real time. And that went for every aspect, including the stylized language the actors had to deliver. In a lot of my films, from Velvet Goldmine to Far From Heaven, there's often been some stylization to the language, but it still boils down to something absolutely specific and concrete. Flesh and blood. For I'm Not There, all the actors got little packages of research, with films, and recordings of Dylan speaking, and collections of the music that inspired their stories, and images I'd collected. That all went into what they did, to provoke something unplanned and untutored. They all used it. It was remarkable to see how that material would keep coming back out, in ways the actors probably couldn't even explain.
AVC: Were you surprised by the success of Far From Heaven? You've never been a commercial filmmaker, but that film did well at the box office, and was nominated for awards.
TH: Of course. I thought it was as big a risk as any of my films, because it was such an outmoded, degraded genre. And the style of acting and the artificial look of the film, we tried to preserve from Douglas Sirk and '50s cinema. They weren't things I tried to soften or minimize for a contemporary audience. I think Far From Heaven is the film where I've come closest to making it work like a lot of my favorite movies work. Like the way Hitchcock films work, in an almost diagrammatic way, where you "get" them immediately and they're communicable to a 5-year-old child and an 80-year-old adult. But then you look deeper, and there are all of these other things that come through that only reinforce what the film looked like from a distance. It's hard to describe, but I think it's the truth about popular art, that it has to work toward emotional clarity, and there are all these layers that you can peel off, but ultimately, it also has to function in an immediate way. But I don't think all my films do that, or even try to.
AVC: Were you tempted, having had that kind of success with Far From Heaven, not to repeat yourself necessarily, but to make another film that could be enjoyed conventionally as well as on those other levels?
TH: Well, I think all my films can be enjoyed. In fact, they've often surprised me with how they're received. A film that had the hardest time, at least initially, was Velvet Goldmine, and it's the film that seems to mean the most to a lot of teenagers and young people, who are just obsessed with that movie. They're exactly who I was thinking about when I made Velvet Goldmine, but it just didn't get to them the first time around. Now we have all these different ways for movies to get to people. People can live with them over time and pass them around like special secrets. The movies all live their own weird lives, which is so cool. So no, I didn't feel the need to repeat anything.
AVC: If you could have any director's career other than your own, whose would it be?
TH: Meaning their actual body of work?
AVC: Their body of work or their skill set. What they're capable of. Living or dead—which director would you want to be if you weren't you?
TH: I immediately always want to say Rainer Werner Fassbinder, because of his body of work and his amazing ability to materialize popular art out of brutally honest social critique and historical critique. The way that work comes out almost as natural as breathing… That's just incredible. The way he lived his life, with the terrible afflictions and abuses that are almost movies unto themselves, that isn't necessarily what I would want. But his career blows my mind.
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