Summary
Todd Haynes's next feature film after Far from Heaven was I'm Not There (2007), in which six different actors play facets of Bob Dylan's character and history. Haynes had previously had trouble obtaining music rights for his films Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story and Velvet Goldmine; the distribution of the former was blocked by the Carpenter estate for unapproved use of a number of songs, and David Bowie refused to let the director use his music in the latter. Dylan, however, approved the use of his songs in I'm Not There. Made for around $20 million, Haynes's largest budget to date, the finances were assembled through a number of different sources, including Endgame Entertainment, Rising Star and John Wells Productions. Filming began in July 2006, with the completed cut premiering at the Telluride Film Festival in August 2007. The film returned Haynes to the multi-strand narrative format of Poison, and to the music biopic genre first experimented with in Superstar; it arguably served as his most sustained engagement to date with the notion of identity as a performance, a cultural construction that can be shaped and altered. As he has said,
The minute you try to grab hold of Dylan, he's no longer where he was. He's like a flame: if you try to hold him in your hand you'll surely get burned. Dylan’s life of change and constant disappearances and constant transformations makes you yearn to hold him, and to nail him down. And that’s why his fan base is so obsessive, so desirous of finding the truth and the absolutes and the answers to him – things that Dylan will never provide and will only frustrate … Dylan is difficult and mysterious and evasive and frustrating, and it only makes you identify with him all the more as he skirts identity.
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- Information
- Far from Heaven , pp. 130 - 132Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2011