In a 12.12.24 Vanity Fair piece, Guy Pearce has an interesting conversation with Jordan Hoffman:

If there’s a slight problem with A Complete Unknown, it’s that Timothee Chalamet’s Bob Dylan is a little too elusive and circumspect — too much of an artful dodger or a snotty sidestepper — to register in straight dramatic terms.

It needs at least one scene in which Dylan lays his cards on the table and says “this is what I want” or “this is who I fucking am or at least who I’m not any more”…something like that.

And if you ask me, Dylan’s rambling remarks at the Bill of Rights dinner at the Americana hotel on 12.13.63 (three weeks after JFK’s murder) are fairly declarative in this sense.

Martin Scorsese read from Dylan’s remarks in a passage from No Direction Home (‘05), his 208-minute documentary about roughly the same period in Dylan’s life that A Complete Unknown covers. Re-using this event — this scene, these words — would have added a little something to James Mangold and Jay Cocks’ upcoming feature.

Excerpt: “Man, I just don’t see any colors at all when I look out. I don’t see any colors at all, and if people have taught anything through the years [it’s] to look at colors. I’ve read history books, but I’ve never seen one history book that tells how anybody feels. I’ve found facts about our history, I’ve found out what people know about what goes on but I’ve never found anything about what anybody

”It’s all just plain facts. And it don’t help me one little bit to look back.

“I wish sometimes I could have come in here in the 1930s like my first idol – used to have an idol, Woody Guthrie, who came in the 1930s. [Applause] But it has sure changed in the time Woody’s been here and the time I’ve been here. It’s not that easy any more. People seem to have more fears.

“There’s no black and white, left and right to me anymore. There’s only up and down and down is very close to the ground. And I’m trying to go up without thinking about anything trivial such as politics.”

The cologne ad, I’m told, is real.