What Were Bob Dylan and Joan Baez Like in Bed? Ask James Mangold

James Mangold, the co-writer and director of A Complete Unknown, is no stranger to exploring the life of major musicians in the 1960s, having helmed the 2005 Johnny Cash biopic Walk the Line. But in tackling Bob Dylan (played by Timothée Chalamet), Mangold approached his subject through a more narrow, intimate lens, focusing on the star’s initial rise to fame and his relationships with such contemporaries as Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro). In this scene, Bob and Joan are waking up after sleeping together for the first time as the world reckons with a potential nuclear war at the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Mangold chose to focus on this scene in particular because of the dramatic tension stemming from a number of factors.

Once both characters are conscious, they’re dealing with the awkwardness of waking up next to a stranger. Bob’s first words in the scene are a commentary on both the global threat of violence and the social dynamic at hand. Mangold notes: “We just lived through wondering whether we’re going to die, and then our television tells us that danger has evaporated, and then Joan makes coffee in the kitchenette, which is a normal activity for a stranger in an apartment to do, particularly if they’re trying to cover the fact that they were just snooping around.”

“They haven’t even had a rudimentary first-date conversation yet,” says Mangold, explaining how in the previous scene, Joan stumbled upon Bob performing in a bar by chance, and after he left the stage, the pair embraced and slept together. “Her next parlay of, ‘Who taught you to play?’ when he starts noodling on his guitar is almost the standard way young people on a date might feel each other out.”

To recover from the awkwardness of the room’s silence, Joan starts “answering questions about herself, because he’s not asking any,” Mangold says. “Then she adds, ‘But I’m not sure there’s a way to learn that.’ He uses this as an opportunity to respond to her [when she calls him full of shit]. He says, ‘You struggle because your songs are not very good, and you write about bullshit.’ ” Mangold calls Bob’s dialogue a “counterattack.” A line about “sunsets and seagulls” is one the screenwriter had in mind before starting on this scene.

Bob responds to Joan’s question with a stock story about picking up guitar on the road, which “he tells other characters in the movie, and remains virtually unchallenged in the slight illogic of it, him being this 19-year-old who somehow was living life out on the trains and carnivals and had seemingly skipped high school.” Chalamet added in a line about learning chords from a cowboy named Wigglefoot, “which is something Timmy brought to the scene; it’s something he had gotten from a radio interview Dylan had done very early.”

In response to his patronizing comments on her songwriting, Baez calls him an asshole, “which is the first thing he agrees with that she’s said all morning,” Mangold notes. “Which is interesting in and of itself, because it reveals an aspect of Bob’s character: He doesn’t mind if you call him an asshole.” Mangold saw this exchange as “a kind of foreplay. They’ve been thrown into this by a world crisis and a spontaneous sexual adventure, and they’re waking up on the B-side of those decisions. Each ends up taking a shot at the other, but because they’re both powerful personalities and confident artists, neither is thrown off.”

The only way Joan can think to respond to Bob’s insult is to go “to the only place they both feel safe.” She thrusts his song lyrics in his face and tells him to sing. Mangold says, “[This means], ‘Let’s stop talking, because it’s not working.’ ” On the following page, Joan joins Bob by the guitar. Mangold had known from the get-go that he wanted this sequence to end with Dylan and Baez singing together. “It’s like a lovemaking scene,” he says. “It plays the same role in the movie, in the sense that you are watching how well they fit together.”

In figuring out when and how to include Dylan’s most iconic songs within the narrative structure, Mangold thought of Dylan’s records “not as songs or musical numbers per se, but as dialogue that is sung on pitch instead of spoken. I’m making a movie about real people who play music as part of their living experience,” he says. He emphasizes his interest in showing these songs and artists not in the way they’d be seen on camera, even in a documentary. “There’s no way there’d be cameras [in this scene],” Mangold says. “These are truly intimate moments with these characters.”

This story appeared in the Feb. 12 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.