Left: “Lean on Pete” film poster | Right: © Classiq Journal
“The road out would be treacherous,
and I didn’t know where it would lead but I followed it
anyway. It was a strange world ahead that would unfold,
a thunderhead of a world with jagged lightning edges. Many got it
wrong and never did get it right. I went straight into it. It was
wide open. One thing for sure, not only was it not run
by God, but it wasn’t run by the devil either.”
Bob Dylan, Chronicles: Volume One
Left: “Lean on Pete” film poster | Right: © Classiq Journal
Viewing
A Complete Unknown, 2024
James Mangold
Timothée Chalamet’s interpretation of Bob Dylan and his songs is extraordinary, and that is what makes this film so special: it’s not an impersonation, but his own interpretation of the artist. I am not a big fan of biopics, especially the ones that take you through the lives of the main character, from childhood to fame and beyond, but this is different, and, given the fact that it’s about Bob Dylan and still manages to shine beyond that heavy baggage, it’s just proof of a great way to tell this story. What I also liked is that the film focuses on Dylan’s earliest folk music success right until the controversial moment when he started to experiment with electric guitar and rock instruments – “The folk music scene had been like a paradise that I had to leave, like Adam had to leave the garden. It was just too perfect. In a few years’ time a shit storm would be unleashed. Things would begin to burn,” Dylan write about those years in Chronicles Volume One. There is no delving into his past, he is simply thrown into the New York scene and musical scene of the 1960s and the Newport Film Festival, and that keeps this film so intense and fascinating. It truly feels like we are being immersed into those times. For years, Bob Dylan’s albums have been on repeat in our home and in the car, but ever since I watched the film, the soundtrack of this film has been playing repeatedly, too.
Lean on Pete, 2017
Andrew Haigh
I first heard about this film when I interviewed production designer Ryan Warren Smith about The Holdovers. He had worked on Lean on Pete, too, and he spoke so fondly about this experience that it made me very curious. We promised to do another interview together to talk about it, but until then, I have finally had the chance to watch the movie. It’s an incredibly moving film, the relationship a 15-year old boy forms with a horse after he loses what was already little left of his family. It’s not about the usual friendship between a boy and his pet, but Charlie finding in Pete what is missing from his life, someone to talk to and someone to take care of, things he is desperately in need of. He’s trying to cope with whatever comes along and you actually feel that the slow pace of the film is telling us that only the passing of time will guide him through it. And although he feels so lost, there’s a strong sense of place in the film, in the small towns and the great vastness (hence the two film posters I chose for the newsletter, and which I find extremely telling and natural in their simplicity, both images from the film), beautifully shot, and I can not wait to discuss everything about location and production design with Ryan.
The Player, 1992
Robert Altman
Masterly from the master. A smart, hilarious and very much of its time film about the Hollywood of the 1990s. If you were to know in advance what it takes, you’d not want to watch the movies that come out of the movie studios. Who has the courage to make a film about today’s Hollywood?
All the President’s Men, 1976
Alan J. Pakula
Robert Redford was promoting his politically-charged film The Candidate in 1972 when Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, the two investigative reporters from The Washington Post, broke out the Watergate story and president Nixon resigned. But Redford didn’t want All the President’s Men, to be about Watergate or Nixon. “I wanted to focus on something I thought not many people knew about: How do journalists get the story?” This is one of the best political thrillers ever made, especially that we know the outcome in advance. And that is because what is indeed fascinating about the story is the journalistic part. “We took all the elements of their work — the typewriters, telephones, pens on paper, and kicked up the sound on all of them. Every scene where the typewriter is used, the noise is kicked into high gear so there’s a real bang. What does it sound like? It sounds like weapon.” This is a film that continues to fascinate me, after repetitive views. It’s the perfect film.
Left: Photo © Headoniste | Right: © Classiq Journal
Reading
After I watched the film A Complete Unknown, I wanted to read again Dylan’s Chronicles Volume One, which is largely an evocation of Dylan’s first year in New York City, 1961 (the time of Complete Unknown), with flashbacks to his boyhood in Minnesota, with the chapters in the middle concerning the making of two later albums, switching from one chapter of his life to another in a meandering narrative and yet all wonderfully hanging together. Never divulging too much, not aiming to set the record right or tell the whole story of how things happened. And in spite of that, or maybe because of that, this feels amazingly detailed, because the journey of any artist finding his voice is never simple, never free flowing, never an open book.
On the way: the book I’ve been waiting for for some time, Sophy Roberts’ second book A Training School for Elephants. “I’ve worked for 15 years on conservation stories in Africa. But the cliches bothered me, in the way outsider narratives were soaked in Out of Africa, Hollywood sunsets that seemed to write Africans and their oral histories out of the landscape. So when I came across an 1879 expedition to Congo with four Asian elephants — one of King Leopold II of Belgium’s first incursions into the continent — I could see a journey I could follow, which would give me a through-line not only from the Swahili coast to the Great Lakes, but into the story of Europe’s grab for a continent. By retracing the journey, I hope I could start to understand something more of colonialism’s impact.”
Sophy’s first book, The Lost Pianos of Siberia takes us the music, exile and landscape of Siberia. A land generally known for its harshness, terrifying, unimaginable exile stories and primitive life conditions, is shown another face, of poetry, humanity, survival and unique beauty, as Sophy Roberts sets out to track down a piano for a piano player friend of hers, and then to find out how music entered and was cultivated in Siberia throughout its troubled and dark past. This kind of writing and this kind of book could only be possible by the deep understating and deep bond the author, though her repeated trips there and relentless passion and honest interest, had of and formed with this outlandish part of the world and its people, the people’s people. Sophy Roberts is the most outstanding travel writer of today and her passion for a well told story makes you a better listener.
Listening
The soundtrack: A Complete Unknown
The podcast: Desert Island Discs, the decades-long, perpetually inspiring BBC show.
The album: The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan
Making
Amy Madigan in Streets of Fire, the most vibrant and original character, whose run-down leather baseball cap is part of her uniform of confrontation, suggesting much more than a banal tomboy, but rather a new attitude, being faithful to herself and nobody else, her clothes becoming something aspirational. Robert Shaw in Jaws – everything about the clothing of his character, the rough-edged, old sea dog Quint, suggests that the last thing on his mind is to impersonate a social creature or to belong. He is as anti-social and anti-conventional as one can be. His clothes (his signature long-billed faded cap, blue collar work shirt and fisherman’s jacket) not only signal isolation, but serve one purpose and one purpose only:to be worn. Actually, such transcending status has Quint’s cap achieved in time, that it has become inspiration for other film characters as well – when I interviewed Justine Seymour about her costumes for the tv series The Mosquito Coast, inspired of course by Paul Theroux’s book, first adapted for the big screen by Peter Weir, she told me that part of her costume creation for Allie’s character (Justin Theroux, the writer’s nephew) was finding him a cap, and that cap was a copy of Quint’s cap.
Long story short, I love to see the many lives this simple, basic accessory can have in a film. Enter Headoniste, the French brand that set out to reinvent the iconic baseball cap as an essential accessory for a diverted classic wardrobe, an authentic brand, made locally.
On an end note
Lately I’ve seen more and more children and teenagers rummaging through record stores, buying discs with their parents or with their pocket and saved-up money. It feels right and it makes me smile. Maybe they have watched Almost Famous. I wish every teenager would watch this Cameron Crowe film. William Miller (Patrick Fugit) is a 15 year old kid. He is smart and earnest, passionate about music and writing and aspiring to be a rock journalist. And he does get the chance to do a profile on an up-coming band for Rolling Stone magazine (after he lies about his age) and is ushered on tour with Stillwater. It’s his coming-of-age experience. His mother (Frances McDormand) is reluctant to let him go; she is a college professor with fierce values and a strong adversity to rock music (William’s sister rebelled against it and left home, leaving him her rock albums), but William promises he won’t miss his tests. He will miss the tests and won’t even get back in time to attend his graduation, but he has lived the experience that will shape his character and future, he sees not just the rock world (the drugs, the sex and the rock ‘n’ roll), but the real world, with disappointments and darkness and cruelties and hope amidst it all. He is lucky because his mom may be strict, but she is his friend, too. His sister, too. William has another friend, legendary rock critic Lester Bangs (Phillip Seymour Hoffman – his every role is a gift to us the audience) of Creem magazine. Every kid needs a friend like him, who ignores William’s age, trusts his abilities completely, and pushes him to go for it, “be honest and unmerciful”. He is lucky to be able to do what he likes, but that does not mean that it’s easy. It’s hard work to get a good story, and to get it right, especially as a teenager who is a fan of the music and is trying not to make friends with the band you have to objectively write about. But what I really want to say is that so much about this film is about the music and how music can make you feel, how in every song you can find something that feels as if it relates to you and only to you. Every teenager should watch Almost Famous and keep buying records.
“As far as I knew I didn’t belong to anybody then or now.
I had a wife and children whom I loved more than anything else
in the world. I was trying to provide for them, keep out of trouble,
but the big bugs in the press kept promoting me as the mouthpiece,
spokesman, or even conscience of a generation.
That was funny. All I’d ever done was sing songs that were
dead straight and expressed powerful new realities. I had
very little in common and knew even less about a generation
that I was supposed to be the voice of.”
Bob Dylan, Chronicles: Volume One
The regulars: The interviews, newsletters and podcasts I turn to every week and/or every month because they are that good. Ruthie’s Table 4 with Ruth Rogers. Fashion Neurosis, with Bella Freud. Craig Mod’s newsletters: Roden and Ridgeline. Soundtracking, with Edith Bowman. Alicia Kennedy’s newsletter. Racquet’s Rennae Stubbs tennis podcast. Gone to Timbuktu with Sophy Roberts. Wachstumsversuche, with Sarah Schill. Sirene Journal, Racquet, and Waves & Woods in print.
