Dressing Bob Dylan, Joan Baez (Interview)

Arianne Phillips first teamed up with director James Mangold on “Girl Interrupted” when she was “a baby costume designer,” as she told IndieWire. In the 25 years since that collaboration, Phillips has created some of the most iconic clothing in contemporary American cinema, from his looks for Brad Pitt’s casual stuntman in “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” to his recreation of “The Man in Black” by Johnny Cash. styling for Mangold’s “Walk the Line.”

Both of those films earned Phillips Oscar nominations (she was also nominated for her work on Madonna’s “WE”), but they were mere warm-ups for her latest work on Mangold’s “A Complete Unknown.” Unlike “Walk the Line” or some other Phillips-designed biopics (like Milos Forman’s “The People vs. Larry Flynt”), “A Complete Unknown” takes place in a relatively compressed time frame, following Bob Dylan (Timothée Chalamet). during the first four or five years of his career. Its simplicity, however, is deceptive – at least when it comes to Phillips’ work.

“Timothée had 66 or 67 costume changes,” Philips said, and that was just the beginning: every character, from Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro) and Johnny Cash (Boyd Holbrook) to Sylvie Russo (Elle Fanning), had between eight and 25 looks. In addition to the more than 100 speaking parts, “A Complete Unknown” also had more than 4,000 background actors whom Phillips had to dress in period clothing, making “A Complete Unknown” as massive an undertaking as any film of his career.

Making the progression of each of the film’s characters organic was Phillips’ biggest challenge in the film, but she says she received help from circumstances that weren’t, on the surface, entirely positive. “The idea was we were going to shoot in 2020, and then we got delayed because of COVID,” Phillips said. “Then when we came out of COVID, it became a scheduling issue between Timmy doing ‘Dune’ and Jim doing ‘Indiana Jones.’ Pre-production didn’t actually begin until 2023.”

Even then, there was another delay when the actors’ strike ended the film. Yet for Phillips, all the stops and starts had one major upside. “By the time we started, I had known for four years that I was going to make the film and I had been keeping an archive of footage, hunting and gathering as I went,” she said. When the film stopped due to the strike, Phillips had had his first fittings with the actors and was able to think about his choices. “I had this very quiet six-month period where I was free, just reflecting and looking at the work I had done.”

Phillips used this break to read every Dylan biography she could and to create hours and hours of playlists of his music, activities that helped her better understand the musical legend. “Most of the time you have to run and shoot from zero to 60,” she said. The extra prep time led to multiple discoveries that made their way into the film, the most significant being that Dylan was extremely thoughtful about his clothes, even before he was famous.

“In Suze Rotolo’s book, she describes how meticulously Bob dressed, and I thought he dressed like a messy 19-year-old,” Phillips said. “In fact, he really made an effort to imitate this Woody Guthrie idea of ​​an American worker with overalls and Pendleton shirts. I wouldn’t say it was orchestrated, but it was deliberate: he thought about how he wanted to be presented. Phillips’ deep dive also led her to discoveries about other characters.

“I had seen this beige mod vinyl coat in photos of Newport, and it just didn’t seem in tandem with anything Joan Baez had ever worn,” Phillips said. Eventually, she realized that Baez had worn the coat on an album cover photographed by Richard Avedon and realized that the coat must have been a gift to her. Phillips embarked on detective work to trace the origins of the coat, and it became a central costume for Baez, who, like Dylan, was trying to find his own identity at the time – an idea that was central to Phillips .

“I really wanted the clothes to show a young man finding his voice, not only musically, but also how he presents himself to us,” Phillips said. She added that clothing was also important in showing the passage of time. “Most biopics trace the trajectory of a person’s life from birth to death, and Dylan only wrote an incredible amount of stuff in just four years. Technology, architecture, automobiles… none of that really changes in four years. So I really had the opportunity to guide the audience through the film.

Although “A Complete Unknown” is a period piece about a specific cultural moment, Phillips believes its appeal has more to do with how it speaks to the present. “There are similarities with what is happening in the world right now,” she said. “We need hope, we need to believe that change is possible, and we still have the same tensions and divisions. Ultimately, for me, this film shows how creativity is essential and music is the ultimate leveler that brings everyone together. Hopefully these themes will resonate with people.