Director James Mangold knows fans were hoping that Joaquin Phoenix would reprise his role as Johnny Cash from 2005’s Walk The Line in his new Bob Dylan movie A Complete Unknown. But he’s not interested in multiverses.
“I don’t do multiverses,” Mangold recently told Rolling Stone. “But beyond that Johnny Cash was like, 30,” he adds.
Even if Phoenix was the right age, though, Mangold is still not a fan of the concept of multiverses in general, calling them the “death of storytelling.”
“I love Joaquin, but he’s not 30, or whatever Johnny was at this moment. They’re both young people in that moment in life. It’s weird that I’ve even worked in the world of IP entertainment because I don’t like multi-movie universe-building,” Mangold says.
“I think it’s the enemy of storytelling. The death of storytelling. It’s more interesting to people the way the Legos connect than the way the story works in front of us.”
He adds: “For me, the goal becomes, always, ‘What is unique about this film, and these characters?’ Not making you think about some other movie or some Easter egg or something else, which is all an intellectual act, not an emotional act. You want the movie to work on an emotional level.”
Mangold also directed 2013’s The Wolverine and 2017’s Logan starring Hugh Jackman as Wolverine. The character is back in theaters this weekend in the multiverse tale Deadpool & Wolverine directed by Shawn Levy.
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Instead of Phoenix, Mangold cast The Bikeriders and Narcos actor Boyd Holbrook in the role of Johnny Cash in A Complete Unknown opposite Timothee Chalamet as Bob Dylan.
“I think when you see the movie, Boyd is fantastic and you don’t think about it for a second. It’s just, Oh, there’s Johnny Cash and he’s in Bob’s life,” Mangold said.
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Among other historical figures of the music industry who appear in the film is folk singer Joan Baez, played by Monica Barbaro.
“She’s one of the main characters in the movie. She is an established figure in folk music, and when young Bob arrives, there is an intense and instantaneous fascination and attraction with each other, but also a slightly competitive edge between them,” he says.
“Also just real admiration. There are sparks both warm and fiery that exist throughout the movie between them. She becomes one of the really fascinating characters, someone who also, unlike Bob, had grown up almost on the stage, has a kind of comfort and professionalism about making records and concert appearances that is diametrically different than Bob’s more seat-of-his-pants approach.
Today, like Dylan himself, Baez is still playing shows. She’s due to appear at the Newport Folk Festival this weekend — a festival that features prominently in A Complete Unknown because it’s where Dylan famously went electric in 1965.
Baez is known for songs like Diamonds and Rust and her cover of Dylan’s song Farewell Angelina. Other famous people in the movie are Edward Norton as folk artist Pete Seeger and Nick Offerman as ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax.
In addition to music movies like A Complete Unknown and Walk the Line, Mangold is the director behind 1997’s crime thriller Cop Land starring Sylvester Stallone, Harvey Keitel, Ray Liotta and Robert De Niro; 1999’s drama-thriller Girl, Interrupted starring Winona Rider, Angelina Jolie, Clea DuVall, Brittany Murphy, Elisabeth Moss, Jared Leto, Angela Bettis, Jeffrey Tambor, Vanessa Redgrave, and Whoopi Goldberg; 2007’s 3:10 to Yuma starring Christian Bale and Russell Crowe, and 2001’s rom-com Kate & Leopold starring Meg Ryan and Hugh Jackman.
Mangold also directed Bale alongside Matt Damon in 2019’s Ford v Ferrari. His most recent film before A Complete Unknown, set to be released later this year, was 2023’s Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny.
Main Image: James Mangold at the Japan premiere of Logan in 2017. Wikimedia Commons, Dick Thomas Johnson from Tokyo, Japan