How "A Complete Unknown" Recreated a Long-Lost New York

"How does it feel?" croons Bob Dylan in his 1965 hit, "Like A Rolling Stone." Production designer François Audouy, whose credits include Marvel films and music videos for Billie Eilish and Harry Styles, asked himself that exact same question for the new Dylan biopic, A Complete Unknown. Directed by James Mangold and based on the book Dylan Goes Electric! by Elijah Wald, the film tells the story of the Minnesota-born music icon’s rise to fame after arriving in New York City in 1961.

Starring Timothée Chalamet as Dylan, A Complete Unknown centers the individuals and places that shaped his budding sound: a friendship with folk legend Pete Seeger (Edward Norton); a bond with Suze Rotolo (who is renamed Sylvie in the film and played by Elle Fanning) that grounds him in his early years in the Greenwich Village artistic scene, and a tumultuous relationship with Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro), a constant source of musical inspiration. The film takes place in Manhattan nightlife hot spots of the early ’60s, including Gerde’s Folk City—the site of Dylan’s first major gig—and the Gaslight, a Greenwich Village cafe made famous by beat poets.

While much of the film was shot in New Jersey, Audouy was responsible for bringing the apartments and streetscapes of 1960s New York (back) to life. Yet unlike period pieces that cram scenes with as much vintage ephemera as possible, A Complete Unknown opts for a more nuanced approach. Dwell spoke with Audouy about his scenic design process, which draws on "how it feels" to inhabit not just a character, but the era’s cultural and political evolution.

Your previous work in film and media is quite diverse. What’s the overarching design philosophy you bring to projects? 

Obsessiveness, probably. With every project that I take on, I have to become not only an expert in the subject matter, but I really want to get in the heads of the characters and the settings in which the story takes place. When you put characters in their apartments and houses, they’re an extension of the character…at a very deep level.

I’m always looking for the truth in the scenery and now, as I get older as a production designer, I’m trying to get below the surface research and into the emotional undercurrent of these spaces. I want the worlds that I build to flow over the audience; I’m not interested in [designs] that are distracting and make it about the theatricalities. What turns me on is taking audiences into a time machine where they forget that they’re watching something that takes place in the early ’60s—they’re in the early ’60s. They’re watching this over the shoulder of the main characters and their environment is like a warm blanket that just envelops them, because it’s full of realism, depth, truth, and authenticity.

What did that look like for A Complete Unknown?

In this particular movie, I kept thinking about Bob Dylan’s line "How does it feel?" as my mantra for the production design, because that’s really what it’s all about. How does it feel to walk the streets of the village in 1961? How does it feel to go into Gerde’s and listen to Joan Baez and Bob Dylan’s first performance? How does it feel to walk into Bob Dylan’s apartment, which is really the apartment of this young kid, 19 years old, who’s just left his home in Minnesota. How does it feel to wander the hospital to see Woody Guthrie, who’s ailing in his room?

There’s so much nuance, especially in the residential interiors. Maybe it is a common trope in films or television shows about the 1960s—often the scenic design tends to feel very overblown with era-specific paraphernalia—but in Pete Seeger’s house or in Dylan’s apartment, it is not. In Sylvie’s apartment you see some civil rights march posters but it’s very quiet.  

That nuance, those details, are things that we obsess over. I worked very closely with my set decorator, Regina Graves, and we’re totally in sync with the drive to tell stories in a very realistic way. Suze Rotolo wrote a great autobiography about her time with Bob Dylan in the 1960s; she wrote beautifully about her apartment and Bob’s apartment—about life in the Village. Sometimes words can be even more evocative than pictures because there’s an emotion to what it felt like that is helpful for us to connect to as storytellers.

With Suze—Sylvie—we plotted out her whole life story. We tried to find ways to to tell that story, especially what had happened in the years prior, in terms of her political engagement and things like that, in her apartment. She was an artist and a painter, but she was also really connected to what was going on politically, and there was an interesting parallel between her involvement and connection to her community, and how connected Bob Dylan would become. You see Sylvie’s influence on him. They go to political marches together, and they’re walking and talking about what’s going on in the arts, so there was a parallel between both of those apartments. With great art, everything is there for a reason. I think it’s the same thing with production design: every color, piece of set dressing, is there for a reason, and is hopefully imbued with story.

And then there’s the city of New York itself. There is something about Greenwich Village that lives in the American cultural imagination, specifically in the 1960s and ’70s, whether your point of reference is Patti Smith, beat poets, or even Fran Lebowitz. How did you go about recreating neighborhoods?  

Greenwich Village was a very unique place in America because it was a very affordable neighborhood in the middle of one of the greatest cities in the world. And because it was affordable, it attracted artists and poets and musicians, all living and working shoulder to shoulder in a very bucolic setting, all going to the same coffee shops and bars and folk clubs.

The early 1960s was different [from the latter part of the] decade; it was more like the 1950s. There’s a lot of subtle change that’s happening from year to year, and that was something that we were trying to tap into in the film: We’re seeing the birth of the 1960s happen in the nuclear core—Greenwich Village. It’s a great American story about these times. The movie’s about Bob Dylan, but it’s also about all of the surrounding characters that influenced him and changed him, and how he changed them as well. I looked at and was inspired by a lot of the Kodachrome photography—Ernst Haas and Tod Papageorge. We had access to all of the original negatives taken by the photographers who followed Bob around. Bob Dylan’s manager put us in touch with the estates of Don Hunstein and Ted Russell and photographers like that. I also looked at the photography of Dennis Hopper, who was documenting New York at that time.

When you are thinking about places like Gerde’s, the Gaslight, the Chelsea Hotel, do you want the audience to think about how the city has changed? New York is a very different place now than it was then. 

I’ve had a lot of amazing responses from people who watch this movie and have an emotional reaction to having spent two hours and 20 minutes in this world. There’s a real emotional reaction—not only watching these characters go through their story, but also being with them in the New York of the 1960s because it’s a very romantic time. It’s a time when people were more connected with each other. There’s, I think, a melancholy feeling to this America that was so much more hopeful. New York City, as you mentioned, it’s a very different place now. It has this amusement park quality to it, where many of the facades have been pressure-washed and sandblasted, and the sidewalks are spotless, and that’s just such a different world from the Greenwich Village we portrayed in the film.

I had bags of period-correct trash that I would layer on top of the sets right before shooting. James Mangold would talk about growing up in New York in the 1970s and remembering how it smelled. And I would try to think of ways to make it look like it smelled like New York—we’d have hot dog vendors, like we still have today, but with pickle barrels in the corner. When you’re adding all those layers of details, it creates a world of specifics. You’re like, Wow, this is completely different from walking down the street in New York today.

For audiences, do you have a specific scene or detail you hope they will pay most attention to?  

My favorite challenge was creating Bob Dylan’s apartment. When you read a scene that says, "interior Bob’s apartment," an apartment might go to the bottom of the list of importance in a normal film. I think Regina and I did something very unique in that apartment. We took a very small space and we made it profound. We really fell in love with that space, and you could feel the love when you watch the film. It started to come alive and become a character. You could literally walk up the steps, open the door, and then have a completely full interaction with the space. We plumbed everything, we ran gas to the stove. Everything could be plugged in. You could sit at Dylan’s desk and look at his typewriter; news clippings from the years that the scenes took place were up on the wall. We rebuilt all of the furniture that Dylan built. It was really special. And, you know, Timmy [Chalamet] would come in there and just sit, because you could really feel this character. And I think that it taught me that you shouldn’t underestimate how profound a space can be to the actual finished project. It doesn’t matter how big it is or how expensive it is, if you’re a believer, and if you spend the time creating that backstory, and really letting yourself fall in love with the space, the results can be really surprising.

Top photo by James Mangold, Courtesy of Searchlight Pictures

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