A creative risk pays off

I just thought: this is a fun little exercise. Don't ever, ever, expect that this will work out,' recalls Todd Haynes, still stressed at submitting a one-page bioflick proposal to Bob Dylan. 'Though there was one really tiny voice in my head saying: "If anything you've said about this guy is true, this is probably the only thing he ever WOULD say yes to."'

Well, it certainly wasn't flattery that allowed the Oscar-nominated Far From Heaven writer/director to become the first non-documentary film-maker to ever secure the rights to the reclusive legend's life and music. 'Dylan's manager, Jeff Rosen, and Dylan's son, Jesse, kept telling me: "Don't say 'voice of a generation'. Don't say 'genius of our time'. Maybe don't even mention Bob's name, or that he's a musician..." And I was like, how do I even begin? They just wanted to help me prove this wasn't going to be some mainstream blockbuster.'

As if. The film, originally titled I'm Not There: Suppositions On A Film Concerning Dylan, stars six different people as Bob Dylan, including a 13-year-old black boy, an Australian woman (Cate Blanchett) and Richard Gere in an incarnation as an ageing cowboy. It's dazzlingly experimental, intelligent, witty, actually even one of the most brilliant rock bioflicks of our time, but it's deliberately not Walk The Line. 'I think to squeeze Dylan into that one-size-fits-all approach is to overlook what he was, what he accomplished, the way he challenged conventional forms in music. What was so exciting about this structure,' continues 46-year-old Haynes, fixing me with his earnestly clever stare, 'was that you could have all sorts of Dylans, some more attractive and positive than others, that would all be in constant dispute through the film.

I mean, when somebody says "be yourself", we all nod as if we agree on what that means, but I don't think I believe in Dylan's singular self any more than I believe in anybody's.

If there's one thing all my films continually challenge, it's that idea.' He relaxes into a friendly smile. 'That said, I do think the trad bioflick gets a lot of eye-rolling crap from certain people. I watch those films like everybody else - and they do provide an amazing vehicle for a performance.'

Or six performances, in the case of I'm Not There. The most amazing being Blanchett's, which caused Harvey Weinstein to announce that if it didn't get her an Oscar nomination, he'd shoot himself. But is getting a woman to play Dylan more than just an award-waving gimmick? Beyoncé was rumoured for the role. Why didn't Haynes cast Madonna, rather than Cate? 'Actually the idea was quite cosmetic,' laughs Haynes. 'It's just such a famous Bob Dylan, this one with the biggest hair and the skinniest body and the Ray-Bans, that I think the shock of it, what it must have looked like to people at the time, has gone away. I was trying to demonstrate how physically unusual Dylan had become in 1966, almost overnight.' This was the period when Dylan faced animosity over going electric and fully embraced amphetamines. 'The first job of a biographer is to try to remind you why the great moments were risky to begin with.'

Haynes himself is all for creative riskiness. Even with Heath Ledger and Christian Bale on the cast list, and an Oscar nomination under his own belt ('I thought it would help more, I really did!'), the original script of this mould-breaking bioflick was apparently so 'dense, difficult and weird' that it took four years to finance. Indeed, watching I'm Not There, you feel that to some extent Haynes himself is like the missing seventh Dylan - an unflagging visionary who shrugged off the restrictive label imposed on earlier work.

Not that you should conflate two individuals who may be creatively in tune, but have yet to meet or even speak. Haynes, who currently lives in Portland, Oregon, 'didn't need or want to' meet Dylan in order to make I'm Not There, which he doesn't even know if the star has seen. You certainly wouldn't get the quixotic Dylan producing academic insights such as 'cinema's always about a kind of affirmation of the singular self within the reproduction and reiteration of a single narrative experience' which Haynes delivers with engaging casualness. Yet maybe Dylan sensed a kindred spirit. Something has to explain why he would put total, final cut trust in Haynes, a director whose 1987 student film Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story, which used Barbie dolls to replay the 1970s singer's battle with anorexia, remains shelved after an enraged Richard Carpenter secured an injunction.

I ask Haynes if he's trying to bring the experimental to the multiplex. 'That's kind of what Ginsberg says to Dylan in the film,' he replies. 'You're trying to do high art on the juke box.' If so, I'm Not There would be this week's No.1 smash hit.

I'm Not There is in cinemas from Friday.