In A Complete Unknown, the history is the thing. And because of that, so are the locations. The new film charts Bob Dylan’s early career, from his arrival in Greenwich Village’s folk music scene in 1961 to his 1965 show at the Newport Folk Festival. His first-ever with electric instruments—not exactly what he was known for at the time—the performance was booed by the strictest of the folk fans in the audience and came to represent the end of an era. Never mind that electric instruments were already omnipresent at Newport Folk—Bob shouldn't partake.
Yet with such storied spots as New York City and Newport as backdrops, would you believe that they shot nearly the entire thing in New Jersey? With the exception of certain iconic facades like the Hotel Chelsea, which were shot on location, the production found that cities like Jersey City and Paterson much more closely resembled the New York of Dylan’s time than the Village does today (“You could eat a meal off of the sidewalk,” says production designer Francois Adoury of the present-day neighborhood.) Cape May, meanwhile, makes a mean Newport. Here, Adouray, director James Mangold, and Monica Barbaro (who plays Joan Baez) sit down with Condé Nast Traveler to talk about capturing the fleeting bohemian energy of the Village in the 1960s that so many continue to chase, and whether there are places still standing that evoke the feeling at all.
How would you characterize the Greenwich Village that Bob Dylan showed up at in 1961? How did you go about recreating it?
James Mangold: I'm 61 years old, so I was born in late ‘63 in the city. There's a sense memory I have of downtown and the city at that time, which, in that moment, was inexpensive to live in. You had Chinatown and Little Italy and a profound Hebrew presence on the Lower East Side, but then you had artists and musicians and truckers and pickle factories with barrels out front with cucumbers in brine and the smell of vinegar in the air and knish sellers with carts. We did as much as we could to get the smell of it, and we were also always throwing garbage on the street [while filming], because I remember from my childhood the omnipresent blowing wrapper, the urban tumbleweed. In addition to the working-class people and conventional businesses, there were businesses tailored to the artistic crowd—the clubs, which are not the way we perceive clubs now. They weren’t designed with music in mind. The Gaslight was a kind of basement that was turned into a small club. Gerde’s Folk City was originally an Italian restaurant. All of these historic concerts introducing great new artists happened in these unique spaces and streets that really don’t exist in contemporary New York.
François Audouy: I imagine it as a cultural petri dish that was bubbling with creativity, where you could walk down the street and bump into Jack Kerouac or Allen Ginsberg or Edward Hopper. There were so many artists in a small footprint, and they were there because the rents were cheap. Rather than recreating facades exactly, I wanted to capture the feeling and spirit of this technicolor world of jazz clubs, coffee shops, wine bars, and restaurants. And we did; we took over a block-and-a-half in Jersey City and recreated a 360-degree world. We recreated Kettle of Fish [which still exists in the Village today] and Café Figaro, the Gaslight. There was also the Folklife Center, a whole store converted into a mecca of everything folk. That’s the first place Bob goes when he gets there. It's a pilgrimage that he takes.
JM: It was never conceivable to shoot all [the locations] in New York because you’d be spending all your time erasing [what's been built since.] I took a real page out of Steven Spielberg’s book—he shot West Side Story in Paterson and Jersey City in New Jersey. Many of our crew and location people are friends, and we pursued a similar strategy to use the neighborhood sections of New Jersey that have not been redeveloped in the past fifty years and still had the bones. There was a lot of work to do, but you didn’t have to fight back all the new construction. And on a simple level, if you take any block in New York, especially in the Village, there are probably a few Michelin restaurants and other establishments that are not interested in closing for a week to let you show there. Jersey City was Macdougal Street, and when we were in Midtown Manhattan we were actually in Paterson. Then there were a couple of times we were in New York for the exteriors of the courthouses and the Chelsea Hotel. Jersey City and Hoboken have many neighborhoods that are Village-esque with many townhouses, small restaurants, coffee shops, and corner bakeries that could lend themselves to a conversion. Paterson has this beautiful, built-up Art Deco section.
Can you paint a picture of The Hotel Chelsea for me, what it was then and what it is now?
Monica Barbaro: I had read Patti Smith’s Just Kids so I knew about the Chelsea Hotel, although that depicted a later time and the after-effects of Bob and Joan. I went to New York University, so I know the area well, although in a completely detached way. It was a gift to be on this set, though, because no amount of research can prepare you for the way Francois captured the time period. My first night shooting was on a balcony at The Chelsea Hotel, looking down at our crew and all of these period-specific cars parked in a line. A couple of the letters on the neon sign weren’t lit up, intentionally—now it’s refurbished and gorgeous, a very different world from what it was. But they worked with the exterior in such a way that I felt I was in a time machine. And then, somebody comes and throws a bunch of period-specific newspapers and crushed beer cans on the ground. I knew the movie was going to look so beautiful.
JM: I don’t know that you’d call it a cheap hotel, but it wasn’t an expensive hotel. A lot of rock n’ roll history and even some deaths have occurred there, and it was a site of rock and folk and literary heroes. Artists gathered there—I believe my old mentor [director and screenwriter] Miloš Forman lived there for a while when he first came here from Czechoslovakia to the United States. We didn’t want to turn it into some kind of mill that it was, we wanted to capture the humdrum vibrance of it: this dank, wonderful, well-located hotel that offered a viewpoint to any and all who stayed there.
FA: It’s such an iconic institution—like the Village, it was a magnet for creatives because it was an inexpensive hotel full of people with long-term leases. Joan Baez could afford to go somewhere fancier, but she chose to go there because of the inspiration. These people needed to be in creative spaces that would feed their writing, they needed to tap into something that was happening around them. The Hotel Chelsea was a place where that could happen, where you could feel how the times were changing. It was very exciting to be able to go and shoot the exterior on location—we worked with the hotel very closely. We had to be surgical because the hotel didn’t want us to displace their guests by closing down the cafe. They’ve done an amazing job restoring the Chelsea to its former glory, so there’s nothing there that’s so new except these giant pots by the front entrance that weighed 500 pounds each. We had to leave the pots and in the film, you can’t really see them.
When the hotel was restored, they tore out all the original doors and sold them at auction—the Dylan door, the Warhol door. We shot the old interiors on a soundstage, we built the rooms and the hallway. The hotel and the elevator in particular would have reeked of pot, and while we don’t work in smell-o-vision I wanted to convey that visually. Joan’s room needed to look like she had a longer-term lease, and we gave her a pink satin bedspread.
Before we go to Newport, are there any other locations you want to mention?
JM: In real life, Pete Seeger’s cabin was in Beacon, New York. He famously found a plot of land for almost nothing and told his wife Toshi that he was going to build a cabin there with a view of the Hudson for her. It was just a forest and they cleared some space. They built an initial, classic log cabin with no plumbing that was half the size of what you see in the film, and they expanded when they had kids which is when we meet them. Way past the running time of our movie, as you may know, Pete ended up sort of saving the Hudson River by leading the charge on cleaning it up. It was a whole second career he had, where the last 25 years of his life were about rescuing New York’s great waterway.
Let’s go to Newport Folk Festival, which still goes on today. Where did you film that and what qualities did you want to capture?
JM: When we created Newport for the movie, we shot the exteriors in Cape May, which is a beautifully maintained town with turn-of-the-century wood structures right on the water. It was a very good match for Newport, Rhode Island. We built the grandstand from scratch in a field in Central Jersey.
FA: I had never heard of Cape May before, and it is such a postcard. It feels like nowhere else in New Jersey. In fact, when you go over the bridge, the locals say that you enter a microclimate because it's kind of on a peninsula—they always have better weather than the rest of the state. It has an island feel, and they’ve preserved so much. It has a tremendous amount of wood Queen Anne architecture and Victorian architecture, and some beautifully preserved hotels and weekend houses. We found The Viking Motel [where Dylan, Baez, and others stay when in town for the festival] right at the end of Main Street, and it has a whole rooftop view of the town with the Atlantic glistening in the distance. It was across the street from Congress Hall, which was the first summer White House and and had all of this history, it was a few presidents' summer White House and now a great hotel.
MB: I have not been, but it’s certainly on my bucket list now. I have not been to the Monterey festival [where Joan performs in the film], either, but I know the fog and the environment. I’m from the Bay, which is where Joan found herself later in life, specifically Carmel. During the strike, I drove through there on a foggy, cold, classic Bay day, and I sat and breathed in the freshest air.
