Promoting his upcoming film, “3:10 To Yuma,” Christian Bale talked to New York magazine about his role as Bob Dylan (twice) in the Todd Haynes directed impressionistic-biopic, “I’m Not There.”
‘Yuma’ doesn’t look that interesting so expect a lot of journalists to try and get away with as many “I”m Not There” questions as possible without pissing off Russell Crowe.
As we noted before, Bale plays Dylan twice in the movie, or as he puts it, “two incarnations of Bob Dylan,” embodying him as the sixties political messiaht and eighties born-again evangelist. Todd Haynes called Bale’s two roles as “two halves of that essentially morally determined Bob Dylan.” Bale told NY mag that they were, “two men on a real quest for truth.”
The abstract portrayal of six people playing Bob Dylan will surely polarize some fans, but it’s the riskiness of the role and Dylan’s own artistic defiance’s that drew Bale in. “There’s definitely an attraction to seeing somebody putting themselves on a target range—and targeting their audience at the same time,” he said of Dylan. “He was creating a battlefront.”
Bale says he’s filmed a scene in which Dylan is “given an award for being the mouthpiece of his generation—and he stands up there and says a big fuck-you, very poetically.” He admires that kind of stance. “Since I was a kid, I’ve always had this image of Jimi Hendrix playing his guitar so much that his fingers are bleeding—and there’s probably no truth to it, but it doesn’t matter. I just remember thinking what a great image, somebody loving something so much they don’t even feel the pain.”