DA Pennebaker is acknowledged as one of the pioneers of cinema verite. As well as Dont Look Back his many acclaimed films include the Oscar-nominated The War Room and Monterey Pop.
BBC Four: How did you get involved with making Dont Look Back?
DA Pennebaker: Albert Grossman, Dylan's manager, asked me if I wanted to go over to England with him. I knew who Dylan was and had maybe heard The Times They Are A-Changin' but I really didn't know much about him. It was just some sort of hunch and I said, "Sure". I met him down at the Caesar Tavern and we talked about doing that first scene with the cue cards, which wasn't originally going to be part of the film.
BBC Four: What was the idea behind that famous sequence?
DA Pennebaker: Dylan just thought it would be interesting and I thought it was a great idea. Initially it was going to be something for British television. You had Ready, Steady, Go where the artists had to mime to a backing track because it was cheaper than having them play live. The Beatles would come in and instead of miming they'd play their guitars upside down and do everything they could to pretend not to sing; it was kind of a joke. Dylan thought it was a funny idea and this would be another step on from that. We shot three sequences - one on the roof, one in the back of the hotel and the one in the alleyway. I just took the one in the alleyway and never took it off. To me, that was the greatest way to start the film.
BBC Four: What did you want to get out of Dont Look Back from a filmmaking perspective?
DA Pennebaker: I don't think of films that way. It's like when you start a novel; you don't think what shelf it should be on or how long it will be. I wanted to have no interviews and no information supplied by the filmmaker. All you would see is what happened directly in front of me.
|
I couldn't maintain that throughout because after a while you don't want to bore people with your obsessions but I wanted it to be a different kind of feature film in which production values weren't the main course. I took a beating for that because people couldn't believe I was asking them to run it in theatres,
|
 |
The famous cue-card sequence |
it looks so ratty and unlikely. It didn't even have end credits that said who everybody is. But that was fine. I was trying to invent something new.
BBC Four: One of the striking things for a British viewer is just how drab the country looks. What did you make of Britain at that time?
DA Pennebaker: I thought it looked wonderful. But what I really liked was that we'd wheel into each town really early in the morning in our little parade of Austins and there'd be no evidence of human life - it'd be pretty empty, perhaps someone setting up a market stall. Then we'd go to the hall where that night's concert was going to take place and there'd be a whole group of people sitting there. There were no posters advertising that Dylan was going to be there but all these people would be waiting. They wouldn't run to him and squeal as did crowds of kids here when the Beatles arrived. It was solemn; it was like some sort of druid council waiting for us. I thought that was fantastic.
BBC Four: Even though Dylan is playing solo and acoustic in the film, he still looks like a rocker with his leather jacket and sunglasses. What did you make of him at that time?
DA Pennebaker: I found him very arresting but I didn't understand fully why. He seemed in some ways very naïve and in some ways very hip. He just seemed to know what was going to happen and what to do. That combination I'd never seen in a person before. Even when you hear a person sing a song as complicated as It's All Over Now, Baby Blue or Mr Tambourine Man, you take for granted the music. You forget that he had to really go through some wondrous process to come up with those songs. It didn't just come up through the room and bite him. That forces you to think about this person, who doesn't seem to really understand the intellectual aspects of life, but who can write these incredible songs. You start watching him carefully and he bears watching. He's never caught short and if he is he makes a joke out of it. So for me he became a really interesting target for filmmaking.
BBC Four: What was Dylan's reaction when he first saw Dont Look Back?
DA Pennebaker: Horrible. We showed it in Los Angeles in a little screening room I'd rented. It was the worst screening room I'd ever had - the stuff wasn't even in synch most of the time. We watched the film and at the end he stood up with a yellow pad he was going to make notes on. He didn't take any notes. He just said, "Well, we've seen the film now and we're going to have another screening tomorrow night and I am going to make notes and we're going to figure out just what we need to do to fix it." This really gave me the blues.
BBC Four: What was it he didn't like?
DA Pennebaker. I don't think he knew. He was just overwhelmed. What he saw was himself sort of naked on the street. He hadn't realised that a film could be so revealing. He always had this thing, like Ginsberg and Kerouac had, that if you just buttoned up and didn't say anything people really wouldn't know if you were a Democrat or a Republican. He thought he was pretty well covered and suddenly he saw himself, as he saw it, as totally revealed. I don't think most people see that [in the film] but that's what he saw. So we screened it the next night. At the end he jumped up with the pad, which was empty again, and said, "It's perfect". That was it.
BBC Four: So he had no influence over the finished film?
DA Pennebaker: I had cut down the scene where he's banging away at the piano and is clearly figuring out a song. I thought that to people who weren't into Dylan this would seem very precious and not too revealing. He called me up and said, "I've got a couple of things about the film. One is the scene where I am working on the song at the
|
piano. You cut it down. That's not how I remember it". He said, "Have you ever filmed anyone writing a song before?" I thought a bit and replied, "Actually, no I haven't" and he just said, "Alright." That was it. Then he mentioned all that craziness in the hotel room and that it wasn't the way it was all the time.
|
|
Pennebaker films Dylan |
I said, "No it wasn't but that's an important aspect of your life and you're going to have to deal with things you don't want to". He said, "Mmm..." and there was a long pause and that was it. I went back and I looked at the thing where he was working on the piano and I saw that he was right and I put it back in. Later on he said, "It's the best documentary ever made, I'm just sorry it's about me." But that's his attitude. He hated people getting at him. He doesn't want to comment to people who can't figure out what he's doing. If they can't figure him out then that's their problem.
BBC Four: Why wasn't the film released until 1967?
DA Pennebaker: I couldn't get anyone to look at it, let alone put it in a theatre. Television was not going to run it. I showed it in a couple of schools and public halls and I'd always get a fantastic crowd so I knew there was an audience, but I couldn't get any exhibitors to think about that. Then this guy appeared who ran a whole chain of theatres called the Art Theater Guild - a chain of porno houses. I showed him the film and afterwards he said, "It's exactly what I'm looking for. It looks like a porn film but it's not." He said, "I'm going to give you this theatre out in San Francisco. It's a big theatre and we'll see what happens". It was the Presidio. It wasn't until we did Monterey Pop the year later that we saw this cinema. It was rattiest place you ever saw but there was a line around the block and there's nothing that warms a filmmaker's heart better than seeing that! And Dont Look back played there for almost a year before we brought it to New York. It took us awhile to get a good 35mm print but after that it jumped and started running everywhere. Exhibitors don't look at the films but they could see that they were gong to sell popcorn and a lot of tickets.
printable version
