Edward Norton On Evoking The 1960s Folk Era In New Film Inspired By Bob Dylan's Life | The View

Three-time Oscar nominee Edward Norton once again shows why he's one of the most celebrated actors of his generation in the new movie, A Complete Unknown. He stars as folk hero Pete Seeger, who shows the ropes to a rising young talent named Bob Dylan, who's played by Timothee Chalamet. Take a look. I absolutely love your music. I'm such a big fan, Mr. Seeger. Pete. How are we? Putting the lean on you? Yeah. Trying to get you to play? Yeah, a little bit. All right. Well, don't hold it against us. For a good cause. Want to use this beauty? You always keep it handy, don't you? He's like a gunfighter with a six-gun. He's keeping it close. Oh, the time will come off when the winds will stop and the breeze will cease to be like the stillness in the wind before the hurricane begins. The hour that the ship comes in. Fabulous. And we'll be shaking. Baby, this is something else. This is really amazing. And congratulations, because you and Timothee and the film were all just nominated for the Golden Globe and the Critics' Choice Award. You are doing your own singing and banjo playing, which just tickles me. How was that? The banjo is a fickle mistress. You know, I had a lot of guitar and a little bit of musical training from my days in theater and stuff like that. But banjo, it broke my back. It's heavy. It's hard. And I came to love it. Oh, wow. Wow. Yeah. I don't know too many people who play the banjo. Well, you know, I felt like calling Steve Martin. You could have. I feel like Steve. Actually, the first thing I did with Google, is there an AI that will replace my hands with Steve Martin's? Turns out they haven't built that one yet. So Bob Dylan, interesting guy, my generation. You think? Yeah. Robert Zimmerman, actually, is what his real name is. And he was actually a poet, and he won a Nobel Prize for Literature, as a matter of fact. That's how brilliant he was with the lyrics. And then didn't show up. That was like the greatest, coolest thing that anybody's ever done. But this film only focused on the beginning of his career in the early 60s. Tell us about that and the relationship that he had with Pete Segal, who you play. So, yes. And the thing I think is really lovely about what our director, Jim Engle, did with this film, is it's really not a biopic. It's not an examination of a life in the sort of color-by-numbers ways that we've grown accustomed to. It really focuses on this incredibly intense, emergent moment between 1961 and 1964, when Bob Dylan and Joan Baez and Pete Segal, and a lot of people were in this intensive collision of artists who were engaged in the social issues of their time, where folk music was almost like punk rock. It was the outsider youth music. And Dylan emerged as this protean talent who, between when he was 20 years old and 23 years old, wrote the songs that defined the generation and defined the era. And there's kind of a beautiful drift through this period, an immersion in the period, and trying to understand how it came to be and why did it fade so quickly. Because in 1965, he famously plugged in an electric guitar at the Newport Folk Festival and caused a scandal. And it's kind of this cultural milestone of the breakup of the folk scene. When I moved to New York when I was 21 years old, that time and those people, they were a mythology. I mean, you felt you were walking in the footsteps of this story of Dylan arriving in New York to try to meet his heroes and become somebody. And I think that even if you're not a musician, even if you're not into folk music, it's very much a movie about becoming who you want to be. And in a way, how even when you do the path ahead, you're still looking for what's next and you're always growing. And I think Dylan is incredibly admirable for his artistic integrity. And Pete Seeger, who was a legendary activist and environmentalist and social, you know, one of the first people to... Way ahead of his time. One of the very first white artists to answer Martin Luther King's call to come and wrote We Shall Overcome. He was a giant and in many ways had a different kind of integrity. He really committed his music throughout his life to the cause of social change. And it's beautiful. It's tender and young. And the music in this film is, I have to say, is just a feast. It's a beautiful film. And I think anyone of any age can appreciate it. Now, you have a bit of a natural resemblance to Pete Seeger, but I hear you did some sort of enhancements to lean into it more. What can you tell us about that? So, I've thought about how much... So, here's the thing. I mean, this is what I'm going to say. Spill. I think one of the things I've come to realize that I admire most about Bob Dylan other than his songs is how protective he was of the work itself. He knew that the mystical power of what he gave us was stronger if he didn't tell you what it meant. You had to find it for yourself. And I've started to feel that in a lot of ways, like if David Blaine walked out here and he said, now I'm going to show you how I do a trick and then I'm going to do it for you. You'd say, no, no, no, no, no. Just blow my mind, right? I feel Timothy and I talked about this a lot because they wanted to set up for social, one of these cameras doing a time lapse of how you do it. The worst. And Timothy and I looked at each other and we said, no, no. And I'm going to push it off myself. Timothy's performance in this movie is a titanic act of immersion into a character. Nobody should play Bob Dylan. And he did it. And he did it so immersively and so beautifully. I've been doing this 30 years. I was knocked out by the depth of his commitment. And you shouldn't, don't look at behind the scenes stuff. Don't look at anything. Just go see it. When we were coming up and Robert De Niro did Raging Bull, we never saw anything about how, we just said that can't be him. Or Close Encounters. We didn't want to watch things about the models being made. We just wanted our minds melted. And I think we should all together preserve that experience. Stop with the social stuff. We don't need it. No, no, but yeah. No, I love that. That's an even better answer. The answer is yes, of course. We do things to try to create the illusion of recreating these incredibly iconic people. But it's the magic trick. It's the way we do it. And I think in some sense, the best thing is just to see it and get lost in it. Yeah, it's terrific. I mean, it's terrific. You know, everybody. And I think the whole cast is great. But I really do want to wave a flag and say this is a performance for the ages that Timothy gave. He is magnificent. Absolutely. Yeah. It's deep. It's rich. His musical performance is wonderful. I'm also going to say this. This one here. He's pretty good too. Is spectacular. I've been doing it for a while though, you know. It's spectacular. The movie is spectacular. Do yourself a favor and see it. Our thanks to Edward Norton, a complete unknown hits theaters on Christmas Day.