The gritty Greenwich Village streets Bob Dylan walked in the early 1960s were recreated in New Jersey. Photo: © 2024 Searchlight Pictures
In his 1965 hit 'Like A Rolling Stone', Bob Dylan urgently repeats the phrase "How does it feel?" to a woman he seems hurt by.
Recreating the scenes of Dylan's early life for the biopic A Complete Unknown, François Audouy realised the question also gets to the heart of effective set design.
Crafting on-screen environments that help an audience to feel as they watch is the central task of a film and TV production designer, Audouy says.
On A Complete Unknown, this meant reconstructing - with absolute authenticity - the early '60s New York art scene from which a plucky young songwriter evolved into the voice of his generation.
Production designer François Audouy's previous film credits include Air and Ford v Ferrari. Photo: Jay L. Clendenin/Los Angeles Times - © Los Angeles Times
"Bob Dylan is a sort of American superhero so I did feel a huge responsibility to get it right," Audouy tells Culture 101's Mark Amery.
As it is a character piece, the production design of A Complete Unknown is "meant to kind of flow over you", Audouy says, although getting every precise detail of the set right was still essential.
"If I don't do my job properly the whole house of cards crumbles ... If any minute it's phoney or fake or pushed or arch, it just takes the audience out of [the story]."
In the early 1960s, the tiny Greenwich Village neighbourhood where Dylan lived and hung out was like an "artistic petri dish", Audouy says.
Without the distractions of technology, creatives in New York were much more connected to each other and to what was happening around them.
"And Bob Dylan was the most connected of everybody."
Unlike the smelly, trash-lined city streets that Dylan first strode down with his guitar over 60 years ago, present-day Greenwich Village looks "pressure-washed, sandblasted and clean", Audouy says.
With the exception of the iconic Chelsea Hotel's still-true-to-period exterior, the "texture" New York streets had in the 1960s was no longer available in Manhattan, he says, so most of A Complete Unknown's outside scenes were shot in New Jersey.
To replicate Dylan's Chelsea Hotel apartment, Audouy and set decorator Regina Graves were able to create a "time capsule" by working from unpublished archival photos made available to them because the film had Dylan's personal stamp of approval.
"Having these high-res photos we were able to sort of completely obsess about all the details ... we just had so much fun with really trying to get it as accurate as possible."
To make Dylan's simple apartment look more cinematic, some artistic licence was taken with its original "bones", Audouy says, but Dylan's belongings in A Complete Unknown - including his desk, typewriter, taped-up newspaper clippings, dog-eared Jack Kerouac books and record collection - are all based on these old photographs.
Based on archival photos, the objects on Bob Dylan's writing desk were replicated in A Complete Unknown. Photo: Courtesy of François Audouy
"You have a completely immersive space where you can not only look in all directions but you can interact with every single thing in the space.
"Imagine being able to go into Bob Dylan's apartment in 1962 and go through his record collection and pick out a record and put it on the record player?"
From 20 March, fans of Audouy's A Complete Unknown sets can check out his next project The Residence on Netflix.
For the murder mystery series he designed multiple floors of the White House which were constructed on eight soundstages in an entire Hollywood studio.
"It's really a remarkable show and I think it's going to really be exciting."
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