The standard career path for serious young filmmakers is to make an attention-getting short or, if they can raise the money, an independent feature; parley that into some big studio assignments; and then use their acquired clout to get back into making the kind of films that interest them. Especially in the last two decades we’ve seen lots of talent go through the first two parts of that formula, only to find that part three isn’t as easy as it seems.

Todd Haynes is not one of those filmmakers. He gained attention in 1987 with his film Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story, using Barbie dolls to depict the life of the singer who suffered from anorexia. (You can thank Richard Carpenter and his lawyers for the fact that you can’t legally see the film today.) His first full-length feature, the audacious Poison, based on the writings of Jean Genet, was denounced from the floor of the Senate by right-wingers who wanted to use it as an excuse to do away with the National Endowment for the Arts.

Having thus won the attention of the film world, along with a reputation as a pioneer of the new “Queer Cinema,” Haynes decided he was doing well enough without Hollywood money. His films since then—Safe, Velvet Goldmine and Far from Heaven—have won increasingly larger audiences without straying from the personal vision he set out to explore.

On the surface, his new film I’m Not There may sound like a conventional project, a biography of Bob Dylan. But if you’re expecting something along the lines of Ray or Walk the Line, you’re in for a shock. I’m Not There is actually an exploration of the nature of identity, using six different actors (Richard Gere, Cate Blanchett, Marcus Carl Franklin, Heath Ledger, Ben Whishaw and Christian Bale) to play Dylan—or rather, personae that Dylan experimented with throughout his career. (None of them are actually named “Bob Dylan.”)

Haynes recently gave a press conference in Manhattan to discuss the film. Some of his remarks:

Artvoice: Is this primarily a film for Dylanologists?

Todd Haynes: I don’t know that you need to know a great deal about Dylan to enjoy the film. And I hope it helps young people who have allotted Dylan to their parents’ record collections to view him as a person who used a lot of adventure and excitement and risk and irreverence, which I think defines who he is and who he was.

AV: Why did you decide to split Dylan up into these different characters?

TH: I had a flood of fresh obsession with Dylan at the end of my 30s [Haynes was born in 1961]. At different points in their lives people look for the courage to change, for a sense of regeneration. [Reading Dylan’s biographies and listening to his music] I noticed how much and how often he changes. He enters a creative phase, and adopts it, and then moves on and has to reject it to clear the air and start fresh. So these seven psyches emerged, distinct from each other and yet they also linked. Each character explores his world and then reaches a certain impact or a certain barrier, forcing the next character into being as a solution to those conflicts.

Some of the characters were drawn directly from the biographical life of Bob Dylan, and some were composites of various sensibilities. The final story [featuring Richard Gere as a Western hermit who may be a “retired” Billy the Kid] takes a lot of Dylan’s interest in the past and his roots in traditional music and puts it all together in one story.

The Woody story [featuring Marcus Carl Franklin, a young African-American actor] is about the early years of Dylan when he was in the thrall of Woody Guthrie and his music, attitude, style and look. It’s about how the creative process can begin through impersonation. It’s almost a joke on passing, as Dylan was: He was pretending he wasn’t a middle-class Jewish kid from Minnesota, and he wanted to connect to this grassroots history of Americana. The amazing thing was how everyone went along with it through the sheer exuberance of that performance. Marcus does a very complicated and delicate dance in his performance—you can tell that he is pulling the wool over peoples’ eyes and enjoying it. It’s such a demanding role for an actor of any age—how he nailed it just amazes me.

AV: Why did you cast a woman, Cate Blanchett, as the newly electrified Dylan who shocked audiences and the media in England in 1966?

TH: The idea to cast an actress as “Jude” was there from the very beginning. It was a very superficial instinct on my part. I was looking at performances during the electric period of ’65 and ’66, and seeing this unbelievable creature, someone who was completely unlike the Dylan in [the 1965 documentary] Don’t Look Back, which was made before he plugged in electric and reinvented himself again. In this time he was even skinnier, more hyper, couldn’t sit still, the hair has gotten bigger. I think there was more joy and play in this Dylan than the slightly pugnacious Dylan in Don’t Look Back. I wanted to do something to get that shock value back. And Cate took it so much further beyond the physical transformation. This is Dylan at his most material, complex and at times spiteful and vindictive. A time when he was incredibly witty, and the mind was just working overtime, and he was at the peaks of his creativity.

AV: Were you trying to give him an element of sexual ambiguity through Blanchett?

TH: I wasn’t trying to say that Dylan had a feminine side, or a particularly soft side at the time. In fact, this was the time when he was sharpest. With the verbal dueling between [the journalist] Mr. Jones and Jude in the film, it was an interesting aspect of his creative life that I wanted to show. A lot of his art had been coming out of vengeance, almost spite. And you see it on stage: Those were the first punk performances in rock history—his music was unimaginably loud for an audience in 1966. But instead of changing his mind because people were booing and hissing, he used that hostility and it pushed him further. The scene where Jude is found out as a Jewish, middle-class kid, culminates in Cate sitting in the bathroom and typing away and creating more stuff.

He was absorbing like a sponge the climate around him. He knew how fast the ’60s were moving, from the ’50s and the civil rights era, all the hope and promise and moral clarity it presented, to 1968, where all of that got clouded. It would remain complex from that point on, and yet Dylan was moving just a little bit faster. In 1968 when the counterculture was reaching into psychedelia, Dylan was off doing country records with Johnny Cash. He was always ahead of the game.

AV: The different stories also have different “looks.” What inspired those?

TH: When I settled on these core Dylan characters and stories, I realized that they all have their roots, to a large degree, in the ’60s era, in a dense time that produced him. And I wanted each of the stories to be told in a different way, and for each of the stories to be made clear, and it made sense to draw from the cinema of the period. And that was a huge door that opened, because amazing stuff went on in film in the ’60s. A lot of it started in the European art films, which were enormously popular in the United States among the arts and music set.

For the “Jude” story I looked at [Federico Fellini’s] 8 1/2, which is an unbelievably witty and rich distortion of an artist being besieged by the media and being asked to answer for himself. Godard was the inspiration for the “Robbie” story [based on Dylan in the mid 1970s, with Heath Ledger as an actor whose on-the-road affairs wound his wife, played by Charlotte Gainsbourg]. Dylan’s love songs from that time are so beautiful in that they paint this incredible picture, but it’s a double-edged sword because the voices are given to the male character and that’s something that the man always has in Godard. It applies a sexual policy to the ’60s, which I though was important to show in the film.

The “Billy” story was inspired by the hippie Westerns that came out in the late ’60s. Prior to Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Westerns were these big, overdone studio productions made on soundstages. But the genre was reinvented by the counterculture, and the actors with stringy long hair were often scored by the artists of popular music scene, from Burt Bacharach, Leonard Cohen and of course Dylan.

AV: As a central figure in the queer cinema movement, do you consider this a “queer film”?

TH: I like a broader definition of queer. I think it’s always about the form and not the content—that’s how we change things, and that’s how artistic form grows. That’s where that label came from for these films that came out in the early ’90s. I was always happy to be categorized in that way, because the films weren’t just about gay characters and gay things, they were about telling stores in unique and different ways. Queer can be a way of rethinking and reexamining conventions, and ideas of stable identity. That really interested me in the glam era [subject of his film Velvet Goldmine]: It wasn’t about gay or straight people, it was about the embrace of the bisexual, which makes gay and straight people uncomfortable, because that in-between of the categorization is unreliable and makes us question our own identity. That’s what’s so radical about Dylan and what I love about him, because this film poses the idea of freedom from yourself and freedom from being confinable. That’s something I think Dylan played out, at a more accelerated rate than other artists due to the pressure and the fame and attention. That’s a radically queer thing to do.

AV: Was Dylan involved with the production of the film?

TH: Only at the very beginning, just to get the music rights. After that his manager was the person we dealt with.

AV: Has he seen the film?

TH: He has a DVD with him, but it is probably in a suitcase on the road. I hope that I hear something, but he works at his own time and pace.