How would you describe Greenwich Village as shown by Bob Dylan in 1961? How did you go about rebuilding it?
James Mangold: I’m 61 years old, so I was born in the city in late ’63. I have sentimental memories of downtown and the city back then, which was cheap to live in at the time. You had Chinatown and Little Italy and a deep Hebrew presence in the Lower East Side, but you had artists and musicians and trucks and vendors with barrels and pickles in front of pickle factories and the smell of vinegar in the air and carts. We did everything we could to smell it, and we also always littered the streets. [while filming]Because I remember Urban Tumbleweed, the ubiquitous flying rapper from my childhood. In addition to working-class people and traditional businesses, there were businesses geared toward the artistic crowd—clubs, which are not the way we understand clubs today. They were not designed with music in mind. The Gaslight was a basement of sorts that had been turned into a small club. Gerde’s Folk City was originally an Italian restaurant. All of these historic concerts introduced great new artists in these unique spaces and streets that don’t exist in contemporary New York.
Francois Audouy: I imagine it as a cultural petri dish that was bubbling with creativity, where you could walk down the street and bump into Jack Kerouac or Allen Ginsberg or Edward Hopper. There were a lot of artists in a small footprint, and they were there because the rent was cheap. Instead of recreating the exact faces, I wanted to capture the feeling and spirit of this techno world of jazz clubs, coffee shops, wine bars and restaurants. And we did; We drove over a block and a half in Jersey City and recreated a 360-degree world. We recreated the fish kettle [which still exists in the Village today] and Cafe Figaro, Gaslight. There was also the Lokjeevan Kendra, an entire store turned into a mecca of everything. That’s the first place when Bob gets there. It is a pilgrimage that he undertakes.
JM: Everyone could have been shot [the locations] Because in New York you will spend all your time erasing [what’s been built since.] I took a real page out of Steven Spielberg’s book – he shot West Side Story Paterson and Jersey City in New Jersey. Many of our crews and location people are friends, and we’ve adopted a similar strategy to use neighboring parts of New Jersey that haven’t been redeveloped in the last fifty years and still have the bones. There was a lot of work to do, but you didn’t have to struggle with all the new construction. And on a simple level, if you take any block in New York, especially in the countryside, there are probably some Michelin restaurants and other establishments that don’t want to close for a week to show you there. Jersey City was McDougal Street, and when we were in midtown Manhattan we were actually in Patterson. Then there were two times we were in New York outside the courthouse and the Chelsea Hotel. Jersey City and Hoboken have village-esqueres with lots of townhouses, small restaurants, coffee shops, and corner bakeries that lend themselves to conversion. Patterson has this beautiful, built-in Art Deco section.