Last year, the filmmaker James Mangold had a choice to make. Would he shoot, edit and release his Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown, starring Timothée Chalamet, in a speedy eight months? Or would he meticulously pore over the edit for eight months, leaving his film to sit on a shelf until an ambiguous release date sometime in late 2025, presumably with the 2026 Oscars in its sights?
“I decided I’d rather move quickly,” Mangold tells me, “than allow what inevitably happens when you have too much time on a movie – all the people with money invested in it start to worry about whether it’s going to work, they start to second-guess and hand-wring. And I’d have given them eight more months to worry…”
