“Every conversation about Joan’s voice, you hear about her vibrato, the key she sings in and the angelic quality. It was about getting those things so it was recognizable,” recollects Barbaro, a supporting actress Oscar nominee — one of many movie’s eight nods, together with finest image. “I leaned into getting as close to her as possible. And on the day, you put the preparation on the shelf and receive the person in front of you in a real authentic moment.”
Barbaro didn’t meet with 84-year-old Baez however did get some cellphone time together with her and located her to be form and forthright. “It’s about authenticity. Joan was very approachable in the research. She reveals so much about herself. I didn’t have to cut through a lot of self-congratulatory B.S. to find what makes her tick.”
Dylan was nonetheless establishing himself within the Greenwich Village folks scene when he met Baez, by then a star. “She had a very complicated relationship with fame in that it didn’t really sit right with her,” notes Barbaro. “I think it bumped against her values, and she was looking for lyrics that were saying something so she could put this platform she had into doing some good.”
Dylan’s expertise as a songwriter was instantly obvious to Baez, and earlier than lengthy they fell into one another’s arms, regardless of his longtime relationship with Suze Rotolo, represented within the movie by fictional character Sylvie Russo (Elle Fanning). In a pivotal scene, Baez wakes up subsequent to Dylan (Timothée Chalamet) after their first evening collectively. She harmonizes whereas he sketches out a brand new music known as “Blowin’ in the Wind.”
“There are so many components to that scene; it’s multiple pages too. We shot that for 14 hours,” Barbaro says with a sigh about filming in temperatures typically topping 100 levels below the lights. It was her last scene on the movie and essentially the most intimate.
“It has to be so raw, first thing in the morning, finding your voice and finding each other’s voice. She’s seeing the words for the first time, but she’s also a talented musician and knows how to pick up the melody and harmonize and play. He’s in the corner on his bed, noodling [on] the guitar, being kind of a d—. But for me, the one thing I wanted to make sure to have was the impact of his writing on her.”
Monica Barbaro stars as Joan Baez with Timothée Chalamet as Bob Dylan in “A Complete Unknown.”
(Searchlight Footage)
Dylan and Baez had been romantically linked till his 1965 U.Ok. tour (which isn’t in “A Complete Unknown” however is immortalized in D.A. Pennebaker’s documentary “Don’t Look Back”). Accompanying him months later on the Newport Folks Competition, the place he went electrical (the brand new film’s climax), Baez flips him the fowl as he takes the stage.
“She fell in love with the poet, the person willing to say what he was willing to say. I think she fell in love with the words themselves and how he was saying things she was trying to find the words for,” says Barbaro in regards to the doomed relationship. “She talked about how there was a mother-child dynamic between them too. And they were so young. If I try to unpack my relationships at 20 … I can’t imagine that being inspected on a public level for decades to come.”
Initially from San Francisco, Barbaro grew up within the Bay Space suburb of Mill Valley, the place she started dancing at an early age and went on to review ballet. Graduating NYU’s Tisch Faculty of the Arts in 2010, she determined to pursue appearing, discovering work on such exhibits as Lifetime’s “UnREAL” and NBC’s “Chicago Justice,” and ultimately touchdown the position of Lt. Natasha “Phoenix” Hint in “Top Gun: Maverick” alongside Tom Cruise.
“My experience with Timothée and Tom is that they work tirelessly at being good at what their characters are good at,” she says, evaluating her two main actors. “It’s an all-consuming profession because you have to learn skills in a matter of months as if you’ve been doing them for decades.”
Just a few weeks in the past, Barbaro discovered of a factor known as an Oscar shortlist. Just a few days later, she discovered she was on it. “I was mid-fitting for another project,” she recollects of the day of the nominations. “My publicist asked if I’d be available to talk at the time. I’m not going to change around my day and sit by my phone. I was going to play it cool. The next thing I knew, my phone was blowing up with congratulations. It’s mind-blowing. Sometimes people will say, ‘Academy Award nominee Monica Barbaro,’ and it stops me, whoa!”
Dylan and Baez sang in regards to the problems with their time — social justice, warfare, racism — points that persist at this time. “It was only 60 years ago. Human evolution takes time,” says Barbaro, questioning if in some methods the occasions, they aren’t a changin’.
“I like to be optimistic, but some days, politically speaking, my optimism is through the floor. The coolest thing about this film is getting to see audiences who lived then and [see them] feel like their time was understood.”