What is it about Portland?
I lived in New York City, and I was like [adopts comical serious-artist voice], "I'm never gonna live anywhere other than New York City. Why would anybody ever? Is there even another place than New York City?"
And God, is there ever, man. It's changed a lot since I moved there in 1985. It's a really professional town now. It's a town where you have to spend all your time working just to live there. And when so many people come with the sort of creative fantasy--based on its remarkable history, obviously--I just don't see where that gets fulfilled today. And for me, I liked it more when I had no notoriety, when I was just struggling to find my way and try shit and also discover shit, which I also feel like it's harder to do now.
I lived in Williamsburg the whole time, where I'm probably better known as a filmmaker than maybe anywhere on the planet, and I just realized that isn't what I want--to be identified that way exclusively. And to find a city where people don't ask you what you do [when they first meet you] is so different. I've met so many great people who live out here [in the Northwest] who are creative and smart, and the very reason why they don't want to live in a big city is so interesting, and already says so much about how they want to preserve, I think, a certain kind of creative instinct.
It's amazing that all these bands are coming out of New York, since nobody there can even afford a practice space.
It's so much about time and space. I've realized how expensive time and space are in New York, and how guarded one becomes over their time and space. And that engenders a sort of stinginess toward the world that's just not how I want to think of myself.
I wanted to take a break from film. I knew that, but I wasn't inspired by doing other things in New York. So I finally came out here to write a script, and it became this really happy, relaxed time with a lot of space, and that winter of 2000 was so dry, it was like a spring that just kept blooming. I was meeting all these new people--of course they were all like 10 years younger than me, but that was fine. (That was great!) And hiking in the forest park right behind my house, and taking excursions, and hanging out with people, and going to see so many more bands than I had probably seen in the last five years in New York....
It just felt like an incredibly social time, and not a hard-working time, yet I was also really productive. I wrote Far From Heaven, and I came up with this other concept for this Bob Dylan thing I'm probably going to do next. In that one little season, I created work that'll keep me busy for the next four years, but I felt like I was playing the whole time.
This all has nothing to do with Far From Heaven--
That's good [laughs wearily]! I'm happy to digress.
All right then. How did your Dylan project come about?
Well, I played a lot of Dylan in high school, and then sort of didn't for a while, until I kind of needed to change. It was kind of the soundtrack that took me from New York to here. And then I just kept getting into more and more stuff. Like I'd never heard all the basement tapes, and I got the whole five-CD collection. I read the Greil Marcus book, read all the biographies. And then I read that collection of interviews from '65; he was talking in that absurd, playful, riddling way. It was so beautiful on one level, like the lyrics to Blonde on Blonde or something, but it's also--he's answering the question, in a deeper, more complex way than the journalist is even aware of, and deconstructing the whole journalistic star process in the same stroke.
That weird articulation sort of propelled me, and there are a lot of other tangents... I'm not speaking very well about it, but I haven't even had time to think about it for a year, because I've been so busy working.