Time Capsule
James Mangold
THE A COMPLETE UNKNOWN DIRECTOR ON A LIFE IN MOVIES
WORDS CHRIS HEWITT
JAMES MANGOLD HAS been making man gold for quite some time. It’s been three decades since his first movie, Heavy, and on the eve of the sofaplex debut of his latest, A Complete Unknown, it’s the perfect time for Empire to show him pictures from pretty much everything he’s made since. “It’s fun to watch all these movies, but also to just visit moments in them,” he says. “Each one represents a year or two, or more, in my life. This was lovely.” Let the Mangold rush commence.
ON THE RECORD A COMPLETE UNKNOWN(2024)
“I remember this day. It was our first day in a set we built, a recreation of Studio A at Columbia Records in New York. It was where Bob [Dylan] played and recorded almost all of his first six or seven albums. The first thing we were doing — you can’t see it so much in this picture, but you can in the scene — is that we were looking at stills from these sessions, and we had arranged all the mic stands in this herringbone pattern, because they had this ridiculous number of boom-mic stands at Columbia. We got as many stands as we could find in the tri-state area. This was mid-shoot. At this point it was pretty much a foregone conclusion that Timmy [Chalamet] was doing everything live. He was so good, we just kept on pushing playback tracks aside and letting him lay it down live.”