To Capture Bob Dylan's New York, the Filmmakers First Headed to New Jersey (2025)

When a 19-year-old Bob Dylan crossed the George Washington Bridge in a hulking 1957 Chevy Impala one frigid day in January 1961, he knew he was heading to a place “where life promised something more.” As he recounted in his 2011 memoir, “At last I was here, in New York City, a city like a web too intricate to understand and I wasn’t going to try.”

It’s a web that filmmaker James Mangold begins to detangle in A Complete Unknown, a biopic released last month that chronicles the legendary singer-songwriter’s early years in New York City and his meteoric rise to stardom. The film, which stars Timothée Chalamet, is a visual and sonic treat, from the period costumes to the (spoiler alert) electric musical performances to Dylan’s signature mop. But creating Dylan’s New York—a “modern Gomorrah” as the Bard himself called it—was its own challenge.

To Capture Bob Dylan's New York, the Filmmakers First Headed to New Jersey (1)

A young Bob Dylan, shown here in 1961, performing at the Bitter End in Greenwich Village.

To pull it off, Mangold tapped François Audouy, a production designer whose credits include Ford v Ferrari and music videos for Billie Eilish and Harry Styles. The pair, who had collaborated on The Wolverine and Logan, kicked off the project in 2019, but filming wouldn’t begin for another five years, due to the pandemic and the 2023 writer’s strike. Most would be frustrated by such setbacks. But for Audouy, it was a gift. “It allowed us to get deeper into the subtext of what this world felt like and what its significance is,” he says. “Part of the job is stepping back from the canvas and thinking.”

"I feel like I’ve met him because I've spent so much time with him.”

Audouy and his team pored through troves of books and archival material, more—in the production designer’s estimation—than even existed at the Bob Dylan museum in Tulsa, Oklahoma. “[The movie] had the support of Bob Dylan. We had the support of his manager, Jeff Rosen, who was kind enough to put us in touch with all of these photographic archives,” Audouy explains. “We had over 200 photos of [Dylan’s] apartment. We had thousands of photos of Columbia Studio A. And we had photos that had never even been published before.”

What began was a multi-year journey in which Audouy quite literally inhabited Bob Dylan’s life, beginning inside Dylan’s grungy Greenwich Village apartment and ending on the stage of the Newport Folk Festival. “I know what brand of cigarettes he bought, what books he was reading, and what records he had bought,” Audouy says, who has yet to meet the Nobel Prize-winning artist. “I've done so much research about this person that I have a newfound respect for him as a poet and an artist and a musician, but, on a deeper level, I feel like I’ve met him because I've spent so much time with him.”

Here’s how Audouy brought Dylan’s universe to life.

New York City

Locations: Jersey City, New Jersey; Hoboken, New Jersey; Patterson, New Jersey; and New York, New York

To Capture Bob Dylan's New York, the Filmmakers First Headed to New Jersey (2)

Bob Dylan (Timothée Chalamet) strolls through a fictional New York.

One of the creative challenges Audouy faced as a designer was capturing the spirit of change that was rolling through Manhattan in the early 1960s—“what it felt like to walk the streets of the Village in 1961, which was a very small community inhabited by a Mount Rushmore of figures in the arts. You know, painters like Edward Hopper and writers like Allen Ginsberg and Dylan Thomas and Jack Kerouac.”

“The first note that [James Mangold] gave to me about the production design was a note that Bob Dylan had given him,” Audouy continues. “Bob had told Jim, ‘You know, the early 1960s was actually the 1950s still, it wasn't the 1960s that you think about—That didn't happen until later.’ And it planted a seed in my mind.”

To Capture Bob Dylan's New York, the Filmmakers First Headed to New Jersey (3)

The exterior of the Hotel Chelsea was one of a few IRL exteriors shot on-location in New York.

Audouy and his team found the perfect New York analog across the Hudson River in New Jersey—Hoboken and Jersey City, in particular— where the architecture, tax incentives, and openness to film and TV production made it ideal for ambitious sets. MacDougal Street and its many folk landmarks—Minetta Tavern, the Gaslight Cafe, Cafe Wha?, Café Borgia, and more—was recreated in Downtown Jersey City. Twenty miles northwest in Patterson, the crew transformed an entire block to look like 1960s Greenwich Village, complete with period cars.

“The community was so open to filming. We were able to do a very, very elaborate full dress of a city block,” Audouy says. “That whole street was very inspiring to do because it was so immersive and layered with all of these businesses and things—the pickle vendor was selling pickles.”

Bob Dylan’s Apartment

Filming Location: on-location in Hoboken, New Jersey and Palisades Stages in Kearny, New Jersey

To Capture Bob Dylan's New York, the Filmmakers First Headed to New Jersey (4)

A peek inside Bob Dylan’s apartment, as seen on set of A Complete Unknown. Out of all the sets, this was Audouy’s favorite.

One of the most meticulous sets—and Audouy’s personal favorite— was Dylan’s New York apartment. The production team relied on a hybrid set for the interiors, one on-location in Hoboken and another on a sound-stage. “We basically built the set twice,” the set designer explains. “We built a full interactive interior on stage, but then we did three walls into a location so Bob could open the windows and look out at his street and drink in the detail of what was happening down below.”

To Capture Bob Dylan's New York, the Filmmakers First Headed to New Jersey (5)

A photo of Dylan at home in the early 1960s.

Because the team had so much archival material to draw upon, they were able to create Dylan’s home in exacting detail—from the newspaper clippings he kept, the type of mattress he used, to the awards and books that lined his shelves. “You could really feel the story of a 19-year-old kid in his first apartment,” Audouy says.

“You could really feel the story of a 19-year-old kid in his first apartment."

The set was so convincing that he fooled the film’s editors, who had no idea the set was filmed partially on a soundstage. Says Audouy, “There were moments in the film where I definitely had goosebumps, and the biggest one was probably when [set decorator Regina Graves] finished decorating Bob's apartment.”

Pete Seeger’s Cabin

Location: A cabin in Blairstown, New Jersey

To Capture Bob Dylan's New York, the Filmmakers First Headed to New Jersey (6)

Pete Seeger (Ed Norton) at home at his rustic upstate property.

In one scene, Dylan drops by his mentor Pete Seeger’s (played by Ed Norton) family home, a rustic cabin in upstate New York. “That was such a hard one to find,” Audouy recalls. But he was surprised to find that New Jersey had a rich architectural legacy, including works by Frank Lloyd Wright and other masters. They ultimately settled on a midcentury wood-clad cabin near the Pennsylvania-New Jersey border. “It was very surprising in that it was kind of in the middle of nowhere, but it was a beautiful, midcentury home,” he says.

To Capture Bob Dylan's New York, the Filmmakers First Headed to New Jersey (7)

The set of the Seeger family kitchen.

Audouy put his culinary skills to the test in this set: “Every time I do a kitchen set, I'll do a meal in the kitchen the night before. We built Pete Seeger's kitchen and I actually cooked onions. I did like a ragout, I think, the day before, and I spilled a bunch of tomato sauce and cleaned it up and everything. You're just hoping that that extra little five percent effort helps everyone really feel it.”

Graystone Hospital

Filming location: Essex County Hospital in Belleville, New Jersey (exterior); Dayton Street School in Newark, New Jersey (interior)

To Capture Bob Dylan's New York, the Filmmakers First Headed to New Jersey (8)

Dylan (Chalamet) and Woody Guthrie (Scoot McNairy) in A Complete Unknown.

Some of the most poignant moments in A Complete Unknown occur when Dylan pays a visit to his hero, folk icon Woody Guthrie, who was suffering from Huntington’s disease, a debilitating neurological condition, inside Greystone Park Psychiatric Hospital in Morris Plains, New Jersey.

The exteriors were shot at the Essex County Hospital Center, a former psychiatric hospital built at the turn of the 20th-century. Finding just the right location for the interiors was a tougher quest. “[James Mangold] had done a whole movie set in a mental institution, Girl Interrupted. “He was like, we got to find somewhere with rounded corners and the right institutional tile. We looked for months and months before we found that location.”

They eventually discovered a historic high school, four miles south in Newark. Guthrie’s room was constructed at the end of a hallway. “It felt very authentic because it was cold and damp and we were shooting at the end of winter. It was a place you really wouldn't want to be institutionalized in.”

Columbia Records Studio A

Filming location: Palisades Stages in Kearny, New Jersey

To Capture Bob Dylan's New York, the Filmmakers First Headed to New Jersey (9)

Dylan (Chalamet) and his band in Columbia Records Studio A, which the production team aimed to look and sound authentic.

A subtle set, but one music fans will regard with near-religious reverence, was Studio A at Columbia Records—the New York recording space where Dylan recorded some of his most famous tracks and “went electric.”

“We had a lot of audiophiles on the show—they were just huge, huge Dylan fans, but also fans of the music from the 1960s. Columbia Studio A is a church, it's like holy ground for these incredible records that were recorded there at the time,” Audouy says. “You can apparently listen to some of these records and hear which Columbia studio it was recorded in based on the sound registry.”

The production design team aimed for their recreation to not only look accurate, but to also sound accurate. “We had all period microphones. We had a reproduction of the mixing console, all the playback, and the speakers were real,” he continues. “So that was another little time machine that we got to spend some time in.”

Newport Folk Festival

Location: Cape May, New Jersey (hotel and surrounding area) and Echo Lake Park in Mountainside, New Jersey (festival grounds)

To Capture Bob Dylan's New York, the Filmmakers First Headed to New Jersey (10)

Dylan (Chalamet) on stage at the Newport Folk Festival.

A Complete Unknown culminates with a concert that would change the world of music forever: the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, when Dylan played a set with a fully-amplified band–a shocker to the anti-establishment audience. Audouy’s mission was to quite literally set the stage for this historic moment and also capture the communal nature of the folk music scene.

“You pretty much have to take out a mortgage to go to a concert nowadays,” he says. “This was a time where anybody could go see Bob Dylan or Johnny Cash or Joan Baez. There was no corporate sponsorship. You could have a picnic on the lawn. I was trying to recreate this very bucolic feeling.”

They settled on two New Jersey locations as a stand-in for Newport: Cape May—a historic seaside resort town defined by quaint Victorian buildings—and Echo Lake Park in Mountainside, New Jersey.

To Capture Bob Dylan's New York, the Filmmakers First Headed to New Jersey (11)

The hotel was filmed on-location in Cape May, New Jersey.

The film took over the Victorian Motel in Cape May to create the hotel scene where Dylan hung out with his on-and-off-again girlfriend, Sylvie Russo (a composite character played by Elle Fanning) and his band. “We basically took over the entire hotel, changed out all of their light fixtures, and did a massive dress. The interiors of the motel hotel were shot on stage. But what was really successful was that we were able to show the community and all these people and musicians arriving in Newport. You can feel the context of what was happening.”

If Audouy were to pick a corporate sponsor for his re-created festival, it would be Etsy, he jokes: “Everything that we built there was all handmade, made out of wood. [We had] hand-painted signage and hand-stitched canvases.”

One of his favorite set-design scores was the original electric piano Dylan and his band used at the festival. “They're very proud of that fact they got that,” he says of the props team.

"A set is an extension of a costume."

Audouy recalls a conversation with actor Monica Barbaro, who plays Joan Baez. “I'm like, does it really matter that we do all this extra stuff that you maybe don't see on-film? And she said absolutely— that, for her process, it adds another five to 10 percent on top of the performance.”

It’s that extra percentage that Audouy searches for in his work. “There's something that happens when an actor puts on a costume, when the undergarments are authentic and the shoes are authentic—they feel something,” he says. “A set is an extension of a costume…When you have the freedom to be real, and give it that extra 10 percent, I think it comes through in the performances—and you feel something in the audience.

To Capture Bob Dylan's New York, the Filmmakers First Headed to New Jersey (12)

Anna Fixsen

Deputy Digital Editor

Anna Fixsen is the deputy digital editor of ELLE DECOR, where she oversees all facets of ELLEDECOR.com. In addition to editing articles and developing digital strategy, she writes about the world's most beautiful homes, reviews the chicest products (from the best cocktail tables to cute but practical gifts), and reports on the most exciting trends in design and architecture. Since graduating from Columbia Journalism School, she's spent the past decade as an editor at Architectural Digest, Metropolis, and Architectural Record and has written for outlets including the New York Times, Dwell, and more.

To Capture Bob Dylan's New York, the Filmmakers First Headed to New Jersey (2025)

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