Bob Dylan Was Impressed (And Influenced) By This Classic '60s Crime Drama

Bob Dylan, one of the most awarded musicians in the medium's history, has good taste in movies. /Film previously wrote about how Dylan is very fond of Martin Scorsese's controversial New Testament riff "The Last Temptation of Christ." That said, he doesn't always make the best decisions when it comes to his acting roles. Most recently, Dylan starred as a Dylan-like musician in the lazy and uninteresting film "Masked and Anonymous." As a musician, Dylan's taste and craft are impeccable. As an actor... Well, I suppose he doesn't really need to be an actor, what with his music career and all. 

As a filmgoer, though, Dylan is wholly savvy. He likes the classics, and he has a long-standing working relationship with Scorsese. Scorsese, recall, directed the concert film "The Last Waltz" in 1975, which featured a few numbers by Dylan, as well as "Bob Dylan: No Direction Home" and "Rolling Thunder Revue."

Dylan also took inspiration from Jean-Luc Godard, often cited as one of the founding members of the French New Wave and a staple of film schools everywhere. Back in 1988, Jean-Luc Godard mentioned (as transcribed by the New Yorker) that he wanted to cast Dylan in an upcoming project, implying that it was maybe his 1985 film "Hail Mary." (The New Yorker pointed out that Godard got the timing a little wrong in his letter, and that he was actually pursuing Dylan for his adaptation of Shakespeare's "King Lear," not released until 1987.)

But in 1985, Dylan had already given a nod of interest to Godard, perhaps as a way of acknowledging that the filmmaker had been pursuing him. Dylan declared in a Rolling Stone interview that he took a great deal of inspiration from Godard's seminal 1960 work "Breathless."

"Breathless" might be described as a crime drama, but it's more a film about hanging out and having conversations. The revolutionary part of "Breathless" is that the characters talk about movies. The film's protagonist, Michel (Jean-Paul Belmondo), has clearly modeled his attitudes and look on the characters he has seen in pop Hollywood movies, specifically the ones with Humphrey Bogart. "Breathless" argued that mainstream Hollywood had, in the following generation, come to influence culture. Watching, discussing, and writing about movies had now become a cinematic form unto itself. 

"Breathless" was also notable in that it affected a grounded, documentary style, eschewing the mannered sense of perfection that the previous generation's filmmakers had all adhered to. Shabby authenticity was now preferred to mannered mastery. 

In that 1985 Rolling Stone interview, quoted by the New Yorker, Bob Dylan was asked about his greatest cinematic influences, and "Breathless" was right on the tip of his tongue. The musician said: 

"I figured Godard had the accessibility to make what he made, he broke new ground. I never saw any film like 'Breathless,' but once you saw it, you said: 'Yeah, man, why didn't I do that? I could have done that.' Okay, he did it, but he couldn't have done it in America."

In that interview, Dylan also cited Alfred Hitchcock as an influence, along with Andy Warhol, Sam Peckinpah, and "Dracula" director Tod Browning. That last one is a little surprising, as Browning tended to make arch and high-concept horror movies. 

It turns out that Jean-Luc Godard and Bob Dylan have something in common: surviving a terrible motorcycle accident. Music historians likely know the incident well, but in 1966, Bob Dylan was blinded by the sun while riding his motorcycle in Woodstock, New York. He slammed on the brakes, crashed his bike, and was left incapacitated. This accident coincided with severe burnout, and Dylan fell out of the public eye for the better part of a decade. 

Godard, meanwhile, suffered a very similar motorcycle accident in June of 1971, while he and a peer, Jean-Pierre Gorin, were shooting their film "Tout Va Bien." The accident also sidelined Godard pretty severely. He fractured his skull and his pelvis, lost a testicle, and was left in a coma for a week. Gorin completed "Tout Va Bien." 

In a 1988 issue of Actuel Magazine (also quoted by the New Yorker), a reporter asked Godard to draw a parallel between his and Dylan's motorcycle accidents. Godard talked about Dylan as if they were kindred spirits, saying: 

"I have a great deal of sympathy for him when I read critics who eviscerate him, who call him a 'has-been.' Sometimes I read Rolling Stone to get news of him. I want to see whether he's on the charts. I tried to get him to act in who-knows-what film, a project in the United States, and then all of a sudden he turned toward Christ. And I said to myself, 'That will happen to me too.' I forgot all about it, but when I made 'Hail Mary,' I remembered: 'Look, Dylan warned me.'"

"Hail Mary" is a film with deep religious themes, so he saw that as reason enough to extrapolate a "Come to Jesus" moment for himself. Godard passed in 2022 at the age of 91.