‘A Complete Unknown’ interview: François Audouy on recreating Bob Dylan’s world, the nuances of musical biopics

Production designer François Audouy has certainly dabbled in period dramas before (Air, Ford v Ferrari). Still, perhaps no project has tested his skills more than Searchlight Pictures’ Oscar darling A Complete Unknown, for which he was tasked with recreating some iconic locations from musical history.

The musical biopic has become something of a sub-genre of its own over the years, with Bohemian Rhapsody and Rocketman going on to become commercial and critical successes—entertaining to both the masses and the fans who grew up watching Queen and Elton John on stage if done well. With this in mind, it was only a matter of time before we got a Bob Dylan biopic.

A Complete Unknown, which stars Timothée Chalamet as the iconic singer-songwriter, chronicles Dylan’s meteoric rise to fame, from his friendship with Woodie Guthrie (Scoot McNairy) to that one time he essentially pissed off the entire folk scene. Obviously, setting a movie in the ’60s requires a very specific aesthetic, and a Bob Dylan biopic necessitates the recreation of certain real-life locations. Enter production designer François Audouy, who was tasked not only with bringing Dylan’s world to life, but also deciding which sets to replicate, and which to reimagine.

A Complete Unknown set designer on balancing authenticity and creativity

A Complete Unknown takes audiences to many different places throughout its runtime: Greystone Hospital, crowded Greenwich Village bars, and the Newport Folk Festival—all of which formed Dylan into the once-in-a-generation artist he’d go on to become. As the film is inspired by true events, it was important for Audouy to nail the vibe of the era while also capturing what it must’ve been like for Dylan as an up-and-coming musician to live in a decade full of Cold War superstition and conservative values. This meant striking that perfect balance of exact recreations of iconic settings with Audouy’s own interpretation.

“That’s what was so much fun about this movie. There were different categories of sets—there were sets where we wanted to be as true, as real as possible, kind of like recreations of the actual spaces, which is Bob Dylan’s apartment but also … Columbia Records Studio A was an exact recreation of the space down to all the instruments and the microphones and the mixing board. Everything was perfectly recreated because it’s iconic. It’s like a high, holy space where these incredible albums were recorded. We really wanted it to look identical and to also sound identical because it was all live recordings.

And then there were other spaces that had to feel right. They weren’t exact recreations, but they had to feel like what it must’ve felt like for Bob to go visit his idol at Greystone Hospital on a Sunday morning in January. There was no historical reference of that meeting, of course, but I was after capturing a feeling of that institution of where he lived for the last waning years of his life and what it must’ve felt like to live in those sort of sterile conditions.”

“As a production designer, you need a lot of time to think,” Audouy added. “It’s not just picking up a pencil and like, drawing a set and building the walls and ‘let’s shoot.’ As I’ve been doing this for a while now, I’ve realized that a lot of the job is thinking and also being sensitive to the evocative nature of spaces and what it feels to be in them.”

Considering that places like Columbia Records Studio A are especially meaningful to music fans, and longtime Bob Dylan fans in particular, Audouy is 100% correct in saying that recreating these spaces was essential to properly tell Dylan’s story, as seeing them onscreen can create an “emotional response” for audiences. This is the power of a good musical biopic; I’d say that A Complete Unknown absolutely delivers in bringing Dylan’s world to life while filling in the blanks in the most satisfying way possible.