Bob Dylan and Elvis Presley never recorded together. They covered each other’s songs, and “Went to See the Gypsy” is supposedly about The King, but that’s as far as it went. In fact, they didn’t even meet.
“I never met Elvis, because I didn’t want to meet Elvis. Elvis was in his Sixties movie period, and he was just crankin’ ’em out and knockin’ ’em off, one after another,” Dylan once told Rolling Stone. “I wanted to see the powerful, mystical Elvis that had crash-landed from a burning star onto American soil. The Elvis that was bursting with life. That’s the Elvis that inspired us to all the possibilities of life. And that Elvis was gone, had left the building.”
The terrible and great thing about music biopics (terrible because you end up with Jackie Jormp-Jomp-style movies being taken seriously and winning Oscars; great because it reminds me of Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story) is that they can bend the truth. So, if Timothée Chalamet wants to meet Austin Butler‘s Elvis in his Bob Dylan biopic, he’s going to make it happen.
“I’ve been picking Austin’s brain non-stop,” Chalamet told his Dune: Part Two co-star as he prepares for A Complete Unknown during an interview with NME. “Let’s let my film come out before I’m so lucky as to get included with Austin, he did such a phenomenal job.” Timmy continued:
“I wish you were in it! There’s an Elvis character in the Johnny Cash biopic [Walk the Line]. It’s really brief, it’s very brief, but I was kind of wishing we could create a musical cinematic universe.”
Chalamet and Butler should — spoiler alert for Dune: Part Two — re-do the Paul Atreides vs. Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen fight in A Complete Unknown but as Dylan and Elvis. My money’s on the boxer.
(Via NME)