Tag Archives: Ondi Timoner

D. A. Pennebaker says Footage Shot by Bob Dylan During Making of ‘Don’t Look Back’ Will Be Released

D. A. Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus.

Bring Your Own Doc host Ondi Timoner interviews D. A. Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus about “Don’t Look Back,” “Monterey Pop,” “Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars” and more.

Footage shot by Dylan during the making of “Don’t Look Back” will eventually be released, according to D. A. Pennebaker.

D.A. Pennebaker: We gave him [Dylan] the camera once. He went around shooting, We have a whole scene of him shooting the camera.

Chris Hegedus: It’s kind of interesting what Dylan shoots. We haven’t put it out yet. It will come out on one of the next releases, DVDs. It’s a party and everyone is sitting around smoking and drinking and talking and he walks around and tries to film everyone and films himself in the mirror and does odd things.

Pennebaker: When we did the second bit [the additional documentary made with footage shot of Dylan’s ’65 tour of the UK] with stuff off the floor, only thing I decided, we never had a complete song in “Don’t Look Back.” When we did the second one we put whole songs in, but what we got was a nicer Dylan, which surprised everyone. Dylan interested em. We met [for the first time] in a bar downtown. It was where all the painters went. The Cedar Tavern. He and Bobby Neuwirth were waiting. The way he talked was intereting to me. He didn’t use words the way you usualy learn them. He’d mix words around and I thought, this guy is a poet and he’s probably trying to figure out what a poet is. He was figuring out how to create himself in some way that he alone was interested in. I was interested to see that happen. I wanted to see what he did in normal conversations and what his songs were like compared to those.

[I just published my rock ‘n’ roll/ coming-of-age novel, “True Love Scars,” which features a narrator who is obsessed with Bob Dylan. To read the first chapter, head here.

Or watch an arty video with audio of me reading from the novel here.]