10 Crazy Tricks Directors Tried To Pull On Audiences
2. Using Fake People - <span Style="font-size: 15px;">Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story.</span>
A lifelong fan of the extraordinary genius of Orson Welles - as almost every serious filmmaker is - Martin Scorcese seems to have followed in his idol’s footsteps a little with this year’s rock n’ roll documentary Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story.
His second movie about Dylan, following 2005’s No Direction Home, Rolling Thunder Revue incorporates interviews with the people and performers involved with Dylan’s 1975 Rolling Thunder Revue tour - people like Joan Baez, Ronnie Hawkins, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, Sam Shepard and Dylan himself, as well as some archival footage.
It also features interviews with people who don’t exist, talking about things that didn’t happen.
Rolling Thunder Revue’s talking head segments with filmmaker Stefan Van Dorp and Jack Tanner are entirely fictional - the former is played by performance artist Martin Von Haselberg, while the latter is Michael Murphy, who played the character thirty years ago in Robert Altman’s seminal mockumentary miniseries Tanner ‘88. To complicate things further, Sharon Stone’s interviews are a pack of lies: she’s playing a fictionalised version of herself, running a script to camera.
Scorcese’s film doesn’t distinguish between the genuine interviewees and the fictitious ones, or between events that happened and those that didn’t.
The result is a film that’s actually upset some people, who consider that they were themselves tricked by Scorcese - conned into accepting the film as a representation of the truth of a moment in the past that they have some investment in.