Gibson Partners with Searchlight Pictures for ‘A Complete Unknown’

Gibson Partners with Searchlight Pictures for

‘A Complete Unknown’

Starring Timothée Chalamet as Bob Dylan, from Director, Writer and Producer James Mangold

Gibson Crafted the Iconic Guitars For the Film A Complete Unknown: The Collection

--A Premier Acoustic Guitar Collection from Gibson--

Available Worldwide Now on Gibson.com

NASHVILLE, TN Gibson has been shaping the sound of music since 1894, when its founder, Orville Gibson, designed and built his earliest-known musical instrument in his workshop. As it celebrates 130 years of making the most iconic guitars in the world, Gibson’s groundbreaking instruments have inspired the most iconic musicians to create their sonic masterpieces, been the catalyst for some of the most powerful moments in pop culture and encouraged new generations to pick up the guitar in legendary appearances on the silver screen.

Bob Dylan remains both pop’s greatest songwriter and its greatest enigma. In theaters nationwide December 25th, Timothée Chalamet stars and sings as Bob Dylan in James Mangold’s three-time Golden Globe-nominated movie, A Complete Unknown, the electrifying true story behind Dylan’s meteoric rise from hard-scrabbling vagabond to rock-and-roll icon. New generations of music fans and Dylanologists alike will have the opportunity to experience his journey from the cafes of Greenwich Village to the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, from where his groundbreaking and controversial performance reverberated worldwide.

Dylan’s artistic evolution was fast-moving, and Gibson acoustic guitars were a constant feature. Gibson’s acoustic guitar luthiers worked closely with the film’s production team including Executive Music Producer Nick Baxter. A variety of Gibsons were used during the filming and recording sessions for A Complete Unknown, striving for pinpoint historical accuracy when it came to instruments, sonics, and recording signal chains. Most of the Gibson and Epiphone guitars throughout the film continue to be handcrafted at the Gibson acoustic craftory in Bozeman, Montana.

Today, Gibson has unveiled A Complete Unknown: The Collection, a specially curated selection of Gibson acoustic instruments inspired by and used during the filming and soundtrack recording sessions. View Gibson’s A Complete Unknown: The Collection available worldwide on Gibson.com https://www.gibson.com/en-US/Collection/a-complete-unknown.

With more than 50 onscreen music performances during the course of A Complete Unknown, Timothée Chalamet and the other cast members had an enormous amount of material to learn. In the film, the music itself is a full partner in telling the story, with every well-worn classic and every chosen lyric a part of Mangold’s narrative fabric. Fluidity was key, and Chalamet’s prowess in this regard was uncanny, according to music producer Nick Baxter, but it was important to channel the creative energy of Dylan’s most terrifyingly prolific period and not be too well-rehearsed. 

“We knew that we needed to capture a lot of this stuff on set and have our actors prepared to do it,” says Nick Baxter. “The fact that Timmy learned these songs and can perform them under all different circumstances, including scenes where he’s writing, or showing someone a song for the first time, or performing, is incredible. He’s not beholden to anything. He can stop, walk away from the mic, mess up a lyric, add a harmonica solo, and he can go up and down in tempo and pace the song differently. I don’t know if this movie would really work without him being able to do that.”

“It’s an incredible amount of lyrics to wrangle, and I don’t know how they did it, especially Timmy,” adds  Baxter. “He has a ridiculous memory, first of all, and was just a student of the character and of the music. But at the same time, in these early writing scenes, it’s almost better if it’s raw in your mind because you can pull in different lyrics and rearrange things—it feels like he’s creating in the moment as you don’t want to over-rehearse for some of these scenes. For example, there’s a ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ duet in the movie between Bob and Joan Baez [played by Monica Barbaro], which is one of the many unique duets that we put together that there’s no real analog for. What if these two people were in a room together, and they played this song? What would have happened? We didn’t really want to rehearse it with the two of them together too much, if at all. When we finally did it on set, there was that first-time rawness to it.”

Baxter continues “We were very grateful to Gibson for giving us a whole bevy of guitars! There were two custom Gibson J-50s built for the movie to match Dylan’s original guitar, a 1947 model. Those guitars were great, and they got even better over time. We had those two on set and used them for a lot of the recordings. We really did try to follow the progression of his guitars; we wanted to honor that. A little less than halfway through the film, we switched to a Nick Lucas Special, which Gibson provided as well. It’s a very different guitar to the J-50™, a much smaller body, almost parlor-style. I was also sent some J-45s to experiment with; they were super-useful. I had one set up in a different tuning because there were a lot of open tunings that Dylan used. Sometimes I would leave one in Open G, or I would set one up really muted, with a piece of tape on the bridge, just to have it as an option. Or one of them would have really old, aged strings on it, so whenever we were experimenting, we could try different colors and sounds. The last Gibson guitar we had was an SJ-200, which we used on a lot of the Johnny Cash songs. Johnny [Boyd Holbrook] gives Bob his guitar at the end of the movie for a final song, and that’s another performance that’s Timmy live on set, really singing and really playing that guitar.”

Robi Johns, Sr. Product Development Manager at Gibson Acoustic Guitars adds, “As many Gibson acoustic guitars played a timely role in American music history our supportive mission was to carefully select the Gibson acoustics that Bob Dylan chose to play during his powerful presence in the 1960s. To achieve this with historical accuracy, we also recreated a few of Bob’s acoustic guitars for the timeframe depicted in the movie.”

In celebration of the release of the film, music fans can visit the Gibson Garage Nashville-Gibson’s flagship store in the heart of downtown Nashville-from December 19 through January to see some of the Gibson guitars that were created for A Complete Unknown on display.

Watch/share the trailer for A Complete Unknown in theaters from December 25th nationwide in North America and January 17th in the UK and Republic of Ireland https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FdV-Cs5o8mc&t=45s.

Explore A Complete Unknown: The Collection of guitars from Gibson: https://www.gibson.com/en-US/Collection/a-complete-unknown.

All Gibson guitars are handcrafted in the USA.

Watch the Gibson TV series “The Process” to learn more about how Gibson acoustic guitars are handcrafted by expert luthiers at our craftory in Bozeman, Montana HERE.