I'm Not There is a 2007 biographical musical film directed by Todd Haynes, inspired by American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan. Six actors depict different facets of Dylan's life and public persona: Christian Bale, Cate Blanchett, Marcus Carl Franklin, Richard Gere, Heath Ledger, and Ben Whishaw. At the start of the film, a caption reads: "Inspired by the music and the many lives of Bob Dylan". Besides song credits, this is the only time Dylan's name appears in the film.
The film tells its story using non-traditional narrative techniques, intercutting the storylines of the six different Dylan-inspired characters. The title of the film is taken from the 1967 Dylan Basement Tape recording, "I'm Not There", a song that had not been officially released until it appeared on the film's soundtrack album. The film received a generally favorable response, and appeared on several top ten film lists for 2007, topping the lists for The Village Voice, Entertainment Weekly, Salon and The Boston Globe. Particular praise went to Cate Blanchett for her performance, culminating in a Volpi Cup from the Venice Film Festival, the Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actress, along with an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress nomination.
The film was released two months prior to the death of the actor Heath Ledger, and was one of his last films.
Famous quotes containing the words not and/or there:
“It’s perversion. Don’t you see what it is? It’s not natural. To go to great expense for something you want, that’s natural. To reach out to take it, that’s human, that’s natural. But to get your pleasure from not taking, from cheating yourself deliberately like my brother did today, from not getting, from not taking. Don’t you see what a black thing that is for a man to do? How it is to hate yourself?”
—Abraham Polonsky (b. 1910)
“When I consider the short duration of my life, swallowed up in the eternity before and after, the little space which I fill and even can see, engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces of which I am ignorant and which know me not, I am frightened and am astonished at being here rather than there. For there is no reason why here rather than there, why now rather than then.”
—Blaise Pascal (1623–1662)