Smith is an award-winning Chicago-based filmmaker whose latest production, Hekla, was premiered March 6, four days after after the release of his new book. In this insightful interview, Smith draws on his own experience as a director and makes a compelling case for Bob Dylan as a legitimate auteur. The book explores Dylan's directorial works—like the experimental Eat the Document (1966/1972), the epic Renaldo and Clara (1978), and the semi-surreal Masked and Anonymous (2003)—revealing how these films offer a personal window into Dylan's evolving identity, performance, and artistry across key eras.
Dylan as a Filmmaker
MGS: The films about which I consider Dylan to be the primary author, Eat the Document, Renaldo and Clara, and Masked and Anonymous, all employ strategies familiar from his songwriting. Dylan's best narrative songs always feel intentionally "incomplete" -- as if he's giving us a puzzle with some of the pieces missing, and we have to work with him to complete the narrative. I'm thinking of "Tangled Up in Blue," "Brownsville Girl," and even something more recent like "Tin Angel." They're all story-songs that are disorientingly non-linear or that shift their perspectives in tantalizing ways. Dylan's films operate in a similar register.
EN: Many viewers find Dylan’s films challenging or even frustrating. Do you think that’s intentional? Is he testing the audience in the same way he has throughout his musical career?
MGS: I think Dylan likes to challenge his audience, no matter the medium he's working in. The fact that he's been phenomenally successful as a musician has probably allowed him to care less about whether the films are successful. Larry Charles gave an interview at the time of the release of Masked and Anonymous where he claimed that Dylan had said to him something like, "Don't worry about how this movie does in the short term." It was as if Dylan knew the film wouldn't do well initially but would eventually be re-evaluated, which is exactly what happened. Not many people working in the film medium have that luxury. Most filmmakers want to be as successful as possible right away because that will allow them to make the next movie. Masked and Anonymous is very perverse: It has a huge A-list ensemble cast, and yet it refuses to function as a commercial object, which is why I compare it to Godard's King Lear. It's deliberately anti-climactic: The whole film seems to be building up to this big benefit concert but when it finally happens, it gets shut down after one song.
EN: If we think of Dylan as an auteur, what are the defining characteristics of his cinematic voice? What themes or techniques recur across his work as a filmmaker?
MGS: I make the point early on in my book that the subject of every Bob Dylan film is "Bob Dylan." He's telling us how it feels to be him -- what his life is like on the road as a touring musician, his relationship to his art, and the difficulty he has in striking a balance between his personal life and his professional life. I would go so far as to say that I think he's more nakedly autobiographical in his films (especially when he's playing characters named "Renaldo" and "Jack Fate") than he is in his own songs. Formally, Dylan's movies are most interesting in terms of how they're edited. In Eat the Document and Renaldo and Clara, the two films that Dylan directed, he exerts his authorial voice most as an editor. He's using footage shot by D.A. Pennebaker, Howard Alk and others, and then re-arranging it to create new meanings in the editing room. I think that with Masked and Anonymous, he did essentially the same thing but at the scriptwriting stage (i.e., combining different literary fragments like he does in his recent songs).
Renaldo and Clara (1978)
MGS: I think Renaldo and Clara is the ultimate Bob Dylan movie. He's deliberately experimenting with the language of cinema by combining different modes of filmmaking. I think a lot of viewers have been frustrated by it because they bring preconceptions to it. I've read a lot of reviews, for instance, that claim that the character of "Bob Dylan" is played by Ronnie Hawkins and that "Mrs. Dylan" is played by Ronee Blakley -- because that's how those actors are credited at the end. So people watch the movie with that in mind and try to make sense of it in that way. But I think Dylan created those credits as a joke in the editing room. Blakley has said that she was unaware she was playing Dylan's wife during the shooting of her scenes. It's a wild movie, and it's very funny. My advice to anyone watching it for the first time is to just let it wash over you. Let it take you for a ride and don't worry about what it "means" any more than you worried about what "Desolation Row" meant the first time you listened to it. Then, if you feel compelled to watch it again, I would advise paying attention to Dylan's use of juxtaposition. Why is he cutting from this image to that image or from this scene to that scene? What do the scenes have in common on a thematic level? Why does he juxtapose a particular song with a particular set of images? It's a very carefully edited movie, but the juxtapostions are more poetic than they are narrative.
EN: The film has often been criticized as self-indulgent or incoherent. In your view, is that a fair critique—or are critics missing something essential about its purpose?
MGS: Calling a film "self-indulgent" or "pretentious" is often a way for critics to let themselves off the hook. They don't even have to try to analyze what the movie is doing. They can just describe their own confusion and how hostile they feel about it. You see this with virtually every mainstream review of Godard's work in recent decades. The amazing thing about Renaldo and Clara is that Dylan's screen time is relatively minimal! Pauline Kael famously said that Dylan gave himself more close-ups than any actor has had in the entire history of cinema. I'm guessing she said that solely because of the "Tangled Up in Blue" sequence, which is a single-take scene of Dylan performing the song in close-up. But Dylan was very generous as a filmmaker in terms of how much screen time he devotes to all the members of the Rolling Thunder ensemble. He allows us to see great performances by Ronee Blakley, Joan Baez, Ramblin' Jack Elliott, Allen Ginsberg, etc. Ginsberg barely performed on the Rolling Thunder Revue, but he ends up being a major presence in the movie.
EN: In college I went to a lot of "art films" (including an hour of Warhol's 24 hour Empire.) Was R&C deliberately more "art film" as a genre or something else?
MGS: Renaldo and Clara is definitely an "art film." Dylan was exposed to European art films for the first time when he arrived in Greenwich Village in 1961. He has cited Truffaut's Shoot the Piano Player, Godard's Breathless, and Fellini's La Dolce Vita as influences in interviews. I don't think Eat the Document would have turned out quite the way it did if Dylan had not been exposed to those films. It's interesting that you mention Warhol's Empire. Dylan also praised Warhol's use of the long, uninterrupted take in that film when promoting Renaldo and Clara in 1978.
Masked and Anonymous (2003)
MGS: Masked and Anonymous is a very bleak and pessimistic movie. It takes place in a version of America that's a totalitarian police state in the midst of a civil war. There's only one television network, and it's controlled by the government. At the time of the film's release, that seemed fanciful. But in 2026, Larry and David Ellison, who are aligned with Trump, control CBS, HBO, Warner Brothers, TikTok, CNN, and a whole bunch of other cable channels and networks. I don't think Dylan and Larry Charles were necessarily trying to predict the future in making that movie. They were just looking at American history -- the Presidency of Andrew Jackson, the American Civil War, the legacies of slavery and racism -- and using that to create a version of America as seen in a "carnival mirror" (to borrow a phrase Dylan uses to describe La Dolce Vita in Chronicles: Volume One).
EN: Dylan’s character seems both central and strangely passive. How does that reflect his artistic persona, and what role does he play within the film’s world?
MGS: I talked to Larry Charles about this at the Sundance premiere in 2003. The central idea of the movie is that Jack Fate is a Buster Keaton-like figure, completely stone-faced. Everyone around him is acting their asses off. They're all giving these verbose monologues, chewing up the scenery, and Dylan just stands there silently. Or maybe he'll say one pithy line. It's as if he's a blank slate and they're all projecting onto him. That was very deliberate on Larry Charles' part. I think part of the reason was recognizing Dylan's limitations as an actor, not requiring him to have to do too much. There's also a long history of laconic leading men in American cinema -- the "strong, silent type" that you see in westerns and in film noir. They're riffing on that as well.
Shadow Kingdom (2021)
MGS: I love Shadow Kingdom! You're right in describing it as "visually controlled." According to Alexander Burke, who plays the accordion player in the film, Dylan "respected the shit out of" director Alma Har'el. I think he trusted her and was content to let her do her thing in a way that he may not have been with, say, Richard Marquand in Hearts of Fire or the directors of some of his music videos. The production design and the cinematography of Shadow Kingdom are both really great. It's beautifully lit and shot. The director of photography was Lol Crawley, who would go on to win an Oscar for The Brutalist. The extras are all wearing period costumes, and there are all sorts of interesting set design touches -- the checkerboard floor, the air conditioner with tassels in front of it, etc. All of that took a lot of care and planning. We thought it was going to be a live concert, but it turned out to be a real movie instead!
EN: The film revisits Dylan’s earlier songs in a stylized setting. Is this nostalgia, reinvention, or something else entirely?
MGS: I think that Dylan had been wanting to do something like this for a long time, and that it took the pandemic for him to finally have the time to realize it. According to journalist David Wild, who I interviewed for the book, Dylan wanted to make a fake documentary about the making of "Love and Theft." The idea was for him and his band to go back into the studio after they had made the album, lip-sync the songs, and have someone film that. And then pretend like that was real footage of the making of that album. For whatever reason, he decided not to do it, but Shadow Kingdom ended up being a kind of similar cinematic hoax. I think the biggest stylistic influences on Shadow Kingdom are French Poetic Realism (a kind of precursor to American film noir) and Twin Peaks: The Return, which incongruously features lip-synced performances by famous musicians in a similarly intimate and surreal "roadhouse" setting.
EN: Michael, thank you for your time. I'm impressed by the book and your enthusiasm for both film history and Dylan.
RELATED LINKS
Interview #50: Michael Glover Smith
Simon Warner, 2026
Bobcats Interview with Matt Steichen
Michael Glover Smith talks about his Bob Dylan fandom,
from the Traveling Wilburys to the RARW Tour
Bio, Films, Books, News
Bob Dylan in Minnesota
Troubadour Tales from Duluth, Hibbing and Dinkytown
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