Bob Dylan ’Blood on the Tracks’ Movie Underway
Oscar-nominated director Luca Guadagnino said he was working on a movie based on Bob Dylan’s 1975 album Blood on the Tracks.
Guadagnino, who was nominated for an Academy Award for his 2017 film Call Me by Your Name, also directed the upcoming horror remake Suspiria, which features a soundtrack by Radiohead’s Thom Yorke. The filmmaker revealed that one of the producers of Call Me by Your Name had secured the movie rights to the LP, and asked him to collaborate on it.
The New Yorker reported that Guadagnino agreed on the condition that Richard LaGravenese, writer of The Fisher King and The Bridges of Madison County, was contracted to create the screenplay.
“Somehow, the moon shot landed,” the report explained. “LaGravenese cleared his schedule and, between April and July, hunkered down to produce a 188-page screenplay following characters through a multiyear story, set in the ‘70s, that he and Guadagnino had invented, drawing on the album’s central themes. ‘When they’re repressing, we dramatize the repression, and what that does to them,’ LaGravenese says. ‘And we dramatize what happens when you let your passions take over too much.’”
Released in January 1975, Blood on the Tracks was subject to a sudden re-recording just weeks before its scheduled release date. Dylan, who was enduring personal difficulties at the time, including a split with then-wife Sara, has always denied the 10 tracks are autobiographical; but the work has become regarded as one of the most personal and honest LPs of all time.
The highly anticipated six-disc Bootleg Series edition will be released on Nov. 2. “On these tracks, we find Dylan – just a singer with a guitar and a harmonica and a batch of great songs – delivering performances that thrill you when they’re supposed to and break your heart when they need to,” Jeff Slate writes in the sleeve notes. “The performances are also in the purest state we’ve ever experienced them.”
Dylan is currently touring the U.S., with dates booked until Nov. 10.