Cate Blanchett as Jude in I'm Not There Courtesy of The Weinstein Company

Blanchett's section, also in black and white, echoes Fellini's 8 ½. "It's such an apt metaphor for what Dylan was experiencing in 1966, the height of the media assault on him, the constant barrage of questions about why he wasn't doing protest songs anymore," Haynes says. "It's exactly what Marcello Mastroianni's character is being assaulted with in 8 ½. It also reflected the surreal collapse of consumer culture into personal life, which is so close to how I feel about "Blonde on Blonde," the record from that time."

For Billy's story, Haynes turned to "those hippie westerns that started to emerge at the end of the '60s, where the genre was invigorated by the counter-culture" — such as Sam Peckinpah's Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, in which Dylan appears. "All these long-haired, anti-hero actors playing famous outlaws. And they're shot so beautifully, they use these long lenses — Conrad Hall's cinematography in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, or the cinematography of McCabe and Mrs. Miller, which were real advances, so sumptuous, soft and observant, and almost improvisational on where you look."

For the Robbie section this September day, Haynes's inspiration is Jean-Luc Godard. "He favored static shots," Haynes says. "He would intercut long angles that would hold, and let action play within them, with these tight close-ups. His framings are so beautiful, so clean and spare. The sexual politics are apt, too: There's an occasional sexism in Godard's films. They're about women, but women are exempt from the political and critical discourse. And those charges have been laid at Dylan and his songs about romance."

These distinctions weren't immediately clear on the page, however. "The first reading [of the script], I was confused. I had to go back and forth to understand every character," says Gainsbourg (who a year after the shoot ended suffered an aneurysm that required emergency brain surgery; at press time, she was fine). "The script is written in an enigmatic way, and I wasn't sure I was understanding the right things. So I grabbed two hours of Todd's time to have a coffee and go through my questions. I would have loved to have spent much more time with him, to have rehearsed. But with the shooting dates, I didn't even meet him in person until I got here. And we shot the first sex scene on the second day. Todd knows precisely what he wants, but at the same time there's a lot of freedom. It's reassuring to be in his hands. But for me it does take time." She laughs. "I would be ready now to start again."

Each actor received his section of the script bound separately, with a CD of the pertinent Dylan music. "So I've been listening to the Robbie and Clair CD for months," Gainsbourg says. "'Sara,' 'Lay Lady Lay,' 'I'm Not There,' 'Corinna Corinna.' Sad songs. Music is so powerful, it was very, very helpful. I usually listen to music on a shoot, but on this, I really feel I can't listen to anything but Dylan."