Director Todd Haynes on the set of I'm Not There Courtesy of The Weinstein Company

Ledger, too, "went back and discovered a whole bunch of his music that I'd never heard," then set to work on Robbie's voice. "As an Australian, I always have to do an accent, so it's the first thing I start with," he says. "Once I have the voice, that's the line, and at the end of the line is a hook, and attached to that is the soul. Then the wardrobe and the fake beards are the icing on the cake." He sighs again. "Apart from Cate, who looked and sounded and breathed and probably smelled like Bob Dylan — I was blown away by what she did — I think the rest of us are just trying to let him bleed through subtly."

Sighs aside, Ledger is clearly jazzed by working with Haynes. "This is so refreshing. You get a sense that he's really reinventing film," Ledger says. "The crew are working 20-hour days, and they don't complain, and afterward they all meet up in the camera truck for an extra hour to drink beer and watch the dailies, because they're so blown away with what he's doing. They're saying, 'Fellini's been resurrected.' It's really sweet, everyone's trying to pour themselves into it — for free — because they believe in him. It's feeling like the world's most expensive student film, in the most beautiful possible way. I wish I could work like this every time with a director like Todd. It's amazing he's gotten away with it so far. We have a bondsman on set who's running the show, but even he lets it go 'til 3 or 4 in the morning, because he's loving it as well."

The sun goes down, the shadows in the museum deepen, and the smokers outside now huddle in the cold. But Haynes takes his time, shooting the extras in a party scene — chockablock with bell-bottoms and Frye boots, curly perms and moustaches — as precisely as he shoots his stars. "I think all biographies are fractured like this," Haynes says. "Don't you look back at who you were as a teenager or young adult, and it's a different person? This film is an invitation to make that not just all right, but something to encourage.

"What's so funny about Dylan is, he's the subject of such an intense desire for identification," Haynes continues. "And that only contributed to him needing to change, to reject that, and disappoint people's need for that. The way he survived as a creative person, I think, is due to his ability to change, to duck out, to deflect."

Heath Ledger on the set of I'm Not There Courtesy of The Weinstein Company

As if to prove his point, when Haynes and his crew gather with Ledger, Bale, Gainsbourg, and Moore on the museum's steps for the official film photo, not a single passerby recognizes the stars. A hardy photographer scrambles up a ladder and wraps himself around a light pole. Some of the crew wave hand-lettered signs reading GOVERNMENT and PAVEMENT, words from an early Dylan music video; three hold signs reading I'M, NOT, and THERE. There's lots of catcalling, whistling, and cellphone photography, and a small crowd assembles on the street to watch. But so effective are the transformations — Bale and Ledger with their wonky Jewfro's, Moore as a brunette, Gainsbourg in a thrift-store suede jacket — that they hide in plain sight. "Oh, this is that Bob Dylan movie," one onlooker says. "I guess the actors have all gone."