Interview #50: Michael Glover Smith
Dylan on film author opens up
WE RECENTLY reviewed a fine new title by the Chicago-based filmmaker, author and teacher Michael Glover Smith in which he explores Bob Dylan’s relationship to film, particularly those projects to which the great singer-songwriter had a creative input.
Bob Dylan as Filmmaker: No Time to Think, just published by British outlet McNiddar & Grace – an imprint with an impressive list of releases focusing on that musical artist – explores with a particular energy and intelligence the productions Eat the Document, Renaldo and Clara and Masked and Anonymous.
But Smith also provides a handsome body of material drawing attention to those cinematic ventures that feature Dylan as actor or as musician, as performer, as video star and so on, so, while the prime focus is on three items with Dylan’s auteur touch, the book offers a springboard for further thinking and reading and research.
The author, who has seen Dylan play live hundred times, has a number of releases in his own filmography including his most recent Hekla, starring Elizabeth Stam, soon to earn a festival premiere and Relative, with Wendy Roby, which made the top 25 highest-grossing movies in its opening week in 2022.
As usual though, this website is keen to ask its contributing subjects about their takes on popular music and the writings of the Beat Generation and so we followed our usual gently interrogative style to find out where Smith stood on these issues. And, with Dylan one of his most significant concerns, it wasn’t difficult to discover some lively links between all of these interweaving topics…
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Simon Warner: Hi, Michael. It’s very good to connect. When I reviewed your book Dylan as Filmmaker I didn’t really have an opportunity to drill down into its eye-catching subtitle, ‘No Time to Think’, and I was just wondering whether that had been chosen as a reference to the famed Beat/Buddhist mantra ‘First thought, best thought’.
Michael Glover Smith: Absolutely. Dylan is an instinctive and spontaneous artist. No matter what medium he’s working in, I don’t think he spends too much time analyzing what he’s doing or why. He follows his impulses. That’s one of the reasons he’s so prolific. He has 40 studio albums, in contrast to Leonard Cohen or Joni Mitchell, who come much closer to being ‘perfectionists’ but have fewer than half that number of albums.
SW: Have you been influenced by the Beats as a filmmaker yourself? Did you read their work and did any of it feed into your own creative activity?
MGS: Yeah, I love the Beats. I read Kerouac’s On the Road when I was 18, which is the exact right age to read that book. Not only did it make me want to make art, it made me want to live. It actually increased my appetite for life. I also love Ginsberg and Burroughs. It’s inspiring to read all of them because their work has that quality of making you feel like you can do something similar.
SW: Do you feel as if Beat art/thinking affected Dylan’s moviemaking or art more generally? In what ways would you propose?
MGS: Yes. Dylan met Burroughs in 1965 and experimented with his ‘cut up’ technique. You can see him demonstrate it in an outtake from Dont Look Back. I think the process of editing Eat the Document followed a similar logic: Dylan was basically ‘re-arranging’ the footage that D.A. Pennebaker and Howard Alk had shot in order to create a new reality.
And he constructed the screenplay for Masked and Anonymous in a similar fashion: He and Larry Charles juxtaposed different scraps of dialogue taken from a wide variety of sources to create something new. Obviously, the spirit of Ginsberg infuses Renaldo and Clara -- from the use of Kaddish on the soundtrack to the poignant scene where he and Dylan visit Kerouac’s grave.
SW: To make a Beat/rock connection, how far do you feel the metaphor of Kerouac’s road and the idea of bands on tour stand up? Is such symbolism linkable to the tests and tensions of life more generally and filmmaking, particularly of the narrative sort, specifically. Does Renaldo and Clara fit these templates rather well?
MGS: Dylan loves Kerouac. He quotes On the Road in Scorsese’s 2005 documentary No Direction Home the famous lines about ‘the mad ones’, and says that he felt like he ‘fit right in with that bunch’.
Dylan has basically lived his entire adult life on the road, and Renaldo and Clara, more so than Eat the Document, is a ‘road movie’. The fact that Dylan wasn’t announcing which concert venues he was playing until the day of each show is a great indication of how spontaneous and freewheeling he wanted that tour to be.
SW: What musical interests – rock, jazz, soundtracks? – have shaped your worldview? Have they influenced the material you put on screen?
MGS: I’m a huge music fan! I listen to everything from traditional folk and blues to early rock’n’roll to jazz to classic country to contemporary indie rock. I love to make the half-joke that most filmmakers are frustrated musicians. Finding the right music for a scene is one of the most pleasurable parts of filmmaking (whether working with a composer or licensing songs).
My new film Hekla has a magnificent score by Trev Gibb. He read the script and recorded all of the music prior to the shoot. He lives in England and sends me files, and I give him feedback. In the case of this particular film, I kept telling him to ‘make it weirder’, so that it would reflect the personality of the main character. I also put a song by Peter Stone Brown, a great Americana artist and Dylan scholar, over the closing credits.
SW: Just one other question, if I may, Michael…I was a longtime friend of the now sadly late C.P. Lee, the Mancunian musician, author and academic, and I was pleased to see him quoted in your Dylan volume. Was his work useful to your research?
MGS: Yes! C.P. Lee’s book Like a Bullet of Light, published in 2000, is a foundational text on Dylan and film. I read it very carefully before I began writing my own book. In particular, his observations on Dylan’s obsession with James Dean were useful, and I was happy to quote them at length at the end of Bob Dylan as Filmmaker.
SW: Thank you for your enthusiasm and insights. I think your book is a valuable addition to the ever-growing Dylan bibliography and R&BG also wishes you well with your new movie production…
See also: Book review #65: Bob Dylan as Filmmaker: No Time to Think, March 10th, 2026