Timothee never wanted to take the easy way out, Saltzman says.
If there was a shortcut, he didnt want to know about it.
The phone call was like, Hey, we heard youre a teacher.
“Timothée never wanted to take the easy way out,” says Larry Saltzman, his guitar teacherSearchlight Pictures
Are you interested in teaching an actor?
I was like, Well, Im not a full-time teacher.
I could probably turn you on to somebody good.
I was not desperate for the gig.
Im laying down all kinds of rules for them.
Like, I cant probably do it at a given time every week.
The actor would have to be flexible in terms of the schedule.
And theyre listening to this and theyre indulging me somehow.
Then the fifth phone call was, Were going to tell you who it is now.
Dont tell anybody, because you tell the wrong person, theyll tell somebody who has a camera.
People will be waiting, paparazzi will find out.
How did the Timothee Chalamet project come about?It was the same kind of thing.
They didnt tell me who it was.
With these non-disclosure agreements, they dont want people blabbing about it.
Im not on Facebook, you know what I mean?
I have none of that kind of stuff.
After three or four or five phone calls, they finally said its Timothee Chalamet.
I really didnt know who Timothee was.
They said its Bob Dylan music.
I played guitar from when I was 11.
So I was very much in tune with what they were.
I looked at the script, and I was a good citizen.
I made a list of the 20-some-odd songs in the script.
His response was brilliant.
I could tell he was just very musical right away.
He went to LaGuardia [High School].
I wouldnt be surprised if he could read music.
He certainly knows intuitively music theory.
We did a lot of talk about music theory.
My Timothee/Dylan Dropbox folder is intense.
That was really helpful.
You could zero in on whatever you needed to focus on.
I wrote things out with probably a few little words of encouragement here and there.
Once youve learned that bass-note walk down, Bobs going to do that a million times.
I always say you cant teach somebody that if they dont have that.
Bobs arrangements were so freaking perfect for what he was doing.
Theyre creative and not generic.
Theyre never just E minor to Dtheres always a little bit of a hammer-on or interesting voicing.
Dylan almost always played the F with his thumb.
He never did barre chords [early on].
He always used his thumb a lot.
And its a really fast tempo.
I was intimidated by teaching it to him.
I was intimidated from playing it myself.
He wasnt intimidated by it.
He just did it.
It has a little funny hammer in it that comes around every once in a while.
Sometimes Bob would maybe vary the pattern.
But in the middle of me explaining it to him, hes already playing.
I mean, it wasnt playing like at tempo and perfectly, but hes already like going.
For the fingerpicking ones there werent many fingerpicking ones.
Girl from the North Country was a fingerpicking one.
But I showed him the different patterns that have names like outside in and inside out.
People have named them.
I showed him that stuff, and wow, he took to it right away.
I was not messing around.
The news is coming around of this pandemic.
Oh, now theres one case.
Oh, now theres ten cases.
By the time the shutdown happened around March 13th, we got news that filming is postponed.
We were going to reschedule it for four months later.
We get to the next couple of months and its like, Oops, pandemics not getting any better.
Then when it would get better, Oh well, Tims got to doDune.
Then it almost became a thing of like, will it ever get made?
But Tim always said, I have faith this is gonna get made.
We switched to Zoom largely.
But it was the height of the pandemic when you didnt even want to get in a taxi.
He didnt need like, Oh my God, can you bring in Larry?
I forget which is the D minor.
Hes not operating on that level.
People dont have time and effort to really listen to everything that Dylan ever recorded.
Thats why I took it very seriously.
I understood the responsibility.
People like you and me who are music fans, we understand the responsibility.
I didnt take a single shortcut.
