Alison Stewart: This is All of It. I'm Alison Stewart, live from the WNYC studios in Soho. Thank you for spending part of your day with us. I'm really grateful you are here. Let's take a listen to some Bob Dylan. [music -- Bob Dylan -- Like a Rolling Stone]

Once upon a time you dressed so fine.

Threw the bums a dime in your prime, didn't you?

Alison Stewart: In the new film, A Complete Unknown, we get a glimpse of the enigma of Bob Dylan through the musicians and love interests who entered his orbit in the early '60s, up until the moment he went electric. The film begins in 1961 as Dylan makes his way to New York. He meets his ailing idol, Woody Guthrie, and soon encounters folk musician Pete Seeger, played by my next guest, Edward Norton, in a performance that was nominated for a Critics Choice and a Golden Globe Award. We see Dylan develop into a person who absorbs those around him, from the earnest singers like Seeger to the more id-like Johnny Cash and it's an interesting watch for New Yorkers.

We get to see the city during a moment in time. Some of you listening may recall that time. Actually, a lot of the action takes place five minutes from our studios. A Complete Unknown was written and directed by James Mangold. It is nominated for a Critics Choice Award for Best Picture. You can see it in New York this weekend. It opens nationwide on Christmas. I'm really glad to speak with Ed Norton. Hi, Ed. Edward.

Edward Norton: Thanks. Yes, good to be here.

Alison Stewart: Which do you prefer, Ed or Edward?

Edward Norton: My dad's Ed, and he might be listening, so probably he's here in the Village. We're all in the Village today.

Alison Stewart: What was challenging or rewarding for you in playing Pete Seeger in particular?

Edward Norton: Well, I moved to the village in 1991 when I was 21 years old.

Alison Stewart: Nice.

Edward Norton: I honestly, Song to Woody, Dylan's first original song and his first record, it was part of the soundtrack of my own personal mythology. Moving to New York and thinking about the actors and musicians I loved and wanting to step into their footsteps. Pete Seeger, if you came up as an artist in New York, Pete Seeger is one of the Olympians. Not necessarily because you have to be a folk fan. He just was known as one of the artists who made a difference. He was the paragon of the artist-

Speaker 4: Between 6hth Avenue between 24.

Edward Norton: You there?

Alison Stewart: [chuckles] Yes, I'm here.

Brooke: Let me know. Hi, this is Brooke calling for City.

Alison Stewart: Do you know what? Hold on one second. We've got different lines going. Okay Ed, let's see if your line is working. Are you there, Edward?

Brooke: Yes, so we're all set.

Speaker 5: Okay, perfect.

Alison Stewart: You know what? We're going to ask everybody to hold on for a minute because all of our zooms are going at once. Let's see if we've got this in the control room. We're all set? All right, let's restart. I'm talking to Edward Norton about a complete unknown. I think it's just us on the line. Can you hear me, Edward?

Edward Norton: Yes, indeed.

Alison Stewart: All right, it sounds good. You were talking about how important Pete Seeger was to anyone who was an artist who came to live in the Village.

Edward Norton: Yes, Pete Seeger was the folk singer who helped clean up the Hudson River. He was the singer who answered Martin Luther King's postcards and went to the south to play in the civil rights marches in 1958, and was on the Selma march and wrote We Shall Overcome. He was at the absolute apogee of artist as activist, artist as humanitarian, artist as environmentalist. If you were even glancingly interested in those issues and the idea of artists as citizens, he's like Gandalf. I had a lot of admiration for him because I am interested in music and play guitar and stuff, you knew Pete Seeger also was this formidable virtuoso banjo and guitar player and one of the greats.

I grew up with my mom's Peter, Paul and Mary records, and you would see that Pete Seeger wrote Where Have All the Flowers Gone and If I Had a Hammer and all these things. I knew a lot about him. I knew maybe even more about Dylan, but in some ways I say it put a burden on the idea of doing a film about them because I held them in such a mythological status. Sometimes you almost feel it's heretical to try to, like, represent these people because they're so iconic, so musically virtuoso. Jim Mangold, who is a wonderful director, he was really articulate in talking about why he wanted to look at this brief period where these people were colliding with each other.

Young Bob Dylan, Pete Seeger the veteran, Joan Baez, the kind of princess of folk at the time and how this emergent moment that was taking place largely in Greenwich Village, produced this cultural flowering, this phenomenal moment of emergent talent that Dylan was the, in many ways, the pinnacle of that ended up not just being the punk rock, outsider cultural form, but really playing a really substantial role in the political expression of a whole generation that wanted progressive change. I think Jim's interest was anthropological. He was interested in the ways that these people were allies, competitors, lovers, got into arguments and the way that those fertile interactions produced this thing.

Dylan, obviously, he's a global cultural and literary icon almost. I think Jim wanted to look at the idea of almost the innocent and aspirational characteristic of that time.

Alison Stewart: Yes, it's interesting because Pete Seeger in the film is a traditionalist in the good sense of the word and he's really appealing to Dylan's songwriting, his greater angels. Then you have Johnny Cash, who's more id-like and pulling at Bob Dylan.

Edward Norton: [laughs]

Alison Stewart: What is it that Seeger wants for Dylan and for his talent?

Edward Norton: I'm not sure I even want to impose it. I'm going to say this-- and I'm not trying to dodge the question- but one of the things that I think Dylan gave artists apart from the songs themselves is he gave us almost the impossible standard of the artist who defends the right of the audience to come to their own interpretation of meaning. When people would say, "What do the songs mean?" He would say, "I wrote them. I don't know what they mean. You tell me what they mean." He refused to unpack it before. He was the magician and he wasn't going to show you the trick, right, because he knew that the power of the trick that he was doing was to create feeling in you and let you see yourself in what he was writing or see your generation and what he was writing.

In some ways the film, in answer to your question, I think there's a lot of ways you can interpret the relationships between a Pete Seeger and a Bob Dylan and a Joan Baez and a Bob Dylan. They were paradoxical and multi-dimensional. I think that's what I love about what Jim's done is he doesn't take a side, per se, or cast a value judgment on one type of integrity versus another type of integrity. Seeger's integrity was legendary. The type of integrity Dylan had, as an artist who follows his own line is, is something that's also admirable for different reasons. They weren't the same and they were allies and then they parted ways.

I think letting the audience feel what they align with and what they relate to and is a big part of why we're doing it. I have some of my own thoughts about it, but I think part of the beauty of it is the paradoxes because people can be allies and still get into arguments. People can be lovers and still be competitors. That's what I think makes it rich and juicy and human and relatable, even if you're not a folk singer, right.

Alison Stewart: Pete Seeger, of course, longtime New Yorker, and he appeared on WNYC a number of times. We found an appearance from 1941-

Edward Norton: Oh, wow.

Alison Stewart: -in which he talked about his banjo playing. Let's listen.

Interviewer: That five-string banjo you heard was played by Pete Seeger. Pete's been a member of the American square dance group for some time. He's just come back from a trip down the south and he's brought back with him some swell folk tunes. Say, Pete, you don't see many five-string banjos today, do you?

Pete Seeger: Why no, you don't. You see, the banjo is one of the few really Native American instruments. The five-string banjo is the kind they used to play in the old minstrel show 75 years ago. I heard tell that it was developed by Negro slaves who were brought over from Africa. When the old minstrel shows died out, the five-string banjos became less and less common, so now they're found mostly down in secluded sections of the South.

Interviewer: What do you say, Pete? Play us one of the tunes you picked up on your trip.

Pete Seeger: Okay. Here's one called John Hardy.

[music -- Pete Seeger -- John Hardy]

Alison Stewart: That's Pete Seeger. You can, of course, talk to Rhiannon Giddens about banjos. That's an amazing African American instrument. When you were playing it was you playing the banjo. Is that true, Edward?

Edward Norton: Yes. I have a grounding in guitar and I was able to work with some phenomenal professional banjo players. Although, I will say, there's something really interesting, which is Pete Seeger, he was a virtuoso. He could play Beethoven's Ode to Joy on the banjo and play bluegrass and play just about everything. He played often in this style called claw hammer, and it's not as popular today. It's hard to find people. There were some brilliant banjo players who can't totally work out sometimes some of the things he was playing, but because I had a background in guitar, I was able to put a lot of focus onto a very few of his things. Banjo is really difficult. I find it difficult.

There are aspects. I don't want to say all of our techniques and trickery, but yes, we played our songs live. We all felt that there is such a different quality to your voice when you're singing in a large space for a real audience. We wanted to capture the core of the performances live. It was the right thing to do. The thing I learned, we all learned-- and Timothy is brilliant in his musical renderings of Dylan's songs- but you just realize Joan Baez and Edward Norton and Pete Seeger, they were people who played unadorned and they make it look easy. They make it look simple. When you try to recreate what they do, you really realize the depth of their talent.

The depth of their vocal control, their breath control, the sophistication of what they're playing. It was kind of wondrous for all of us. I don't think you'll find a movie this year with more music in it. It's got a lot of really great music in it. Not it like being a musical, but more because these people were living in music. They were expressing themselves through music.

Alison Stewart: What do you appreciate about this kind of story? The way this movie is among the many music films that you'll get to see. Maybe not as much music as yours, but this one has quite a bit.

Edward Norton: As I was saying, it's really not a biopic.

Alison Stewart: Yes, it's not, not at all.

Edward Norton: This doesn't move through a life in a [unintelligible 00:13:14]. It really is an immersion in this very intense moment of creative collision between people in the Village, and really looks at the way a complete unknown, that is very young person, arrived in this city. In the span of less than four years, he made himself into his talent, propelled himself into this incredible place in the culture, and yet, he needed to move on from tha even. Jim has said, and I really like his articulation of this, that Dylan came from nowhere because he was restless and he wanted to get somewhere. He got there and he did things and then he got restless again and then kept moving.

I love the way that the film looks at a very short window in which a lot happened and then it dissipated in some sense. I think it has a lot to say about youth and about the way that we will ourselves into being who we want to be. I think it has something to say about the ebbs and flows in American life of the way art and politics and culture will come together and then maybe now we're in a period where they're not so closely interactive. It's worth meditating on how closely intertwined the societal change and the art were at that time. It's a beautiful depiction of that time, I think.

Alison Stewart: When you think about living in New York in the early '60s, what part of it would you have really liked? What would you have liked living in Greenwich Village in the '60s?

Edward Norton: You have this feeling that there was still a kind of radical anti-commercialism, right. There's a great line. In one documentary I saw Bobby Newirth, the musician and painter, who was friends with Dylan. He says, "Back then, nobody said, 'How many records have you sold?' They said, 'Have you got anything to say?'" You get this feeling that there was an intense interest in the authenticity of the work as opposed to its commercial value. I think we're in this period in American life where I feel like the addiction to maximization of just about everything is expressing itself where we're in real danger, I think, of art being completely subsumed by the idea of content and its collateral value.

I think it seems like there was a really interesting gravitational pull in the Village of artists of all different stripes who were here to really be at the center of a serious conversation and that sounds appealing to me. It's funny, I mean, honestly, this is a New York station and it's a good New York detail. When I was 22 and doing plays on East 4th street or I would go see downtown theater, see the Worcester Group or whatever. I remember seeing Willem Dafoe in the Worcester Group, who I later got to work with. I would wander up to McDougal Street, and there was a place that's still there called La Lanterna di Vittorio, just below Washington Square Park on McDougall, on the west side of the street. That was like my go-to place for taking a date after a play and having a beer and and a piece of pie or whatever.

I found out in the course making this movie that that was Pete Seeger's house. That was where Pete Seeger lived-

Alison Stewart: Whoa.

Edward Norton: -with his wife Toshi when they were first married. Probably right after that interview you just played. It was her parents' house. Her father was a Japanese man who did scenic design for the Providence Town Playhouse, which was right next door. They lived on the first floor which is where the restaurant is. I had this like flooding realization that for years, when I was in my early 20s, I used to sit in the evening by the fireplace in what had been Pete Seeger's bedroom, [chuckles] which is amazing and it's still there. You can go to that restaurant today and, and if you go, you're in Pete Seeger and Toshi Seeger's old in-law's house before they moved up to Beacon where they famously lived.

It's like that's the great thing about Greenwich Village. I mean, I'm looking out across it now and it's sort of like we're losing some things here and there, but there's such an incredible-- Like when you're walking around in the village, you're passing the ghosts of so many amazing people, and it's what I still love about living here.

Alison Stewart: I can't wait to walk past there on the way home, how exciting. My guest has been Edward Norton. The movie is called A Complete Unknown. He plays Pete Seeger in the movie. Edward, it was really a pleasure talking to you. Come by the studio, we'll have a conversation about art, whatever.

Edward Norton: Absolutely. I need you to send me that clip of Pete. I've heard many, many, many things and I had never heard that one and it's great. I love hearing his voice in every phase of his life. He was a remarkable New Yorker. Timothy and I talked about like, "Why do you do something like this?" I think you realize that even if you're a fan, you realize there are many, many people who have lost a direct connection to Pete Seeger's music, to Bob Dylan's music even. If more people return to connection with it because the film evokes the romance of that time, I think we'll feel really happy. I think it took us deeper back into it, and hopefully, it's an access point for others to get connected to that period and those artists.

Alison Stewart: Thanks for your time today.

Edward Norton: Absolutely. Thanks a lot.