He also shot the '66 British tour when Dylan went electric and was booed (and worse) by fans. That film, Eat the Document, was never released, but Martin Scorsese used some footage in his Dylan documentary No Direction Home. Pennebaker went on to film the Monterey Pop Festival, John Lennon's Toronto '69 performance, David Bowie's Ziggy Stardust tour and more.
Pennebaker spoke with music critic Mark Brown from his office in New York City. Do you have possession of your original footage or does Dylan? "He has copies of the stuff.
We have a lot of the original stuff and we made prints of it for Dylan. Storing film is a little difficult. We have a place called Iron Mountain, a hollowed-out mountain in upstate New York.
Nobody really prizes old film anymore. Most studios throw it out as soon as they can Isn't that changing in the DVD era, where there's money to be made off bonus footage? "I don't know if there's money to be made, but there's money to be lost by storing it.
From the very first thing I ever shot, I was just absolutely crazed with the notion that I have to save everything. Everything I shot we pretty much have." You've captured moments in rock history where people don't even realize history is being made.
"They never do. You walk in a room and it's just a room. If you shoot the right person then it's history.
If you shoot the wrong person, it's useless." What were your thoughts when you went through the Don't Look Back footage and outtakes? "I didn't want to make Don't Look Back II.
In the beginning I said 'Let Scorsese do that. I don't want to do that.' I kind of thought I knew the footage.
But it was seeing the songs sung in full, suddenly I saw a whole different thing. When I made Don't Look Back I was making a film about a musician. Suddenly I saw a film about the music; It was a different film in a funny way.
It got some of the charisma that Dylan had at the time in a way watching him walk around and talk to people didn't." Whose idea was the music video for Subterranean Homesick Blues featuring the flipcards? "I don't know.
We just did it. Nobody planned anything or justified it much. Somebody would say Let's do this' and everybody would say OK' and just do it.
There was no heavy organization behind the script writing or planning." What moments did you miss because of film or other problems? "I always figure you miss about 90%, but the 10% is golden, so you don't complain.
You miss lots of things. Film in the camera or it's raining. Blissfully, those neurons escape because you don't want to remember what you missed.
" It's all hand-held filming. "I don't like carrying a tripod. Not only do I not like carrying it .
. . but also it fixes the looking, which you don't want to.
People don't stand in one place nailed to the floor. They move around. I like the humanness it gives to the filming.
I try to keep it as steady as I can but I like the idea that once I get the camera on my shoulder my feet automatically tell me where to go. I can just think about what's happening." Modern concert films are boring because they use the same shots over and over.
"The first time you see them they're kind of elegant. Swooping down over the audience, the first time I saw that I thought My God, they've trained a bird to film this.' But about the third time you see the same shot, you think that's not watching the music.
That's watching the instruction book.' You really should be filming musicians playing. The idea of two-second cuts of everything going on at the same time isn't watching everybody playing.
It's watching some sort of device." Contrast the '65 acoustic tour versus the '66 electric. "They were different in a very particular way.
The first film, Dylan didn't have any idea of what would come of it. Why he even did it was a mystery. In the end when I had a film and we put it into theaters, he accepted that.
He said You got your film.' Pennebaker By Dylan was his name for it. He said I want you to come along (in '66) and help me make a film but I'll direct it.
It'll be my film.' It was never going to be my film I wanted to help him figure out how to make a film. He didn't' have the slightest idea how to direct things.
It got a little chaotic. Whatever was going on I would shoot it. Why didn't that film come out?
"We tried to edit it when he had his motorcycle accident. We'd get an editing machine and a couple of editing assistants up to Bearsville so he could try to edit what we had done into some film that would be his film. It never really worked very well for him.
There were a lot of hands up there that got in the way. Eat the Document wasn't a film he wanted to make. He learned something about filmmaking.
I was happy to see Scorsese take some of that footage and make a film out of it. I didn't want to do it because it wasn't my role." What's your view of DVDs and the freedom they give for commentary, bonus footage and the like?
"I don't think it has begun to cover the ground it will cover. The DVD will become some sort of literature in times to come. The documentary film is going to be kind of a new language.
It's going to be so easy that people will make documentary films like they wrote letters in the 19th century. You won't have to have an audience of millions grasping at it. Now you can make (a documentary) with a telephone.
It's kind of wondrous that by chance technology is adding to the aspect. It's something anybody can do and it doesn't take a lot of equipment or people or a studio. Kids can do it.
The most important footage shot in the last century was the Zapruder footage of our president having his head blown off. There were maybe 100 cameras in that area, 100 big studio cameras capable of filming anything. But nobody else filmed it.
One guy with the tiniest miserable amateur camera got it because he happened to be there. The film that's the most extraordinary that I've seen this century is the plane flying into the tower. It was done by two French kids who were just making a film that was boring them to death.
In Paris you never see a plane overhead because you can't fly over Paris - you have to fly around it. So you never hear a plane. He heard a plane overhead and he looked up to see.
And the camera kind of looked up too and he got that incredible picture. That's chance. People are walking around all over the world with the means of getting a film of something happening.
That's going to change the whole way that movies are perceived in the next 50 years.
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