James Mangold hasn't had to do "a lot of cheating" to bring Bob Dylan's story to the screen.

The 61-year-old director is at the helm of 'A Complete Unknown' - which stars Timothee Chalamet as the legendary musician - and insisted that he just had to "focus on tracing" real-life events as opposed to inventing dramatic scenes to produce the biopic.

He told Collider: "Well, it's not only what happens in front of what, but it's also what you show and what you don't, and how much you reveal. There's such a myriad of choices for personal expression, but the first thing you have to do is arrange all these events in a timeline that's accurate and understand where are the problems in the narrative? I mean, maybe the real-life story works pretty well. In truth, there wasn't a lot of cheating in this movie. The period between '61 and '65 is fairly straightforward, and I was just focused on tracing. In a way, it's a movie about comings and goings or leavings and comings, or whatever you call it.

"He runs away from home, essentially leaves behind his life in Minnesota, including even his name, and comes to New York and starts anew with very little money and a Moleskine notebook with some song lyrics in it and the intention to meet his hero at a VA hospital in new Jersey. Within two to three years, he's a cultural phenomenon and has taken over the entire folk movement and is moving into being a rock star."

But the moviemaker was "most" keen to explore the idea that someone with an "immense gift" such as Bob - who is one of the world's best-selling musicians of all time with sales of more than 125 million - can be "lonely" amid all their success.

He said: "What was most interesting to me, though, wasn't just tracing the career steps of Bob Dylan, but was much more making a movie that, even if it was fictional, would be interesting and that's about, in a way, genius or talent and how we all respond to it and how it feels to be the person who has that talent; how lonely, in some ways, it makes you; how it feels to be the people around the person with that talent, how proud or inspired or envious it can make you feel; when you become someone with this immense gift, how transactional so many of your relationships become because people all, even innocently, without it being dark, want something from you or to be closer to you, and how does one carry the burden of creation forward? How important is your loyalty to a genre or to your tribe? And what is your tribe, and why do we need tribes? So, there are so many interesting questions all within the movie."