No Direction Home . . Bob truly does not look back." However, work on the first installment of Dylan's autobiography, "Chronicles, Vol. 1", did overlap production of the project, though it is unclear how much, if any, influence "Chronicles" may have had on "No Direction Home". Though raw material was being gathered for the project, Rosen needed someone to edit and shape it into a quality motion picture, and celebrated filmmaker Martin Scorsese was approached to direct the documentary planned from the project. Scorsese eventually agreed and came aboard in 2001. In the meantime, Dylan's offices gathered hundreds of hours of historical film
Documentary mode could now realize Vertov’s vision and sought to bring real truth to the documentary milieu. Unlike the subjective content of poetic documentary, or the rhetorical insistence of expositional documentary, observational documentaries tend to simply observe, allowing viewers to reach whatever conclusions they may deduce. Pure observational documentarians proceeded under some bylaws: no music, no interviews, no scene arrangement of any kind, and no narration. The fly-on-the-wall perspective is championed, while editing processes use long takes and few cuts. Resultant footage appears as though the viewer is witnessing first-hand the experiences of the subject: they travel with Bob Dylan to England