The Coen Brothers

It was incredibly emotional, I really fell in love with them as people. Theyre incredibly generous and shared with me stories of the great actors theyve worked with, of their thoughts about directing, about art, and about life, Oscar Isaac. The affably geeky Ethan and the suaver Joel were accompanied by debuting lead Isaac and longtime hilarious muse John Goodman, for their group media activities around Inside Llewyn Davis New York Film Festival premiere. Korean master Park Chanwook is another supporter: I love the Coen brothers work. They are inspirational, he told me at the Big Screen Symposium. Overall, I love the Coens work, too. Cinema like No Country For Old Men and The Man Who Wasnt ThereJames Gandolfinis best non Sopranos role inspire me to stay in this crazy game. Comedies like Burn After Reading and The Big Lebowski Walter (Goodman) being spectacularly incompetent at the end, the incredible Phillip Seymour Hoffman playing a square butlermake me laugh like a hyena. I enjoyed seeing Ethans first full-length play, Women or Nothing, downtown New York. Its somewhat slight, and the central plot conceitabout lesbians gulling a man into impregnating one of themis rickety. But theres a generous serve of witty dialogue, including sharp dissing of New Yorks counselling industry. You dont even get the proverb. I did [sing songs] internally, Goodman, who plays a junkie jazzman, quips. My interior monologue was scored. Its Inside Llewyn Davis, 1960s New York music, the Coens in their own words, Im far from home to hear. John Goodman was a Siren? JOHN GOODMAN: I thought that was understood. All must work harder. ETHAN COEN (EC): Johns last couple of movies with us have been Homeric things. We kind of thought about it as an odyssey in which the main character doesnt go anywhere. Why John? EC: Uh [laughs] we just knew that John would understand it. Also, John turned us onto Charles Portis, the novelist who wrote True Grit, but his other novels were contemporary. All his novels have an old, gasbag character kind of like Johns character in the movie, so How do you pick your subject? JOEL COEN (JC): Well, the success movies have been done, havent they? Its less interesting from a story point-of-view, I think. In fact, I dont even know how we would start to think about that one. How do we pick our subjects? Could you expand? JC: I dont know. In a way its an unanswerable question. You just have an idea. I can tell you what we were thinking about or reading or the things that stimulated interest or whatever goes on in terms of, Okay, what if there is a story set here? At a certain point we literally thought, All right, Dave Van Ronk gets beat up outside of Gerdes Folk City. Who would beat up a folksinger? Its another good question. And why? We just thought, Does that go anywhere? T-Bone Burnett? EC: T-Bone was the first person we sent the script to

when we were finished with it so that conversation just started basically as soon as were done with the script. Bob Dylan? JC: Thats a big subject and it goes to the heart of what folk music is in a way. The cultural moment youre talking about was specifically on our mind when we were thinking about the story because we wanted to do something that was set in the scene before Dylan showed up, specifically. Setting? JC: Its hard for us to imagine stories abstracted or divorced from a very specific locale. Weve listened to a lot of the music and we were interested. We read a number of books, including a memoir that was written by Dave Van Ronk about that period. That had got us thinking about it; that was one of things that stimulated it. EC: I was thinking about the scene itself, maybe

that got us going. But then theres this character who seems to fit in that scene, in as much as his concerns are his tortured relationship to success and the whole idea. You asked about making new crap out of the old crap - those are both things that are concerns of characters in that scene: not wanting to sell out, but wanting to perform and reach people and also the authenticity thing. Authenticity? EC: Yes. That was a hallmark of the scene, the conflicted worship of authenticity, and the conflicted desire to have some sort of success. The Justin Timberlake character [Jim] is the more commercial side, and he is the person who presumably wants to be more authentic, but also wants to be represented by Murray Abraham. Its a conflicted, tortured relationship with success, that was a hallmark of the sceneand not just that scene, but the 1960s.

Atmosphere? EC: Yeah, so we were kind of fighting the oncoming green to keep the bleakness. Actually, in some of the shots its mostly supplied snow, you think about New York in the winter, you dont want to see it in the summer when its green. Basically the cover of Freewheeling Bob Dylan is kind of the look thats that lookand the weather is part of that. The cat? EC: As Joel has said, we realised near the beginning that we were making a movie about a character that wasnt really going anywhere and nothing particularly interesting happened to, so we thought, well give him a cat [Applause]. Redemption, absence? EC: Even the place we leave him in, he is in a sense sort of on a hamster wheel. Is he redeemed? Is it a good hamster wheel or a bad hamster wheel? I dont know.

Your motivation? JC: Were on a hamster wheel too [laughs]. We do what we do, and it is like Ethan was saying, theres a good hamster wheel and a bad hamster wheel. I dont know, but were on it. Coerced by producers? JC: No, were very lucky in that respect. How? JC: Weve always had that, were just incredibly lucky. Weve had that from the beginning. Its like we totally stepped in shit, because from the beginning weve been able to control our own stuff.
ALEXANDER BISLEY IS EDITOR-ATLARGE OF THE LUMIERE READER.

THE COEN BROTHERS INSIDE LLEWYN DAVIS IN CINEMAS NOW

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