Inside Llewyn Davis

Inside Llewyn Davis won dit jaar de Grand Prix Award in Cannes.
De nieuwe film van de Coen Brothers beschrijft een week uit het leven van een folkzanger die
zich in 1961 in de folk scene van de New Yorkse wijk Greenwich village begeeft. Llewyn
Davis (Oscar Isaac)— zwerft met zijn gitaar van clubs naar logeerbanken. Een kat kruist
zijn pad en kleurrijke figuren die onmiskenbaar de hand van de Coen Brothers verraden. Joel
en Ethan Coen hebben de film geschreven en geregisseerd.
Een prachtrol voor nieuwkomer Oscar Isaac en mooie rollen voor Carey Mulligan, John
­Goodman en Justin Timberlake en Gareth Hedlund.
De film draait vanaf 5 december in de Nederlandse bioscopen.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
★
PRODUCTION NOTES ★
1
Production Information
2
The Screenplay
4
The Casting
6
The Music
11
The Production
13
The Cinematography,
Production Design and Costumes
16
The Story
19
★
A CONVERSATION WITH T BONE BURNETT ★
22
★
“THE WORLD OF LLEWYN DAVIS” ★
by ELIJAH WALD
28
★
“ANOTHER DAY ANOTHER TIME” ★
by JOHN JEREMIAH SULLIVAN
38
★
★
THE CAST ★
40
THE FILMMAKERS ★
45
★
CAST/CREW LIST ★
52
I
nside Llewyn Davis, the new film from Academy Award-winners Joel and Ethan Coen,
follows a week in the life of a young folk singer at a crossroads, struggling to make it in the
Greenwich Village folk scene of 1961. Llewyn Davis (Oscar Isaac)—guitar in tow, huddled
against the unforgiving New York winter—is beset by seemingly insurmountable obstacles,
some of them of his own making. Living at the mercy of both friends and strangers, scaring
up what work he can find, Llewyn journeys from the baskethouses of the Village to an empty
Chicago club—on a misbegotten odyssey to audition for a music mogul—and back again.
Starring Oscar Isaac, Carey Mulligan, Justin Timberlake, John Goodman, and Garrett Hedlund,
Inside Llewyn Davis is written and directed by Joel and Ethan Coen and produced by
Scott Rudin, Ethan Coen and Joel Coen. Executive producers are Robert Graf, Olivier Courson
and Ron Halpern.
As is always true when the Coens embark on a new film, the distinguished production team for
Llewyn Davis consists of many of their previous collaborators: producer Scott Rudin (True Grit
and No Country for Old Men), executive producer Robert Graf (True Grit; Burn After Reading; No
Country for Old Men and O Brother, Where Art Thou? among many others), production designer
Jess Gonchor (True Grit; A Serious Man; Burn After Reading and No Country for Old Men),
costume designer Mary Zophres (True Grit; A Serious Man; No Country for Old Men; O Brother,
Where Art Thou? and Fargo, among others), and director of photography Bruno Delbonnel, who
shot ‘Tuileries,’ the Coens’ segment from the film Paris, je t’aime. The editor is Roderick Jaynes.
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Brimming with music performed by Oscar Isaac, Justin Timberlake and Carey Mulligan (as
Llewyn’s married Village friends), as well as Marcus Mumford and Punch Brothers, Inside
Llewyn Davis—in the tradition of O Brother, Where Art Thou?—is infused with the transportive
sound of another time and place. An epic on an intimate scale, it represents the Coens’ fourth
collaboration with executive music producer T Bone Burnett. Marcus Mumford, in his first
collaboration with the Coens, is associate music producer.
★
PRODUCTION INFORMATION ★
“We were always interested in the music of the period, the so-called folk revival of the late 1950s,
the thriving folk music scene that was taking place in the Village before Bob Dylan showed up—
music that was being produced and played during what might be termed the beatnik scene of the
50s and early 60s,” says Joel Coen. “That period lasted only through the very early 1960s, and most
people don’t know about it.”
The Coen Brothers, however, were very familiar with the songs from that time, and they found
themselves particularly taken with a book written by the folk musician Dave Van Ronk that
concentrated on the period. The book was called The Mayor of MacDougal Street.
“It’s Van Ronk’s memoir which he started writing but died before completing,” says Ethan Coen.
“His friend, the journalist Elijah Wald, basically put it together for him. It’s less a memoir than it
is interviews with Dave.”
The Coens’ fascination with the book led them to dig deeper not only into Van Ronk’s story and
his music, but also into his era and then create a fictional story about a folk singer in that world.
Ethan says, “One day Joel just said, ‘What about this? Here’s the beginning of a movie… A folk
singer gets beat up in the alleyway behind Gerde’s Folk City.’ We thought about the scene, and
then we thought, ‘Why would anyone beat up a folk singer?’ So it became a matter of trying to
come up with a screenplay, a movie that could fit around that and explain the incident.”
Sitting down to research the period and then to develop the concept and write the screenplay, the
brothers found the material a natural, comfortable fit.
“We already knew a lot of this music. If you’re into Bob Dylan, which both Ethan and I are,
you can’t help but know about this music because Dylan drew on it so heavily and in such an
interesting way. He’s such an interesting interpreter of that music,” says Joel.
“If you trace it back far enough it’s all Americana, the same kind of music, the same family tree, the
same species of song we used in O Brother, Where Art Thou?”, Joel says referring to their hit film.
“We’ve both been interested in this traditional American folk music a long time. We felt the folk
music revival of the 50s was in part a revival of the traditional American folk musical forms we’d
always been aware of and loved.
“A lot of this music is really beautiful. And its revival developed into what we think of as the singersongwriter ‘thing,’ which is different from traditional folk music.”
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How Dylan embraced that folk music and the singer-songwriter phenomenon that grew out of it,
and where he went with it, is all of great interest to the Coens. But for the story they had in mind
the brothers wanted to look back at that earlier era of folk, the era just before Dylan—rather than
in the direction in which Dylan took it. “People know much more about Bob Dylan—his story
and his music—than about this period, because he was such an important and transformative
figure,” Joel Coen says. “He arrived in 1961 and changed everything.”
The Coens steeped themselves in the folk period of the late 50s and very early 60s, watching
various documentaries, including one that John Sebastian’s brother made about Vince Martin, a
Village figure from those days who performed in the duo Martin and Neil with singer Fred Neil.
One aspect of the era that especially intrigued the brothers was the quest for authenticity that
so many of the folk artists and the emerging singer-songwriters of the day strived for; they all
seemingly shared a profound fear of achieving success and ‘selling out.’
“When you read about the scene you see this mania for authenticity,” Joel says. “You have these
guys like Elliot Adnopoz, the son of a neurosurgeon from Queens, calling himself Ramblin’ Jack
Elliot. In the film we have a character who sings and plays a guitar, wears a cowboy hat and calls
himself Al Cody. His real name is Arthur Milgram.”
The brothers also looked at variety shows from the era and read Dylan’s memoir, in which he
talked at length about what the music scene was like when he arrived in New York, at the time
Llewyn Davis takes place. But it was Van Ronk’s memoir about the Village music scene and its
antecedents that was the lodestar for them in creating the story they wanted to tell.
“Dave Van Ronk was not a songwriter,” Ethan says. “He wrote a few songs, but that wasn’t
his scene. A lot of what he sang was traditional folk songs, songs that could be interpreted
and performed in a variety of ways,” and which each performer is free to approach differently.
(Ethan points out that though the character Llewyn Davis plays songs often associated with
Van Ronk—songs like ‘Hang Me,’ ‘Dink’s Song,’ and ‘Green Rocky Road’—Oscar Isaac’s
performances in the film don’t attempt to channel Van Ronk’s style per se.)
The songs of Inside Llewyn Davis come from the same family of American music that inspired
O Brother, Where Are Thou?, and Llewyn Davis shares a powerful connection to O Brother in
spite of differences between the two works in tone, content and style. “We wanted to make
another film that was driven by music, and in that sense the two films are similar,” Joel says.
The manner of presenting the music in the two films, however, differs significantly.
“In this movie we wanted entire songs to be played out,” Ethan says. “O Brother used music in a
more conventional way. You get little bits of songs on the soundtrack. Here we wanted whole songs
to be done in their entirety. The film actually begins that way. You watch Llewyn performing for
a whole three minutes. We liked the idea of that. You don’t know where you are in terms of scene
setting—there’s no story yet. You’re just watching a performance.”
3
Another link between Inside Llewyn Davis and some of the Coens’ previous work is the brothers’
close collaboration on this film with executive music producer T Bone Burnett.
“T Bone is part of the mix from the beginning, when we’re starting to write the script and we really
don’t know specifically what the music is going to be—and we just know that there’s going to be a
character who plays something,” Joel says. “A lot of what we decide and then write in the screenplay
comes directly from talking to T Bone, from the three of us tossing out ideas.”
★
THE SCREENPLAY ★
In the Coens’ screenplay the audience discovers the character of Llewyn at a crossroads in his life
and career, adrift in the New York folk scene of 1961. When they began to write, the brothers took
as a starting point the opening image of a folk singer getting beaten up in a back alley of a Village
folk club; the question they then asked themselves was, “How did this character get here—what
were the events that led to this?”
According to the Coens, when they sit down to write they only have the most general idea of where
the story is going.
“We never, including on this movie, do an outline or figure out what’s going to happen, how the
screenplay’s going to unfold,” Ethan says. “We just start writing with the first scene and we see
where it goes.”
“In this case, though, we did know how we wanted it to end,” Joel says.
When we meet him, Llewyn is struggling to make it as a single act after the suicide of his singing
partner, Mike Timlin. Making matters worse, he doesn’t have a place of his own or money to pay
for one, and he’s sleeping on couches all over the city, scaring up what work he can find.
Llewyn, like so many folk singers of the day, is concerned with authenticity—with not selling out.
On the one hand he’s eager, almost desperate for success, so he can earn a little bit of money; on
the other hand he wants to remain true to himself. An irony of the screenplay is that when Llewyn
actually sees an authentic backwoods country folk singer—what the Coens describe as ‘the real
thing’—he heckles the singer, which results in his being beaten up in a back alley by her ‘authentic’
backcountry husband.
The screenplay begins and ends with Llewyn enduring a beating outside the Gaslight Café;
in the final pages of the script Llewyn finds himself walking into a predicament that bears a
mysterious resemblance to the one he walks into in the script’s opening pages.
“One thing we wanted from the beginning was to have a circular structure to the story,” says Joel.
“It was always the idea, even before the whole story was thought through, that it was going to
wind up in the place where it started. And we knew that it was always going to take place within
a compressed period of time, a tiny slice of time—roughly a week maybe.”
4
“Another thing that was always on our minds, as we wrote, was when—exactly when, at the end
of the movie—we were going to let the audience know that the story was coming, so to speak,
back to the present,” Ethan says. “When will the audience get the idea that the story is kind of
completing a circle?”
The brothers explain that they carefully constructed the closing scene at the Gaslight:
“It isn’t until the scene at the very end, when you go back to Llewyn performing Hang Me’ at the
Gaslight—just as he did in the opening—that we put in certain things to tell the audience that
they’re watching the identical moment they saw earlier,” Joel points out.
“Llewyn could sing the same song any number of different nights—it’s part of his repertoire. So
we had to very specifically think about how to illustrate that this was not just Llewyn singing the
same song twice, but that this was the same actual performance from the beginning of the movie,”
Ethan says.
Joel says: “The shot [of Llewyn coming off stage, after his number] isn’t covered by the camera in
the same way as it is in the beginning, but the scene repeats the same dialogue, so you realize you’re
watching the same event, from a different angle.”
This shot also expands on the moment. Llewyn performs a chorus of ‘Fare The Well’ (‘Dink’s
Song’) after ‘Hang Me.’ At that point the performance is over and he walks off stage. The story has
now come full circle.
As for the characters who populate Llewyn’s story—they are an amalgam of impressions the Coens
have of certain historical characters and fictional creations of their own imagination. Jean and Jim
Berkey, for instance, in particular as they perform with their friend Troy Nelson at the Gaslight
Café, recall in some ways the folk trio Peter, Paul and Mary.
“In fact, in the script we gave them a Peter, Paul and Mary song to sing—‘500 Miles’,” Joel says.
Ethan says, “There was a real act called Jim and Jean but all we essentially took from them—from
their act—was their names. I have no idea who they were as people. Jim and Jean, as they are in
the movie, they are our invention. We thought of Jim and Jean as the more clean-cut version of
the folk scene.”
“With the character of Roland Turner we were thinking about the New Orleans, old-school, jazz
guys, and Dr. John,” Ethan says. “Roland is a composite, on the surface, of various figures.”
Llewyn, for his part, is an original, wholly fictional character. Inside Llewyn Davis—the title a
reference to Van Ronk’s 1963 album, ‘Inside Dave Van Ronk’—isn’t in fact about Van Ronk.
Like Van Ronk, Llewyn has a working class background, but otherwise he resembles Van Ronk only
in that he shares his repertoire of songs—music that according to the Coens derives more from what
they describe as the Scots-Irish-Anglo tradition as opposed to the Southern tradition of the blues.
5
Llewyn takes a physical beating or two in the story, but he takes a psychic beating as well. His
contentious relationship with Jean Berkey, his best friend’s wife, weighs on Llewyn through the
movie. Jean sleeps with Llewyn, only to go on the attack, telling him he’s got no ambition, isn’t
getting anywhere—and everything he touches falls apart. When he lands a gig recording a song
he thinks is inane about the newly elected President Kennedy, he somehow manages to lose out
when the song becomes a hit. The record Llewyn made on his own isn’t selling, and so he sets his
hopes on being signed by Bud Grossman, a music producer and manager out of Chicago. A golden
opportunity to audition for the legendary Grossman suddenly looms when a bizarre twosome—
jazz musician Roland Turner and his companion Johnny Five—appears; they are driving cross
country and need an extra hand for gas money. Llewyn is in.
Llewyn’s trip to Chicago is roughly inspired by an incident in Van Ronk’s life, in which
Van Ronk suffers through a particularly embarrassing audition for the well-known folk manager
Al Grossman (the model for the script’s Bud Grossman).
Ethan says, “The trip to Chicago is not a big deal in Van Ronk’s reminiscences, but we felt the
movie was so much about New York that the road trip would be a useful detour—we thought of
it as a kind of foil that might set off New York in an interesting way.”
Llewyn’s loss of his Masters Mates and Pilots license is another detail the Coens borrowed from Van
Ronk’s life (though Van Ronk shipped out twice with the merchant marines, he never returned to
sea after losing his seaman’s papers), but otherwise Llewyn’s odyssey through New York—and the
misfortunes that befall him—are the inventions of the Coens.
★
THE CASTING ★
Their screenplay in hand, the Coens understood at once that the crucial element in filming the tale
would be the casting of the title role.
“That was definitely the main challenge,” says Ethan. “If you do a movie about a musician you
want to see him perform, so we had to find an actor who could hold his own not only in terms
of the dramatic requirements of the role—we needed an actor who could also sustain prolonged
performances of music.”
“Yeah. It was like ‘How do we do that’?” says Joel. “It was a bit like the problem we faced doing
True Grit when we didn’t know who was going to play the 14-year-old girl, the lead. At a certain
point, you have to ask yourself, ‘Are you really going to make the movie if you don’t find the right
person’?
“This was a similar situation, but with a different set of requirements. The character of Llewyn
has to hold the movie together because he’s in every scene. But he also has to perform at least
five songs, and we wanted—needed—someone who could really sing. We wound up looking at
musicians, and even though there are notable exceptions, most musicians are not actors. There
are some that could certainly do a supporting role, but as the lead—someone who’s engaging
you completely as a made-up character throughout an entire film—that’s a different skill set.”
6
The brothers thought they’d have to put the project on the back burner when luck or fate intervened
in the person of Oscar Isaac.
The Coens’ casting director Ellen Chenoweth first brought up Oscar’s name when everyone
concerned was tossing around suggestions. Oscar, a New York-based actor classically trained at
Juilliard, has a multitude of theatre credits and is beginning to make a name for himself in films,
having appeared in several A-list projects, such as Ridley Scott’s Robin Hood and Nicolas Winding
Refn’s Drive. What’s extraordinary about Oscar, however, is that he’s also an accomplished singer
and musician.
“We saw him on an audition tape. That’s hard for us. We like to see people in person,” says Joel.
“But we thought he was very interesting. So he came in and sang and did some scenes.”
The Coens were impressed and excited enough to send the tape to T Bone Burnett, the Oscar and
Grammy Award-winning executive music producer of Llewyn Davis, as well as the Coens’ previous
films O Brother, Where Art Thou? and The Ladykillers.
Straightaway Burnett told the Coens, “This guy’s better than a lot of the musicians I work with.
He’s the real thing.” His opinion carried a great deal of weight for the brothers, and confirmed
their instincts.
Burnett was even more enthusiastic when he saw Oscar perform in person.
“I thought he can play and sing as well as anybody I work with,” he repeated—high praise from
an artist who performed in Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder tour and produced records for the likes
of Roy Orbison, Elvis Costello, Elton John and Tony Bennett.
Oscar’s ability to adapt to and perform authentically in the style of the folk guitar playing of the
era also made a big impression on Burnett. “That style of playing the guitar is called Travis Picking,
and it’s not an easy thing to do. But Oscar mastered it,” Burnett says.
Says Joel Coen, “In addition to Oscar’s obvious musical skills, we thought he was so good in the
dramatic scenes we did with him when we saw him, that it just became obvious to the both of us
that we had found Llewyn.”
The other thing about Oscar that appealed to the brothers was that Oscar in no way resembled
Dave Van Ronk.
“Not physically, not ethnically, not in terms of his whole aura,” says Joel. “Oscar’s got a beautiful
tenor whereas Van Ronk was kind of growly, but, you know, we liked that. Oscar was very
different from the way we had imagined the character when we wrote, yet we felt there was no
reason we couldn’t re-imagine him in some way. We also felt that Oscar could convincingly
portray someone from New York’s working classes, and we liked that. That’s a big part of
who Llewyn is.”
7
For Oscar, landing the role was a thrill—the lead in a major motion picture. But it was made even
more gratifying for him because it was the lead in a Coen Brothers film.
“I had read somewhere the Coens were going to do a movie about the folk music scene of the
60s, and immediately—because I’m a huge fan and have been watching their movies forever, and
because I love folk music—I thought, ‘I have to be a part of this.’ I never thought it would happen.
But I thought, at least I’ll try.”
“I was able to get an audition with their casting director, did four or five scenes for her and then
recorded ‘Hang Me’—a Van Ronk version of a folk song they were having people sing—and I sent
the tape. I spent four hours recording it, thirty different versions! I also learned ‘Dink’s Song.’ Then
I saw the Coens, and they asked me to come in for another audition. Then a month went by. An
agonizing month during which I was screaming at the universe, ‘Give me this!’”
“I finally got the call. Joel called himself, which is a great way to find out, and which is typical of
his kind and quiet personality. He said, ‘We want to do the movie with you.’ I was so elated. At
first I couldn’t believe it.”
With Oscar cast and financing secured, plans for filming moved forward. With a modest budget
befitting the scale of the story, the Coens determined they could shoot the script entirely on
location in New York and in under forty days. Producer Scott Rudin, who produced No Country
for Old Men and True Grit for the Coens, continues his successful collaboration with them
on this film. Many of the Coens’ other longtime collaborators also signed on, including
production designer Jess Gonchor and costume designer Mary Zophres. And the brothers hired
acclaimed French cinematographer Bruno Delbonnel (nominated for an Academy-Award®
for his work on Amélie and Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince) as director of photography.
Delbonnel photographed ‘Tuileries’ for the Coens, their segment from the film Paris, je t’aime.
Pre-production moved along quickly, and the casting process continued. For the key roles of Jim
and Jean Berkey, the folk-singing duo who plays a significant role in Llewyn’s life, the Coens cast
Justin Timberlake and Carey Mulligan, unexpected choices.
“Justin came in and we thought he’s interesting but also he’s an amazing singer with an unbelievable
range. Yet he’s such a good actor,” says Joel. “We thought it would be a great kick to see him as a
folk singer.”
Justin was very excited about the project.
“I was lucky enough to work with the Coens and with Oscar Isaac and Carey Mulligan,” he says.
“I worked with Marcus Mumford on the soundtrack so I became very good friends with all of
them. I don’t know any other world where we could collaborate like that, but it was so much fun.
Not only will it be a great movie, but the music will be fantastic.”
“Justin was great because he pitched in on the music entirely—not just on the music he was
directly involved with [in his own scenes],” Joel says. “During the week we rehearsed the music
8
for each scene; he stayed the whole time, and worked with everyone. He helped write the song
‘Please, Mr. Kennedy’ and he sings off-screen in the Irish quartet [in one scene that takes place at
the Gaslight Café].”
In the film Jim Berkey considers Llewyn his best friend. Jean thinks of him as something more.
She and Llewyn have a volatile, sexual, love-hate relationship that often has them bitterly arguing.
The brothers were delighted to cast Carey Mulligan as Jean. Mulligan rose to fame for her
performance in the film An Education, which won her a Best Actress Oscar nomination, and she
appears as Daisy Buchanan in Baz Luhrmann’s adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby.
“Carey was an actor we wanted to work with. We’d seen her in An Education and she was really
great in that. We weren’t thinking about her as a singer, but she can sing,” says Joel. “We saw a lot
of actresses for the part. But Carey sent us a tape and it was very funny.”
“Funny because she was angry and pissed off,” Ethan says. “It was a really angry reading of the
scene with an American accent, and we were a little scared of her. And surprised. She had just done
a movie with Oscar in which she couldn’t have been sweeter.”
Physically, Mulligan also appealed to the Coens:
“There was clearly something about Carey’s physicality which seemed like the period to us—like
she was one of those Village girls of the time,” Joel says. “It’s easier with certain actors than with
others to imagine them in a particular time period. We could definitely see Carey in this period.
And we thought it would be fun to see her do this part which is so angry—not the type of
character Carey is associated with.”
Carey was delighted when the Coens offered her the part.
“The opportunity to work on a Coen Brothers film comes along once in a lifetime—well, five if
you’re John Goodman. But if you’re just a normal lucky person, when the Coens offer you a role,
you jump at it,” Mulligan says.
An added plus was that she fell in love with her character.
“I hadn’t played or read a character with more than two lines of dialogue strung together and here
I would be someone who speaks in paragraphs.
“I also loved how unkind Jean could be, how brutal even. Most of the women I play are quite
empathetic, and Jean most certainly is not. We come into Jean and Llewyn’s relationship at a
heated time; things are heightened between them, she’s so resentful, and I loved that.”
For the role of Roland Turner, the physically challenged, garrulous, somewhat drug-addled jazzcum-tin pan alley-cum rock ‘n’ roll songwriter and musician, it was as if the Coens took their cue
from Carey Mulligan.
Says Ethan, “We’ve done five or six movies with John Goodman and we wanted to do something
with him again. We had just done True Grit before we started writing this film, and Charles Portis,
9
who wrote the novel True Grit, always has these gasbag characters in everything he writes. We were
thinking of Roland as a Portis character.”
“I’m not sure if we were consciously or unconsciously thinking about John when we started
writing the character but when we were done with it we realized that the guy sounded just like
John. It had been thirteen years since we worked with him [on O Brother, Where Art Thou?], and
we wanted to work together again. So, yes, the role was absolutely written for him,” says Joel.
“John understood the whole jazz cat, the whole Dr. John/Doc Pomus/New Orleans nature of the
character. Doc Pomus was a white Jewish songwriter who sang in black clubs in the 40s. John also
understood exactly the way the character looked, that Chano Pozo style,” says Ethan. “Chano
Pozo was a drummer who played with Dizzy Gillespie. John knew who he was.”
“He even designed his own hairstyle. We called it a Mulligan after the jazz-great Gerry Mulligan.
Mulligan wore his hair in a Caesar cut just like Roland.”
“Roland’s character has a specific function to fulfill in the story—he’s the voice in the film that’s
taking the piss out of folk music,” Joel says. “Llewyn has an ambivalent relationship to the music
but he’s committed to it. Roland’s the guy who simply sends it up.”
Goodman was more than ready for the assignment. He loves all Coens characters—loves their
recognizable humanity—and he was eager to work with the brothers again. Goodman says,
“Roland may appear weird and far out to some people, and to Llewyn. But to me, Roland seems
like a normal guy.”
“Coens characters are like all human beings you meet, but they’re just stretched a little. I thought
a lot about the guy before we began and I assumed he was a jazz pianist. But when I went to the
read-through with Joel and Ethan, Joel said, ‘No, he’s a trumpet player.’ But Ethan goes, ‘Oh, no,
he’s a reed man—I see him playing the saxophone.’ So he’s a little bit of all three. Let’s just say he’s
a jazz musician who’s got a problem going with recreational drugs that’s gotten a little more than
recreational.”
Garrett Hedlund was cast in the role of Johnny Five, Roland’s youthful, spaced-out, taciturn,
caretaker/driver. The Coens were unfamiliar with Hedlund’s work but when they met him
during the casting process they decided he was exactly right for the role.
“Garrett has that kind of natural feeling, he projects that sort of hip, reserved, nut-job type, and
we went for him,” says Joel.
Says Ethan, “He looked the part absolutely!”
“I heard about the movie and I heard it was a wonderful story about Dave Van Ronk, but I never
thought I’d be a part of it,” says Hedlund, who recently starred in Walter Salles’ On the Road, based
on the Jack Kerouac novel. “I’m a big Coen Brothers fan—I’ve seen everything they’ve done. I also
love that they’re from Minnesota like me.”
“So when I got a call about meeting them when they were coming to L.A., I couldn’t believe it. I’d
do a walk on for them, a voice-over. When I read for them, they said, ‘Yeah, you really have a good
10
handle on this guy.’ I don’t know why they felt that way. They told me the character’s based on a
real person, someone they crossed paths with along the way, and he had this ‘thing’ about him. You
couldn’t really pinpoint it but they felt you couldn’t really trust him. Llewyn doesn’t trust Johnny
Five, so maybe that’s why. Johnny Five’s a mysterious guy who doesn’t talk much and tries to look
like James Dean.”
“Garrett is from Minnesota, actually near where we shot Fargo,” Ethan says. “We thought he’d be
a perfect fit with John. His and John’s characters are kind of like Mutt and Jeff. Goodman’s Mutt.
Or vice versa. But it was a great fit.”
Joel points out that Garrett’s character speaks very little in his scenes.
“In fact he has almost no dialogue. Casting a person with very little dialogue can be difficult.
Interestingly, one of the things that attracted us to Garrett is that he has this very deep voice.
When he does speak it makes a big impression.”
F. Murray Abraham and Stark Sands round out the principal cast—Abraham in the role of the
Chicago nightclub owner and music manager Bud Grossman, and Sands as a folk singer who’s
been drafted.
“We’ve always wanted to work with Murray,” says Joel. “In fact, Ethan has worked with him. He’s
appeared in several of Ethan’s plays. We knew that he was in a play in New York and we thought
we could get him at the end of the shoot. And we were able to.”
Sands, an accomplished actor/singer, and a Tony nominee, recently scored on Broadway in the
punk rock band Green Day’s musical American Idiot and is currently appearing on Broadway in
the musical Kinky Boots.
Says Sands, “I’ve played a soldier so many times that I felt comfortable auditioning, thank goodness.
At my last audition Joel said, ‘What we really need is someone who can play folk style, who can
finger. Are you willing to learn that?’ Was I ever! I went out, bought a book and taught myself so
that I’d be good enough to play by the time shooting started. Whew!”
★
THE MUSIC ★
Folk music is integral to the concept of Inside Llewyn Davis and is a major part of Llewyn’s story.
“When we were writing the script, musical ideas—even specific songs we wanted to use—became
part of the process,” says Joel. “At this point T Bone got involved.” The Coens work closely with
Burnett. “We tell him what we’re thinking of and he starts making suggestions,” says Joel.
Says Ethan, “One of the things T Bone suggested was the song ‘500 Miles’ which in fact turned
out to be Justin’s number, not Oscar’s. It’s a very beautiful song. We saw a YouTube clip of the
Brothers Four performing it in a club and the entire audience joined in singing. That wouldn’t
happen today.”
11
For T Bone Burnett, the memory of having suggested ‘500 Miles’ to the Coens is kind of fuzzy.
“You know what? I can’t remember,” he says. “Our collaboration is such that I can’t distinguish
between what anybody suggested other than to say I think Joel and Ethan suggested most songs.
And I just facilitate.”
“But I probably did come up with ‘500 Miles.’ I love it. It’s a beautiful, beautiful song. Dylan did
a version of it,” he says.
Other songs in the film are ‘Dink’s Song,’ which is closely identified with Van Ronk, ‘Hang Me,
Oh Hang Me,’ ‘Green Green Rocky Road,’ the folk ballads ‘Shoals of Herring’ and ‘The Death of
Queen Jane,’ as well as ‘The Last Thing on My Mind,’ ‘Please, Mr. Kennedy,’ ‘The Old Triangle,’
‘Cocaine,’ ‘Old MacDonald,’ ‘Leaving the Cat’ and ‘Storms Are on the Ocean.’
A week or so before filming began, cast rehearsals got underway. This included performing and
recording the music—despite the fact that a decision had been made to play the music live during
shooting, not on playback.
“The reason we record the music [before shooting] is that eventually we can use it on an album,
and also there’s a sense that no one will really get serious about the music unless it’s all set down,”
says Ethan. “Also, T Bone wanted a studio version of everything.”
Burnett was thrilled with the decision to perform the music live for filming.
“Joel and Ethan wanted it live because they wanted the music and the film to have something of
a documentary feel—something of the period about it, the raw reality of it happening right there,”
Burnett says. “That’s something you just can’t ever get with lip-syncing.”
One fortuitous event connected to the music also originated with T Bone Burnett. It was he who
suggested bringing in the British musician Marcus Mumford to contribute and play on the tracks
as they were recorded. Mumford’s group, Mumford & Sons, a British group with an original
country-folk-American inflection, has two hit albums. The band’s second album ‘Babel’ won the
2012 Grammy Award for Record of the Year.
Says Burnett, “Mumford’s music is quite interesting. The energy of the band is unbelievable, and
Marcus is a good man. He seems like one of the boys, he seems like he’s on the team.”
Among the other musicians who played on the tracks were Punch Brothers, the Lost City Ramblers,
and John Cohen, who played the banjo.
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★
THE PRODUCTION ★
Production on Inside Llewyn Davis began Monday February 6, 2012, on location in Woodside,
Queens for scenes that take place in Llewyn’s sister’s house where Llewyn occasionally retreats
for a warm bed, a little comfort and a loan. Scenes were also filmed under the EL in Woodside
(the elevated subway train) and on the subway platform where Llewyn receives an important call.
After a quick stint on Randall’s Island for a scene set on the outskirts of Chicago, the unit
moved into Manhattan for the scenes in which Llewyn meets with his manager and record
producer only to learn that his solo album is performing poorly. Two scenes were then filmed
in an East Harlem church replicating a Merchant Marine Union Hall. Llewyn, like his father,
is qualified to work on US merchant ships. In the Hall Llewyn suffers another setback. He
discovers he’s no longer eligible to ship out because he owes back dues. He manages to come up
with the money to pay the fee only to suffer a twist of fate that keeps him from being able to
work on a commercial vessel.
A sequence was next shot in a doctor’s office where Llewyn arranges for an abortion for Jean, followed
by a scene on East 9th Street. The unit then set up shop at a Manhattan recording studio where
Llewyn, Jim Berkey (Justin Timberlake) and another singer/guitar player, Al Cody (Adam Driver),
record Jim’s specialty song, ‘Please, Mr. Kennedy.’
An important sequence followed at the Village’s famed Gaslight Café, the focal point of the
Village folk scene at the time, where some of the most important music in the film is performed
by Jim and Jean and their friend Troy Nelson (Stark Sands), as well as Llewyn.
Carey Mulligan experienced a good deal of trepidation about filming the Gaslight sequences.
“I was very nervous about singing ‘500 Miles.’ Singing for me seems to be the most nervewracking thing to do. And when you’re surrounded by actual musicians like Oscar, Justin and
Stark, it’s even worse. The last time I sang on film in Shame, it was a solo. Here it was with these
accomplished musical artists so it was very intimidating. But the boys were easy going, and
T Bone, who supervised the music, is such a warming, comfortable influence that I was OK.”
Oscar Isaac was particularly impressed with Justin Timberlake and the way he worked.
“Justin’s so funny and good-natured. Our characters have a really warm relationship. I think
he’s the closest thing Llewyn has to a friend in the film and yet here is Llewyn having sex with
the man’s wife.”
Executive music producer Burnett admired the musical abilities of everyone in the cast but
singles out Oscar’s particular gifts for special praise.
“I don’t think any actor has ever learned to play and sing as thoroughly and compellingly—while
filming it all live without the aid of a click track, that is without the aid of any technology—as
Oscar,” Burnett says. “And it’s music he hadn’t really heard a year before. Amazing.”
13
Additional scenes on Village streets were staged after which a series of intense encounters
between Jean and Llewyn were filmed in the Café Reggio, in Washington Square Park and in
the Berkey apartment.
“Oscar and I had this long walk and talk scene in which Llewyn and Jean discuss their
relationship, and I came away very happy,” says Mulligan. “The Coens just create this ease on
set. There’s a general understanding that everyone is trying to make a good film. You sort of feel
like they’re guiding you along but there’s no drama. And it was great to work with Oscar. We
both said that we should make a plan to do a picture together every year!”
The Coens especially enjoyed Carey’s working method on set.
“There’s this cliché about British actors versus American actors,” says Joel. “The American actor
is ‘angsting’ over everything he has to do and the British actor does what he or she’s supposed to
with a minimum of fuss—just gets on with it. That’s acting. That’s Carey. You can ask her to do
anything and she just goes and bangs it out. No angst involved at all.”
“It’s a lot of fun to watch an actor like Carey work,” Ethan adds. “And she does not suffer from
vanity. She kind of goes stomping through the scene, swearing at Oscar, giving him a terrible
time. I would think it’s some great fun playing a character like that.”
“Carey and I had a great time playing husband and wife in Drive,” Oscar says. “We loved that
experience. It’s a real turn on to watch Carey do what she’s doing here—just get really mean
and nasty, really tell it like it is. My favorite scenes in the film are those when she’s giving it
to me. The Coens really understood she was capable of that. That helped me understand my
character as well.”
“Llewyn’s not an easy figure to define. It’s hard to say exactly what kind of person he is. I think
he’s charismatic, gregarious, you know, outgoing and positive, just not this week—not the week
the movie’s taking place. You’re catching him on a real downswing.”
“The uncanny thing is somehow I feel that the character is not complete with me. That’s
not a false humility thing, just the structure of the whole operation. The Coens created this
extraordinary character and their understanding support helped me bring him to life.”
“The three of us, Ethan, Joel and myself, started developing something like a second-hand
language. I felt as if I could read their thoughts. In one scene, after a take I thought to myself,
‘Wouldn’t it be better to move my hand here,’ thinking of this very specific point of dialogue in
the scene, when Joel came over and said, ‘In the next take why not try moving your hand’ at the
very same moment I had thought to do it. I felt that we’d become like the triplets of the Village.
I felt like an honorary brother.”
After another blistering scene between Llewyn and Jean in her apartment, the brothers filmed
various sequences that depict the near surreal car journey Llewyn takes with Roland Turner and
his companion Johnny Five to Chicago, where Llewyn intends to audition for the legendary
14
music producer Bud Grossman. There’s a price to pay for the passage. Llewyn has to listen to
Roland’s rant—not always pleasant for Llewyn but inevitably entertaining for the audience.
The trip to Chicago is inspired by a story in Van Ronk’s life, though the character of Roland
Turner is wholly the invention of the Coens. John Goodman was completely comfortable with
the character. The Coens recount that Goodman felt he understood Roland’s humanity. He
liked the man.
The Coens had a great time working with Goodman. The instant rapport they had developed
with him the very first time they worked together resurfaced immediately on the Llewyn Davis
set. Goodman seems to exist naturally on their wavelength. Goodman says, “To me, everything
the Coens write is great. I just seem to have an affinity for the things they write. I assume I know
where they’re coming from and I’m usually right.” “We do have such an easy rapport with him,”
says Joel. “We had it right from the beginning. I remember on Raising Arizona we asked him to
do a ‘Spanky’ take. We didn’t have to explain. He knew exactly what we were talking about—
what we were referring to: Spanky from the ‘Our Gang’ comedies. It was the same on this film.”
The character of Roland isn’t exactly disabled but has a great deal of trouble ambulating.
He propels himself with a pair of crutches.
“When we talked to John about how we wanted him to walk in a particular scene we used the
name Everett Sloane as a verb,” Ethan says. “He understood the reference to the character Sloane
played in Orson Welles’ film The Lady From Shanghai. The character is lame. He uses crutches
to get around and walks in an odd crab-like manner. John knew precisely what we meant when
we told him, ‘In this scene you just Everett Sloane your way across the room.’”
“Neither John nor Carey had a great deal of time on set,” Joel says. “But they sort of parachuted
in, did their work perfectly, and were gone. It was great.”
After stops at a diner along the way, a scene at a forlorn service station (shot in Riverhead, New
York) and a stretch of roadside where Llewyn finally abandons Roland and Johnny, action
shifted back to a New York soundstage for scenes inside Roland’s car and a touching scene that
depicts Llewyn’s visit to his aging father in a seedy nursing home. Llewyn serenades his father
with ‘The Shoals of Herring,’ a song that tells the story of a herring fisherman who went to sea
as a boy in the 1890s.
The unit then moved to the Upper West Side to shoot outside the Beacon Theatre at Broadway
and 74th Street, and afterward inside a Riverside Drive apartment, home to Llewyn’s friends the
Gorfeins, uptown, bohemian, arty types who know Llewyn from the days he was singing with
his partner Mike. Llewyn often camps out on their couch. We see him sparring one night with
the Gorfeins and their guests during a contentious dinner party. Llewyn also spends a good part
of his week searching for the Gorfeins’ cat after inadvertently letting it out of the apartment.
15
★
THE CINEMATOGRAPHY, PRODUCTION DESIGN AND COSTUMES ★
A hallmark of the Coens’ work in each of their films is exquisite visuals—their films present
a compelling, vibrant atmosphere and tone that’s integral to the way the story is being
told. It fell to cinematographer Bruno Delbonnel, production designer Jess Gonchor and
costumer Mary Zophres to work with the Coens in executing their vision for Llewyn Davis.
Says Delbonnel, “All I knew about New York in the 60s is based on archives, film footage, still
photography. Everything I saw looks desaturated in this material. Was it really like that or not?
I felt that using these references would have been wrong.”
The cinematographer says that instead he wanted to create a particular mood for the film, a
mood based on the 1960s and also on Llewyn Davis’s personal story.
“It’s the mood of a person who doesn’t have a coat to protect him from the cold New York
winter,” he says. “It’s more about being evocative than truthful to the 60s. I was looking for
coldness, sadness, unhappiness, loneliness,” he says.
Delbonnel discussed these ideas with the brothers.
“Early on, we agreed there was something interesting in the front cover of the Bob Dylan record
‘The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan,’” he says. “You can feel the slushy, cold New York winter in that
photo. The main thing was to avoid being too pretty.”
“I also thought of Llewyn’s story as a folk song and I thought it could be interesting to ‘build’
the light as a folk song as well.”
He explains.
“The Gaslight Café would become the ‘chorus,’ like the refrain of the movie—dark, contrast-y,
almost colorless. For the rest of the movie I decided to go for a very simple way of lighting based
on an overcast kind of daylight, and using a palette that was a little bit uncomfortable, magenta,
yellow. I was looking for something that was opposed to a blue-cyan cold world.”
One major decision the Coens and Delbonnel made was opting against shooting with a digital
camera and sticking to shooting the movie on film.
“It was based on a feeling, as none of us has ever shot anything digital,” Delbonnel says. “Film
seemed appropriate for the period because of the grain structure of the film stock. I even made
some tests using super 16mm film, but the tests were too grainy. I thought I had made a mistake.
So we went with normal film that will look beautiful on HD-TV and on DVDs.”
Like the cinematographer, production designer Gonchor’s work was based on the specific year
and the feeling and setting of the story.
“I had three basics to work with. It’s 1961, it’s winter, and it’s New York City,” says Gonchor.
“And it’s a particular New York—not the elegant East Side or the leafy outer boroughs, but the
16
messy, unkempt downtown Greenwich Village, which mimics the main character who’s in a
way himself and doesn’t have his own place.”
“In most Coen Brothers films, the ones I worked on, the art direction can look almost fake.
Not to the point where it’s pushed over the edge but where it’s almost hyper real. This film was
going to be different. The brothers said they wanted to approach it like a documentary, have it
be as real as possible, to enhance everything—not make it stylized but to have it seem totally
authentic.”
Another element Gonchor had to contend with was a modest budget.
“With a smaller budget you have to be very crafty about what you’re doing. We did a lot of
location scouting to find what we wanted and needed.”
A signature scene in the film occurs at the Gaslight Café, but of course the original Gaslight is
long gone.
“We hoped to find a subterranean Manhattan club that could work for us but these rooms
were too small and cramped for shooting. We found an existing empty space, more or less a
small abandoned warehouse in Crown Heights Brooklyn that worked. We turned it into the
Gaslight,” says Gonchor. “We lowered the height of the ceiling, constructed arches, brought
in the period furniture and fixtures, and the result was that you really felt you were in a dingy
Village Club circa 1961.”
“We were also creative with the Chicago Club, the Gate of Horn, converting the old Gramercy
movie theater on East 23rd Street into a music club, and turning the antiquated projection
booth into a cramped, messy office.”
Once in a while Gonchor and the Coens were able to use an existing location to match
their needs.
“Burger Heaven on 51st Street has been there since 1963—it looked perfect for the Chicago
diner scene. All we had to do was cover up some modern appliances,” Gonchor says.
Costume designer Mary Zophres has worked with the Coens for nearly twenty years and, like
Gonchor, is very much on their wavelength.
“As soon as I read the script I had a conversation with Joel and Ethan about the time being
very specifically February, 1961, and then I started to research it. We all felt that the era had a
timeless quality about it. It could be the 50s or it could be later. The actual time doesn’t jump
out at you and say ‘1961.’ Nonetheless the look of the movie very much has its foot in the 1950s.
In 1961, the counter culture was just beginning to coalesce. What we call ‘The 60s’ came with
a distinctive fashion statement.”
For Zophres, the main challenge was how to dress Llewyn.
17
“Basically he’s in one outfit throughout. Remember, he doesn’t have a place to live, so you
know he isn’t going to change—maybe just a shirt. And so he carries a small duffel with him
in addition to his guitar. He lacks a winter coat—he’s always chilly—so his sport jacket is allimportant. We tried hundreds on him, tweed, leather, suede, but what came up looking best was
a beige corduroy sport jacket from the 1950s. Basically beside the jacket and shirts, all Llewyn
has is a sweater and a pair of pants.”
“One other thing, actually. Llewyn’s shoes became all important. He’s always walking around
in miserable weather and his shoes don’t keep out the elements—a problem for him. We made
the shoes ourselves and based them on a shoe of the period made and sold by Thom McAn that
we saw in a Sears catalogue. It’s a modified desert boot. Oscar loved the shoes. He wouldn’t even
rehearse unless he was wearing them.”
Zophres thought carefully about the clothes for the other characters as well.
“I based Jean Berkey’s look on a composite of various folk singers of the time. Carey wanted to
wear slacks, and that looked absolutely right. She felt this young woman wouldn’t want to dress
like her mother wearing a dress and pantyhose or heels. You know, ‘I’m going to wear pants and
flats, and I’m not going to put my hair in curlers.’
Jim’s look is basically preppy, which worked—a little like the guys from the Kingston Trio,
though he has a beard in the film.”
Timberlake himself had suggested he wear a beard in the film that resembled the beard of the
singer Paul Clayton—the Coens were great with that.
“Roland Turner is like a white man dressing like a black man and that’s how I approached it. I
researched jazz musicians both black and white, and sort of blended the two, putting Roland in
a dark maroon suit with a Fedora. When the character removes the hat he’s sporting kind of a
Caesar haircut. John Goodman loved that.”
“Roland doesn’t really care what he looks like—he’s mimicking jazz greats he’s seen, copying
them,” says Goodman. “He’s like a lot of loud people who are searching for a place in the world,
just trying to stay on top of things, maybe to prove themselves a little smarter than they are.
Roland seems to be an encyclopedia of the mundane. He’s had a lot of adventures but let’s face
it, nobody wants to hear about them.”
The road trip to Chicago and the sequences with the Gorfeins completed, the unit moved to the
Gramercy Theatre on East 23rd Street for scenes set inside the Gate of Horn, the Chicago club where
Llewyn has a frustrating audition for music impresario Bud Grossman. Accompanying himself
on guitar, Llewyn performs his version of the traditional English ballad ‘The Death of Queen
Jane,’ music that has been sung and recorded by a great many folk artists including Joan Baez.
As John Jeremiah Sullivan has written in his liner notes to the movie’s soundtrack, at this point,
Llewyn could chose to play “something crowd-pleasing, and he should, really—but instead he
decides to play something weird and old, ‘The Death of Queen Jane,’ a song about a pregnant
18
woman whose life is in danger, and about her baby, if it will live or die. By that point we know
these topics aren’t abstract for Llewyn. The forces that took the queen’s life, sparing her child,
move through him and the lives of people he loves (poorly). But he’s trapped in his fate. He can
sing about it but can’t sing his way out of it.”
The scenes at the Gate of Horn completed, Inside Llewyn Davis wrapped April 4, 2012 after six
weeks of shooting.
★
THE STORY ★
1961, Winter. Greenwich Village, New York. On stage at the Gaslight Café, Llewyn Davis (OSCAR
ISAAC) is finishing his final number of the night (“You’ve probably heard that one before, but
what the hell—if it was never new and it never gets old, then it’s a folk song...”). Offstage, his
set done, Llewyn’s told someone has been asking for him out back. In the alley, he encounters a
thin, angular man, obscured by shadows, who snuffs out his cigarette, moves up to Llewyn, and
socks him in mouth—retaliation, the man says, for heckling his wife on stage the night before.
Morning: Llewyn wakes on the sofa of his friends Mitch and Lillian Gorfein, uptown academics.
With nowhere to live, no money, no winter coat to protect against the cold, he retreats to
their couch on a regular basis. Stumbling into the corridor, Llewyn locks himself out of the
apartment, along with the Gorfeins’ cat. With no other options, he dumps the cat at the Village
walk-up of his best friend and fellow folksinger Jim Berkey (JUSTIN TIMBERLAKE) and his
wife Jean (CAREY MULLIGAN), letting himself in by the fire escape.
Other hurdles and hindrances, major and minor, pile up: Jean says she’s pregnant, and Llewyn’s
responsible; he’s got to pay for the abortion, and if he expects to stay the night it’ll be on the
floor. At the dingy office of his music label, Legacy Records, Llewyn learns his new album—his
first as a solo artist since the suicide of his singing partner—isn’t selling.
Out of money and out of options, Llewyn subways out to his sister Joy’s modest home in Queens.
Looking for a loan Joy can ill-afford, Llewyn wonders if there’s any profit left over from the sale
of their parents’ house—but Joy says the money’s in escrow; and besides, the funds are going
toward their father’s nursing home bills. Joy reminds Llewyn that—like their father—he’s got
seaman’s papers from the merchant marines; Llewyn can always ship out if he’s desperate for cash.
Back in Manhattan, there’s a message waiting from Jim. It’s a gig. Someone dropped out of a
studio session for Columbia Records, and the job’s Llewyn’s for the taking, if he wants it. As
Jim, Llewyn, and another musician Al Cody (ADAM DRIVER) rehearse ‘Please, Mr. Kennedy,’
Llewyn scoffs at the song—a novelty tune about the space race—only to learn it’s an original
composition . . . of Jim’s. Finally, taking $200 in cash upfront for the session, Llewyn forgoes
royalties, a decision that will come back to haunt him later.
Stopping by Legacy to pick up his mail, Llewyn asks Ginny the secretary if there’s been any
word from Bud Grossman—a month has passed since Llewyn sent the big-time music producer
a copy of his album, and he hasn’t heard back. “Nothing,” Ginny tells him, and sends Llewyn
on his way with a carton of his unsold LPs.
19
A break, or so it seems, presents itself when Llewyn catches the Gorfeins’ cat running down
MacDougal Street. Unnamed cat and unsold copies of “Inside Llewyn Davis” in hand, Llewyn
heads to Al Cody’s to unload the stack of vinyl and crash on Al’s couch. But the apartment is off
limits—Al’s girlfriend is coming to town.
Another curve ball awaits Llewyn at Dr. Ruvkin’s office: Llewyn wants to schedule Jean’s
abortion, and pay for it, but Ruvkin says Llewyn’s got credit “from last time”…. Llewyn paid
for Diane’s procedure last year, Ruvkin says, but Diane decided last minute not to go through
with it (“Diane didn’t tell you? She asked me to refer her to a doctor in Cleveland…. She decided
to… go to term….”)
Uptown, at the Gorfeins’, Llewyn finally returns the cat, and accepts a dinner invitation from
Mitch (ETHAN PHILLIPS) and Lillian (ROBIN BARTLETT). But when Mitch brings
Llewyn a guitar and asks him to play a tune for their guests—and Lillian chimes in, attempting
to sing the harmonies of Llewyn’s dead singing partner, Mike Timlin—something in Llewyn
cracks. Dinner quickly goes south, and amid the melee over Llewyn’s performance (“I’m not a
trained poodle. I do this for a living!”), Lillian makes a discovery: the cat Llewyn has brought
home isn’t theirs. Confronted with incontrovertible evidence (“Where’s its scrotum?!”), Llewyn
is forced to admit Lillian’s right.
With no place to sleep and the unclaimed and unnamed cat on his hands, Llewyn opts in when Al
Cody tells him two acquaintances are driving to Chicago and need a third man to help with gas
money. On a bleak, windswept Greenwich Village street corner, a huge four-door sedan glides to a
stop. Llewyn peers through the windscreen; inside is one Roland Turner (JOHN GOODMAN),
an obese jazz musician sporting a goatee, a feather in his fedora, and an animal fetish tie pin—and,
at the wheel, his hipster companion, Johnny Five (GARRETT HEDLUND). This ride to Chicago
is the only thing standing between Llewyn and music mogul Bud Grossman (F. MURRAY
ABRAHAM); if Llewyn can get in front of Grossman—and play for him at his club, the Gate of
Horn—he stands a chance to get signed. Guitar in tow, clutching the cat, Llewyn settles into the
backseat alongside Roland, forced to listen to the jazzman’s jarring, free-associative rant.
During a stop to eat at a forlorn, out-of-the-way roadside diner, Llewyn stumbles on Roland,
stoned and unconscious on the men’s room floor. Llewyn and Johnny Five get the big man on
his feet and walk him back to the car. But things go downhill; late at night a state trooper hassles
Johnny for stopping on the shoulder to sleep, and when Johnny takes a swing, he gets cuffed and
frogmarched to jail, taking the car keys with him.
Stranded with a comatose Roland on a highway somewhere in the Midwest, Llewyn’s had it. He
abandons the car—and, finally, the nameless cat—taking a Greyhound bus the rest of the way
to the Windy City.
Llewyn’s determined to hang in, looking for any way to gain traction in his life and career, and
hoping against hope that Grossman will be his salvation. But a big break proves as elusive as ever,
temptingly close sometimes but always just out of reach. At the Gate of Horn, Grossman—preoccupied, his mind perhaps made up even before Llewyn plucks a note—doesn’t seem terribly
20
impressed; “I don’t see a lot of money here,” Grossman says, reaching his verdict. Llewyn appears
to accept Grossman’s assessment of his future, his mood in keeping with the mournful nature
of the ballad he’s just sung.
Llewyn hitches a ride back to New York, where he settles the dues he owes the seaman’s
union—with the help of an old union buddy of his father’s, and the money he saved from Jean’s
abortion—and secures a post as Seaman First Class in the merchant marine. But after a visit to
his ailing father at his retirement home, he learns his sister has thrown out his Masters Mates
and Pilots License—the one thing he needs in order to ship out. Another door has closed.
A beleaguered Llewyn tries reconnecting with Jean, and with the Gorfeins. At the Gorfeins’
apartment, where all is forgiven, he learns that ‘Please, Mr. Kennedy’ is a runaway hit, and will
likely pay out royalties for years to come. And, to Llewyn’s surprise, in Lillian’s arms he finds the
Gorfeins’ cat—seemingly unchanged and safe in its rightful place. Ulysses found his way home,
Lillian says, scratching at the door the night before. The cat’s name—it’s Ulysses—Lillian says
again, when Llewyn at first doesn’t understand.
By the end of the week, Llewyn will come full circle: back at the Gaslight, bitter and drunk, he
heckles an insecure, aging singer. The following night, his own set finished, he’s told a stranger
wants a word with him out back. Stepping into the alley, Llewyn finds himself where he began:
on a cold winter night, staring into an uncertain future, in 1961.
★
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T Bone Burnett, the renowned musician who played on Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder tour, is a
songwriter and soundtrack and record producer, working with artists as varied as Roy Orbison,
John Mellencamp, Elvis Costello and Diana Krall, Elton John, Tony Bennett, and many others.
Burnett won Grammy Awards for the soundtrack of the Coen Brothers’ film O Brother, Where Art
Thou? and for his work with Alison Krauss and Robert Plant. His song ‘The Scarlet Tide’ from Cold
Mountain earned an Academy Award nomination. In 2010, Burnett won the Oscar for his song ‘The
Weary Kind’ for the film Crazy Heart. He is currently producing the music for the ABC-TV Show
“Nashville.”
In talking about his work as executive music producer on the Coen Brothers’ latest film Inside Llewyn
Davis, Burnett begins by discussing the film’s significance:
TB:
You know, it’s a really important film to me, so…
Q:
Why do you feel that? Why is it important for you?
TB:
The film is about a time very much like the time we’re in.
Q:
Can you explain that?
TB:
Well, I don’t want to give a lot away. But you know, the film is about a time when there’s
22
a new moment happening. The old has died, and the new thing hasn’t quite been born
We’ve been in an interregnum now for the past ten years, really, where the old has been
dying but is not dead, and the new is being born but it’s not yet alive.
We’ve been in this brackish water where it’s not one thing or another. The old structure
that we lived in for, you know, my whole lifetime has been dismantled for the most part.
But the new, the new structure hasn’t taken place. You realize this is an incredibly long
conversation that has to do with, you know, eve thing that’s going on in the Internet,
and in music.
Q:
I understand.
TB:
But at any rate, I feel we’re at a time now when the value of music has been brought
into question. And this movie speaks very eloquently, I think about the value of music,
and about the value of art throughout culture. We’ve been in a period of time for the
last twenty years really, during which there’s been an assault on the arts by the
technology community. The technology community has devalued the art, especially
music, and has taken over the role of the artist in the society. We’re being told now that
artists are to crowd source their work, that artists are to follow the crowd rather than lead
the crowd. Well, there’s no artist worth his salt that will follow the crowd.
Q:
Of course.
TB:
I’m not interested in any artist who will follow the crowd. Jules Verne put a man on the
moon a hundred years before a rocket scientist did. Einstein said that Picasso preceded
him by twenty years. The arts have always led the sciences, and they should, too, because
the arts are involved with the whole of humanity, the whole of the creation, not just
specific parts of it. We can’t let the engineers be in control of our society because one
thing will happen. We will turn into the matrix. So that’s why this film is important to
me because it talks about this in a very eloquent way. So many arguments have been
posed, so many cheap arguments have been floated out there, and they’re still floating
around our culture like, like a virus, exactly like a virus. As in ‘Information wants to be
free.’ This film is a much more profound way to talk about where we are.
Q:
How do you see that issue in the movie in terms of the character Llewyn Davis and
his story?
TB:
Well, you know, the thing is he’s very good, but the thing he’s doing—there’s no line
there’s no structure that supports what he’s doing at all. He’s completely out on his own.
And that’s where all musicians are today. Every musician in the world, you know. The
irony of the Internet, which was supposed to democratize everything, is that it’s
consolidated power even more so in the big media companies.
Q:
It’s true.
23
TB:
And the individual artist that it was supposed to empower is essentially just putting a
message in a bottle. There’s no support system for anybody; so an artist—Llewyn in the
film—can go to the record company and look for his royalties, but you know, there are
no royalties because—they made one box of records and it’s in the closet. That’s the
access the internet gives us.
Q:
That is exactly what happens to Llewyn. He’s a serious musician and artist, and he has
integrity but he can’t make it work for him.
TB:
Because there’s just nowhere for him to ply his trade. He can go again to the Gaslight for
the—however many times...
Q:
Yes.
TB:
…but you know, it’s just going to get him the same results. He’ll get some applause, he’ll
get drunk, and then the next morning he’ll wake up on somebody’s couch. As he does.
The thing—and I’ll say this. This is something I’ll say about the film. This sounds like
something a press agent would say, but I’ll say it. I want to say this very soberly. I cannot
think of a precedent in the history of civilization for this performance Oscar Isaac gives
in this film.
Q:
Yes he’s amazing.
TB:
I don’t think any actor has ever learned to play and sing a repertoire this thoroughly and
compellingly, and be able to film it all live without a click track, without the aid of
tuning, without the aid of technology—just a complete analog performance of this
character whose music Oscar had never heard a year before he did the film.
Unbelievable. Oscar absorbed the guitar playing of Dave Van Ronk and the era—a
technique known as Travis Picking—as if he was born to it. He learned all the songs, and
he learned to sing ‘em so naturally.
The thing is when we were on the set—in the movie you always have some kind of
thumb track or click track or something that sets the tempo so you can cut between
takes. But in this case, you know, the Coens decided early on that they just wanted to
shoot and record the music live. No playback.
Q:
I was going to ask you about the decision to film the music live.
TB:
They wanted it that way, and because they wanted the movie to have something of a
documentary feel, something of that period about it. I think they wanted the reality of
it, just the raw reality of it happening right there because you can never get quite that
thing in lip-synching. At any rate, I was talking about Oscar’s performance.
Q:
I understand that the Coens sent you Oscar’s audition tape and you told them you felt
he was as good as any professional musician in this music.
24
TB:
Yeah, I said he’s as good as the musicians I work with—he’s playing and singing as well
as anybody I know. That style. And that’s not an easy style to play. Travis Picking it’s
called, as I mentioned, it’s a finger picking style that was, as far as I know, pioneered by a
Black musician from Kentucky named Arnold Schultz who taught it to Ike Everly who
taught it to Merle Travis, and then it became known as Travis Picking in Nashville
because he popularized it.
Q:
Can I ask you about the music you chose for the film? Joel and Ethan, describing your
working method together, said that they tell you what they’re thinking and then you
make suggestions. So can you talk a little about what you suggested and why
for the film?
TB:
You know what? I can’t remember—by the time we’re finished, I’m serious, I look at it
as such a collaboration that I don’t distinguish between what anybody suggested other
than I will say, honestly, I think they suggest almost everything. And I just facilitate. But,
every once in a while I’ll come up with something like maybe a good idea for another
film or something. (laughs) Like on The Big Lebowski I suggested ‘Man of Constant
Sorrow’ as a, you know, a theme song for our epic hero, The Dude.
Q:
Yeah.
TB:
And they thought it was a great song for our epic hero Ulysses Everett McGill. In O Brother,
Where Art Thou?
Q:
O Brother was their next film. They didn’t use it in The Big Lebowski.
TB:
That’s right…
Q:
They said you suggested ‘500 Miles’, the Tom Paxton song, for Llewyn Davis.
TB:
I think I probably did. I love it—that’s a beautiful, beautiful song. Dylan did a version of
it. But the movie starts out with ‘Hang Me.’ Song about getting hung. And then it goes
into ‘If I Had Wings,’ and then you come into Llewyn’s world and you find the guy he
had done ‘If I Had Wings’ with jumped off a bridge. And then every song is either about
death, abortion, murder, you know. It’s separation. ‘500 miles’ I love because I think it’s
a slave song.
Q:
It is?
TB:
“I can’t go home,” you know, “I can’t go home this way.” It feels like a deep, beautiful
song from the slavery era in this country, and I thought it was interesting the way it’s
been metabolized into the culture through folk music, the way I guess the liberal world
was able to take that song and make it part of the culture in a way that people could hear
it, you know, and not be too guilty. I don’t know, I’m getting into some crazy territory…
25
Q:
It’s very interesting. I love that song, but I never thought of it that way.
TB:
“If you miss the train I’m on, you’ll know that I’m gone. Hundred miles… not a shirt on
my back, not a penny to my name, I can’t go home this way.” Doesn’t that feel
like that dislocation?
Q:
Yes.
TB:
That just feels like a deep story in our culture. An interesting aspect of the folk world is
its connection to the Rights Movements, the Civil Rights Movement.
The progressive element of folk is emerging again at that time with people like Baez, and
then Dylan appears. The Coens deliberately set the story specifically in the pre Dylan
era. They wanted to explore the music scene as they say that existed before Dylan came
and changed everything.
Q:
In talking about the music in Inside Llewyn Davis they said they see a deep connection
to the music in O Brother, they say both films contain the same species of music. You
feel that way as well?
TB:
Yeah, I do. It’s American, American music. Traditional—I call it traditional American
music. I don’t know what else to call it really because it’s, it’s the music of the poor
people. And it’s beautiful. Like all of the great cuisines, all the great food innovations
not all of them but so many of them—were peasant foods; barbecue for instance down
here in the South. They invented barbecue sauce because they would get the meat that
would go bad, and they’d have to cook it for two weeks to get it, to get it, you know…
Q:
Edible.
TB:
It would taste so bad they would put barbecue sauce, they’d put all kinds of crazy sauce
on it. So that’s this connection… to the kind of music this is. It’s the kind of music that
grows out of that same situation.
Q:
Can we talk a little more about the music in the film. That song, ‘Please, Mr. Kennedy.’
Where did that come from?
TB:
Well there was, there was a folk song during the Vietnam era called, ‘Please,
Mr. Kennedy, don’t send me off to Vietnam.” And my guess is it was a riff on a Tom
Lehrer song. Tom Lehrer, the great satirist. I love Tom Lehrer. I think the folk movement
took a cue from him and tried to produce that sort of satire. And that song, “Please, Mr.
Kennedy”—it was supposed to be a fake rock ’n’ roll song that was supposed to deal with
the issue of Vietnam. But we moved it to our period and made it a spoof of
the Space Race.
Q:
So it’s a real song you just rewrote lyrics to?
26
TB:
Yes. We used the old song as a basis for this song, and then wrote new melodies and new
lyrics. Justin [Timberlake] wrote a couple of new melodies, beautiful melodies, and I
think all of us wrote lyrics. Justin, Ethan, Joel, and I all wrote.
Q:
Justin Timberlake really threw himself wholeheartedly into his role. It seemed like you
were all having a great time shooting that scene in which they were recording that song.
TB:
I was just sitting on the side—you know, just off-camera with this stop watch, old
school, timing measures to see if Oscar was speeding up or slowing down. If we had a
take or not that we could use. And Oscar never—he must have worked with a
metronome or I don’t know what. He’s just got it in his soul. But he never varied once,
not one song, on all those takes. He never, never varied. We were able to cut between
every take. I’m excited about ‘cause there’s just no better way to spend your time than
doing this kind of thing that they do with this kind of music.
Q:
You got Marcus Mumford of Mumford & Sons involved in the film, yes?
TB:
I did. ‘Cause his music’s quite interesting. He’s the energy of his band, and the energy of that
band is unbelievable.
Q:
I’ve never seen them live but I’ve got their albums on you know, as you say,
on the Internet.
TB:
Marcus is really a brilliant and insightful lyricist, and I thought he was a good man. He
just seemed like one of the boys. He seemed like he was on the team.
Q:
Let me ask you about Dave Van Ronk. Can you talk a little bit about him? I mean
obviously you knew of him and the Coens knew of him.
TB:
Actually I didn’t know him.
Q:
Really?
TB:
Yeah. The only thing I can tell you about Dave Van Ronk is he wasn’t a loser. He was a
brilliant artist who suffered this fate that many of us suffer. No matter what, you can
suffer this fate… like in The Unforgiven where the young kid has just shot a man and
he’s feeling incredibly guilty, and he’s getting drunk, and he says, “Well he had it
coming,” and Clint Eastwood says, “We all got it coming, kid.” It’s a great line. But yeah,
Dave never got his due, that’s for sure. But you know, he was tremendously influential.
You know Dylan slept on his couch. Like Llewyn, sleeping on couches. And like Llewyn,
he never got his due. But he had it coming.
★
27
T
he Greenwich Village of Llewyn Davis is not the thriving folk scene that produced
Peter, Paul and Mary and changed the world when Bob Dylan went electric. It is the folk
scene in the dark ages before the hit records and big money arrived, when a small coterie
of true believers traded old songs like a secret language. Most of them were kids who had grown
up on the streets of New York or the prefab suburbs of Long Island and New Jersey, trying to
escape the dullness and conformity of the Eisenhower 1950s. Some were college students living
at home with their parents, others shared apartments in what was still the old, immigrant New
York of Little Italy and the Lower East Side, where a two-person hole-in-the-wall could be had
for twenty-five or thirty dollars a month.
Some details of Llewyn seem like nods to familiar figures—his Welsh name recalls Dylan, and
like Phil Ochs he crashes on the couch of a singing couple named Jim and Jean. But the film
catches him in the moment before Dylan and Ochs arrived in New York, when no one could
have imagined the Village scene becoming the center of a folk music boom that would produce
international superstars and change the course of popular music. This moment of transition—
before the arrival of the 60s as we know them—was captured by one of the central figures on
that scene, Dave Van Ronk, in his memoir The Mayor of MacDougal Street, which the Coen
Brothers mined for local color and a few scenes. Llewyn is not Van Ronk, but he sings some of
Van Ronk’s songs and shares his background as a working class kid who split his life between
music and occasional jobs as a merchant seaman.
Llewyn also shares Van Ronk’s love and respect for authentic folk music, songs and styles created
28
by working class people and passed on from one artist to another, polished by the ebb and flow
of oral tradition. For Van Ronk’s generation, that well-worn authenticity provided a profound
contrast to the ephemeral confections of the pop music world, and the choice to play folk music
was almost like joining a religious order—complete with a vow of poverty, since there were
virtually no jobs in New York for anyone who sounded like a traditional folk artist. That would
change in the early 1960s, and already there were glimmerings of the world to come—a few
small clubs where people could play once in a while for tips and little record companies that
might not pay anything but at least were willing to record the real stuff. With all its difficulties,
Van Ronk recalled that time with deep affection—like Llewyn he was living hand-to-mouth and
sleeping on couches, but for a while he was surrounded by people for whom the music mattered
more than anything else.
The Village folk scene of the late 1950s has mostly been ignored or forgotten by later fans and
historians, who tend to jump from Pete Seeger and his hits with the Weavers at the beginning
of the decade to Dylan’s arrival in 1961. By contrast, Van Ronk recalls this as a key period in
which an intimate band of young musicians shaped a new approach to folksinging, studying
old records to capture the grit and rawness of Delta blues and Appalachian ballads, then finding
ways to make that music express their own feelings and desires. Most of these musicians did not
go on to professional careers, or even make a record. (The Kossoy Sisters were among the few
to be recorded, and their 1957 album was forgotten by all but the most ardent folk fans until
the Coen Brothers used its version of “I’ll Fly Away” to score part of their characters’ odyssey
through rural Mississippi in O Brother, Where Art Thou?) The Village scene of the late 1950s was
a world of sincere, enthusiastic amateurs, ignored by the outside world but intensely dedicated
and fired by youthful optimism. Van Ronk remembered, “We had no doubt that we were the
cutting edge of the folk revival—but bear in mind, we were in our late teens and early twenties,
and if you do not feel you are the cutting edge at that age, there is something wrong with you.
Of course we were the wave of the future—we were 21!”
Looking back from the twenty-first century, it can be hard to remember how different things
were in the days before the constant barrage of mass media and instant communication, and the
extent to which even bright young musicians in New York City could live in their own world.
The center of the Village scene in those days was not a nightclub or coffeehouse, but Washington
Square Park, where singers and musicians gathered to jam on Sunday afternoons. Van Ronk
started showing up in the mid-1950s, and recalled that there would be six or seven groups playing
at the same time, each with their own circle of friends and listeners. By the arch at the bottom
of Fifth Avenue, a crowd of kids who had gotten into folk music at progressive summer camps
and Labor Youth League get-togethers would be singing union songs they had picked up at Pete
Seeger concerts or from Sing Out! magazine. Over by the Sullivan Street side of the square the
young Zionist socialists of Hashomer Hatzair would be singing “Hava Nagila” and doing Israeli
folk dances. Around the fountain, a banjo virtuoso named Roger Sprung led the first wave of
urban bluegrass musicians, picking high-octane hoedowns and singing in nasal harmony.
Sprung was one of the few people on that scene who had any connection with the commercial
music business: he had recorded four songs in the early 1950s with a group called the Folksay
Trio, whose two other members shortly renamed themselves the Tarriers and got two top ten
29
hits, “Cindy, Oh Cindy” and “The Banana Boat Song.” A song the Tarriers recorded with
Sprung, “Tom Dooley,” was copied by a younger group called the Kingston Trio and topped the
pop chart in 1958.
The Tarriers and Kingston Trio were part of a pop-folk trend that now tends to be remembered
as hokey, lightweight silliness, and the Washington Square crowd helped shape our modern
opinion. For most of the young musicians in the Village, it represented the bland conformity
and commercial culture they hated and were trying to escape. As Van Ronk recalled, with
typical vituperation, “We knew about the Kingston Trio and Harry Belafonte and their hordes
of squeaky-clean imitators, but we felt like that was a different world that had nothing to do
with us. Most of those people couldn’t play worth a damn and were indifferent singers, and as
far as material was concerned they were scraping the top of the barrel, singing songs that we had
all learned and dropped already. It was Sing Along with Mitch and the Fireside Book of Folk Songs,
performed by sophomores in paisley shirts, and it was a one hundred percent rip-off: they were
ripping off the material, they were ripping off the authors, composers, collectors, and sources,
and they were ripping off the public.”
The pop folkies Van Ronk ridiculed might rule in suburbia and Midwestern college campuses,
but they had little impact on what was heard or played in New York clubs, much less by the
hardcore folkniks in Washington Square. No one on that scene remembers Roger Sprung for
his near brush with the Top Forty. They remember him as an older musician who knew more
than the rest of them about real Southern music, and was willing to teach anyone who cared
about that style. He was in the Square every Sunday, accompanied by a fellow named Lionel
Kilberg who played a home-made washtub bass, and they would have a cluster of younger
players around them that over the years included pretty much all the musicians who went on to
lead the urban old-time and bluegrass scenes of the 1960s. Kilberg was particularly important
because he was also the person who went down to city hall each month and got the permit to
play music in the Square. The permit allowed them to be there from one to five o’clock, and the
permit-holder had to be physically present for the singing to be legal, so Kilberg was the one
absolutely necessary participant.
Along with the folkdancers, the political sing-along kids, and the bluegrassers, young soloists
would sit on benches or around the fountain near the arch, playing guitars, banjos, or dulcimers
and singing ballads and blues. If they were any good or had enough friends, they would be
surrounded by small circles of listeners, and when someone learned a new song they would
bring it down to the park and other people would pick it up. Van Ronk would normally be there
singing blues, and the Kossoys, Paul Clayton, or the folklorist Roger Abrahams sang ballads
from the British Isles or the Southern mountains. Sometimes an older, established performer like
Oscar Brand or Theodore Bikel might show up, or someone might bring Woody Guthrie—he
was already incapacitated by Huntington’s Chorea and couldn’t sing, but he would occasionally
strum a few chords—or the Reverend Gary Davis, a Harlem street preacher and guitar virtuoso
who was the main inspiration for a generation of young fingerpickers.
Van Ronk recalled that the ballad singers and blues people tended to hang with each other
because there were not many of either, and they formed a sort of clique within the clique: “We
30
banded together for mutual support, because we didn’t make as much noise as the other groups,
and we hated them all—the Zionists, the summer camp kids, and the bluegrassers—every last,
dead one of them. Of course, we hated a lot of people in those days.”
In hindsight, those ballad and blues singers were shaping a new aesthetic that would produce
people like Dylan, Ochs, Joan Baez, Joni Mitchell, and inspire the folk-rock innovations of the
Lovin’ Spoonful, the Byrds, the Mamas and the Papas, and Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young.
(Meanwhile a related scene was being nurtured in Britain by ballad revivalists like Ewan
MacColl—Llewyn Davis sings MacColl’s “Shoals of Herring” to his aging father—and hardcore
blues record collectors like the young men who became the Rolling Stones.) But in the late 1950s
they did not know they were on the cusp of a new era, and if anyone had told them they were
sowing the seeds of a future pop or rock trend most of them would have been horrified. As Alan
Lomax said, welcoming viewers to a filmed jam session in his fifth-floor walk-up apartment,
“You’re in Greenwich Village now, where people come to get away from America.” They were a
small band of true believers, outside the mainstream not only of American commercial culture,
but of any mainstream, and they were proud of their independence and their secret knowledge.
Van Ronk wryly dubbed his crowd the “neo-ethnics,” and to some extent they were a folk
equivalent of the “early music” movement happening at the same time in the classical world—it
makes perfect sense that when Llewyn Davis visits an older academic couple, the other guests
include a man who plays harpsichord in a group called Musica Anticha. As in the classical
world, there were famous concert artists who played in places like Carnegie and Town Hall, and
then there were the young, fervent disciples searching out rare, old material and trying to play
it “authentically,” the way it would have sounded in its original time and place. Several of the
Washington Square regulars were pursuing degrees in folklore and some made trips down South
in search of old musicians and scratchy 78s. For those who remained in New York, the bible
was a set of six LPs that had been assembled by a beatnik eccentric named Harry Smith and
issued on the Folkways label in 1952 as The Anthology of American Folk Music. Compiled from
recordings made for the “Race” and hillbilly markets in the 1920s, the Anthology introduced
them to artists like Mississippi John Hurt and the banjo player Dock Boggs, and the neo-ethnics
assiduously imitated every quirk and nuance of what they regarded as the real, raw antithesis of
the pap purveyed by the pop folkies.
Van Ronk recalled that a lot of people listened to that set so many times that they knew every
song on all six albums: “We did not like everything on those records, but it was all important
to us because it showed us what was out there and how it really sounded, from the sources
rather than from second- and third-hand interpreters. It changed everything, because the
previous generation had liked folk songs, but sang them like trained concert singers. For us,
what mattered was authenticity, reproducing the traditional ethnic styles all the way down to
getting the accents right. It did not matter whether you were ethnic à la Furry Lewis, or à la
Jimmie Rodgers, or à la Earl Scruggs; that was a matter of personal taste. But that it should all
be authentically ethnic was a matter of principle.”
As in any sect, some people were more orthodox than others. Van Ronk, like Ramblin’ Jack
Elliott before him and Bob Dylan a couple of years later, worked hard to get the rough, raspy
31
vocal styles of the mountains and prairies, but other singers were willing to compromise at least a
little with modern, urban tastes. Most of the women on the scene sang in lovely, clear sopranos,
sometimes adopting a Southern accent but rarely striving to sound like aged farmwives. But
they still studied old records and collections of ancient ballads published by academic archivists,
and mastered archaic instruments like the Appalachian dulcimer.
Of all the early neo-ethnics, Paul Clayton was the most successful at combining scholarship
and performance. (A handsome, bearded man, he also looked a bit like Justin Timberlake’s
Jim Berkey.) Clayton had a degree in folklore and had traveled around the South interviewing
and recording older musicians, discovering artists like the black fingerpicker Etta Baker and
the medicine show bluesman Pink Anderson. He was also the most successful performer in
the clique of true believers: while the others were lucky to record a song or two on various folk
compilations, he made fifteen solo LPs in the six years from 1954 to 1959. But he was not part
of the pop-folk world, people like the Weavers, the Tarriers, and Harry Belafonte who were
adapting traditional songs into pseudo-folk hits like “Goodnight, Irene” and “The Banana Boat
Song.” His albums were mostly on Folkways Records, a small, independent label that made the
bulk of its profits by selling to libraries and universities. As Van Ronk recalled, “Every time Paul
needed a few bucks he would hunt up some obscure folklore collection, then go see Moe Asch at
Folkways and say, ‘You know, Moe, I was just looking through your catalog, and I noticed that
you don’t have a single album of Maine lumberjack ballads . . .’
“Moe would say, ‘Well, I guess that’s a pretty serious omission. Do you know anyone who can
sing enough of those to make a record?’
“And Paul would say, ‘Well, as it happens…’”
Clayton’s album titles give an idea of the result: along with Timber-r-r! Lumberjack Folk Songs
& Ballads, they include Wanted for Murder: Songs of Outlaws and Desperados, Bay State Ballads,
Cumberland Mountain Folksongs, and Whaling and Sailing Songs from the Days of Moby Dick. But
along with the serious folklore, he also reshaped some old songs for his concert performances,
writing new verses and reworking melodies, and even recorded a couple of these creations with
semi-pop arrangements. None of them attracted much attention beyond the local folk scene,
but his influence went a long way: a song he recorded in 1959 called “Who’s Gonna Buy You
Ribbons” was the inspiration for Bob Dylan’s “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right.”
I’m walking down that long, lonesome road,
You’re the one that made me travel on…
So it ain’t no use to sit and sigh now, darlin’,
And it ain’t no use to sit and cry now.
It ain’t no use to sit and wonder why, darlin’,
Just wonder who’s gonna buy you ribbons when I’m gone.
If few people remember Clayton today, that is a reminder of how completely the scene changed
in the few years between the late 1950s and the early 1960s. The neo-ethnics never expected
to become stars—if they had nurtured any dreams of commercial success they would not have
32
devoted themselves to folk music. In retrospect it is easy to see the Village scene of the late 1950s
as a training ground for the big time, and it certainly was a hotbed of youthful enthusiasm and
musical dedication, remembered by many of its denizens as their equivalent of Paris in the
1920s. But a look at the Village Voice’s club and coffeehouse listings puts those memories in
perspective. There were some folksingers there, but they are rarely the top-billed names, and
they were competing with a lot of other music. In October of 1961, when Dylan got his big
break at Folk City—the only New York folk club of that period that had a liquor license, and
the model for the bar in Llewyn Davis—it was as opening act for a local bluegrass band, the
Greenbriar Boys. There were only two other clubs in town advertising any folksingers by name,
and both featured older cabaret-style performers rather than members of the young Village
crowd. Meanwhile, the main rooms were sticking to jazz: Thelonious Monk, Ornette Coleman,
Zoot Sims, Horace Silver, Herbie Mann—and as a reminder of how fast the times would soon
be changing, Silver and Mann were on a double bill with Aretha Franklin as the opening act.
(That was not particularly unusual: two months earlier, Aretha was in the same club opening for
the John Coltrane Quintet.)
As for the coffeehouse where Dylan made his New York debut, the Café Wha?, its advertisement
named no individual performers, but just showed a picture of a beatnik in beret, beard, and
sunglasses and listed the entertainment as “folk singing, comedy, calypso, poetry, and congas”
in “Greenwich Village’s Swingingest Coffee House.” The Wha? was an out-and-out tourist trap,
run by a smart hustler named Manny Roth whose show biz savvy would be passed on to his
nephew David Lee Roth of Van Halen. Its regular performers included Richie Havens, Fred
Neil and Karen Dalton, now recalled as folk legends, but it made the overhead by pulling in
audiences of out-of-town tourists who had come to gawk at the beatniks and weirdos.
The Village’s first full-time folk club, the Café Bizarre, had set the pattern back in 1957. Van
Ronk played there on opening night and remembered, “it was selling the squares a Greenwich
Village that had never existed. The ambiance was cut-rate Charles Addams haunted house: dark
and candle-lit, with fake cobwebs hanging all over everything. The waitresses were got up to
look like Morticia, with fishnet stockings, long straight hair, and so much mascara that they
looked like raccoons.” It was a Hollywood notion of beatnik life, as shown in movies like Bell,
Book, and Candle where witches and warlocks mixed with beat poets and no one could tell the
difference, or in TV shows like Dobie Gillis and Peter Gunn. For a while the Voice even ran a
weekly ad for a “Rent-a-Beatnik” service that would send a bearded, bereted hipster to liven up
the dullest party.
In the context of the 1950s it did not take much to be typed as a beatnik weirdo. Llewyn Davis’s
beard would have been enough to make most right-thinking Americans giggle and point at
him—compared to the crew cuts and button-down shirts of normal young people, it was the
temporal equivalent of facial tattoos and multiple piercings. For an older generation that had
lived through the Depression and two world wars and now was relaxing in the safety of the
steadiest economic boom the American middle class has ever known, the only explanations for
choosing a life of sleeping on floors and devoting one’s days to obscure poetry and archaic music
were insanity or perversion. Meanwhile, to the young Villagers, the older tourists represented
the conformist mindlessness that had produced the McCarthy witch-hunts and the Cold War
33
and was threatening the world with atomic Armageddon. The two groups were divided by a wall
of mutual fear and mistrust, and to add insult to injury when the conventional older Americans
showed up in the Village they acted like the whole place was a kind of absurd amusement park,
and treated anyone who was trying to be a serious artist as part of the crazy show.
The Bizarre and the Wha? were particularly obvious about catering to the tourist trend, but
even the less gaudy clubs were tough rooms to work. While the bars had to close at one a.m.,
the coffeehouses stayed open as long as they had customers, so performers often played five
or six sets a night, seven nights a week. The crowds were rowdy, the money often just came
from a tip basket, and the pace was grueling, but as a result the Village was a unique training
ground. Van Ronk grumbled about the audiences and the exploitation, but also argued that
those clubs taught his generation lessons they could not have learned anywhere else, balancing
their devotion to unpopular ethnic styles and explaining how people like Dylan and Ochs
became the best singer-songwriters in the country within a year or two of arriving. “We had
so much opportunity to try out our stuff in public, get clobbered, figure out what was wrong,
and go back and try it again. It was brutally hard work, because these crowds of tourists usually
started out at the bars and by the time they got around to us they were completely loaded. So we
would be playing for audiences of fifty or a hundred drunken suburbanites who really could not
have cared less about the music—they were there to see the freaks and raise some hell. In that
kind of situation, you either learn how to handle yourself onstage or you go into some other line
of work, and the people who stuck it out became thoroughly seasoned pros.”
The musicians who gathered in Washington Square were inspired by a shared devotion to
authentic, honest music with deep history in a mythic rural America, but the club scene was
driven by harsh economic realities. The New York cabaret laws were among the strictest in the
country, and the only reason a lot of clubs booked folksingers was that it was a way around the
regulations: an “incidental music” clause designed for restaurant background music made an
exception for groups that had less than four people and did not include wind, brass or percussion
instruments. That meant a club could feature poets or folksingers without meeting the arcane
licensing strictures and high fees required for jazz groups, and that was particularly attractive
when they began serving an audience of tourists who didn’t care about the music anyway.
In some ways this situation worked to the folksingers’ benefit, but along with making the clubs
less than perfect concert rooms it also provided fuel for old prejudices. The tourists tended to
lump folksingers and beatniks together, but when Van Ronk talked about the people his crowd
hated, the beatniks were only a few steps behind the suburban squares and once again the dislike
was mutual: “The beats liked cool jazz, bebop, and hard drugs, and hated folk music, which to
them was all these fresh-faced kids sitting around on the floor and singing songs of the oppressed
masses. When a folksinger would take the stage between two beat poets, all the finger-poppin’
mamas and daddies would do everything but hold their noses. Then, when the beat poets would
get up and begin to rant, all the folk fans would do likewise.”
Van Ronk was not talking about the older beats—to someone who dreamed of being a rambling
hobo with a guitar slung over his shoulder, Jack Kerouac’s On the Road went right along with
Woody Guthrie’s songs—but by 1960 that generation was no longer reciting in the coffeehouses
34
and the young beatniks tended to be local, middle-class kids like the folkies, who dressed like
parodies of urban Bohemians and listened to ridiculous poems. As for the beats’ opinion of the
folk crowd, it was a mix of the contempt avant-garde outsiders have for fresh-faced do-gooders
and the contempt jazz aficionados had for those who sang droning ballads and only knew three
chords. The character played by John Goodman in Llewyn Davis is loosely inspired by the songwriter Doc Pomus, a Jewish New Yorker who earned his stripes in the 1940s singing blues in
black nightclubs, and his reaction to Llewyn is typical of most jazz fans and serious hipsters on
that scene: “What’d you say you played? Folksongs? I thought you said you were a musician.”
The famous slogan of the 1960s, “Don’t trust anybody over thirty,” reflected a generational split
that in some ways was even more important than the musical divides. For Van Ronk or Llewyn
Davis, people like Pomus and Thelonious Monk might be respected as artists and Bohemian
predecessors but nonetheless were part of a different world—even though that world was barely
a block away. To complicate matters, that older world included most of the people who might
record or hire them. Moe Asch of Folkways Records, the model for the movie’s Mel, was 55 years
old in 1960 and had recorded Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, and Lead Belly, as well as jazz artists
like Sidney Bechet and Art Tatum. He genuinely loved traditional folk music and was a political
comrade of the “old left” and an early supporter of the new protest song movement, but he was
also a hard-nosed, old-fashioned businessman. His records formed the foundation of the neoethnic aesthetic, but most of them only reached a small base of cognoscenti, and he subsidized
his less profitable projects by being famously stingy with the artists who sold better—as well as
being painfully honest with borderline cases like the fictional Llewyn who didn’t sell as well as
they hoped.
Albert Grossman, model for the movie’s Bud Grossman, was only 34 in 1960, but likewise was
regarded by Van Ronk’s generation as a member of the old guard. He had opened Chicago’s Gate
of Horn in 1956 as a kind of folk nightclub—it had a liquor license and hired artists the neoethnics regarded as “cabaret folksingers,” people like Josh White, Bob Gibson, Odetta, and the
Clancy Brothers, who sang folk material but presented themselves as experienced entertainers.
In the 1960s Grossman would move to New York and become an icon of big-money folk
promotion, first creating Peter, Paul and Mary, then managing Dylan’s transformation from
a waifish, guitar-strumming poet into a rock star. But even in the late 1950s, when he was
just a nightclub owner, Van Ronk’s crowd tended to dismiss the cabaret style he promoted as
slick and fake. The young neo-ethnics tried not to do anything that seemed like professional
entertainment. They sang in rough, countrified accents, went onstage in street clothes, and
presented their songs with stolid seriousness: In Van Ronk’s words, “If you weren’t staring into
the sound-hole of your instrument, we thought you should at least have the decency and selfrespect to stare at your shoes.” There was a dedicated virtue and honor in this approach—it was
similar to what Miles Davis was doing at the same time in jazz, turning his back to the audience
so that his listeners were forced to concentrate on the music rather than the visuals—but it
made no sense to club owners like Grossman, who balanced their affection for the music with a
keen sense of the bottom line. As a result, Grossman never hired the young New Yorkers at the
Gate—and Llewyn suffers a variation of Van Ronk’s humiliating audition there.
In 1960 nobody who knew the music business and wanted to make a living had any interest in
35
people who sounded like Van Ronk or Dylan. The top folk stars were people with nice voices
who dressed like successful pop or classical musicians: Belafonte and Josh White in tailored silk
shirts; the Kingston Trio in matching collegiate casual wear; and older artists like the Weavers,
the Rooftop Singers, and the Limelighters in suits and ties or evening gowns. Dylan described
the dominant attitude in one of his first songs, “Talking New York,” quoting a club owner
telling him, “You sound like a hillbilly. We want folk singers here.”
Folk City’s owner, Mike Porco, the real-life counterpart of the movie’s charmingly cynical
Pappie Corsicato, was an exception, but that was because he knew nothing about the music
business. He was just a local Italian guy who ran a bar called Gerde’s on a block of factory loft
buildings. His main customers were people working in the area, so he did not have a lot of
nighttime business and was interested when Izzy Young, who ran a little book and record store
called the Folklore Center on MacDougal Street, proposed hosting concerts there. Young was a
hardcore traditionalist who had gotten into the scene by doing folk dancing and boasted that his
store had the most complete selection of obscure books on world folklore in the United States.
The Folklore Center was also a kind of clubhouse for the neo-ethnic crowd—Dylan wrote in
Chronicles that he wandered in on his first visit to the Village and met Van Ronk there—and
when Young started his evening club in Porco’s bar, he meant it to be a showcase for older,
“authentic” performers like Reverend Gary Davis and young locals like Van Ronk and Clayton.
That was in January of 1960, and Young ran the club as a non-profit for five months before
Porco realized that it was attracting a regular crowd and could be turned into a business. He
took over the booking, renamed the place Gerde’s Folk City, and for a while it was the one bar
that regularly featured folksingers. That made it a step up financially from the coffeehouses,
many of which just paid performers a portion of what people put in the tip basket. But like the
bar in Llewyn Davis, it was not necessarily a quiet, serious music club. Van Ronk recalled many
cheerfully raucous evenings hanging out with Porco and his friends, talking over the poor guys
and gals who were trying to sing onstage: “As in most music bars, the people seated in front
knew that they were watching a show but the people at the bar would act like they were in
another room. When that place was crowded, it was one of the toughest rooms I have ever seen.”
If one wanted to precisely date Inside Llewyn Davis, the obvious bookends are the opening of
Folk City in January, 1960, and Dylan’s arrival in New York almost exactly a year later. That
was a kind of in-between moment, when the scene was obviously changing but no one had any
clear idea where it was headed. By the time Folk City was solidly established, the Cafe Bizarre
had been open for three years and had been joined by the Café Wha?, the Commons, and the
Gaslight Café, all within a block of each other on or near MacDougal Street and featuring folk
music alongside a declining wave of beat poets. More clubs would open over the next few years,
till at one point there were almost three dozen within a few blocks, but even in 1960 there was
enough work that young musicians were drifting in from all over the country. By the time Dylan
arrived from Minnesota, the core of local folk disciples had already been augmented by Carolyn
Hester from Texas, Len Chandler from Ohio, and Tom Paxton, model for the movie’s Troy
Nelson, from Oklahoma. Like the Coens’ character, Paxton started playing in the Village on
weekends while doing his military service at Fort Dix, and he was a new kind of folksinger. His
interest was less in learning old songs than in carrying on the tradition by writing new ones—in
36
the movie, Nelson sings Paxton’s “The Last Thing on My Mind”—and he was a key figure in the
evolution from neo-ethnics to singer-songwriters.
That evolution has gotten most of the historical attention, thanks to Dylan, Paul Simon,
Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen, and the other poetic wordsmiths who gravitated to the Village
in the next few years, mixing the musical aesthetic of the folk crowd with the literary aesthetic
of the beats. It was not an instant shift: when Izzy Young sponsored Dylan’s first concert at
Carnegie Recital Hall in November, 1961, Dylan had gotten a rave review in the New York
Times and a contract with Columbia Records, but still attracted barely fifty listeners. His nasal
voice and whining harmonica were too raw and abrasive for mainstream music fans, and even
after Peter, Paul and Mary made “Blowin’ in the Wind” a national hit two years later, nobody
could imagine him becoming a pop star in his own right. When his own performing career
finally took off, he sounded as baffled as a lot of his old friends on MacDougal Street: “I once
thought the biggest I could ever hope to get was like Van Ronk, but it’s bigger than that now,
ain’t it. Yeah man, it’s bigger than that. Scary as all shit.”
A lot of viewers will probably think of Inside Llewyn Davis as an early glimpse of Dylan’s kingdom.
But it is more accurate to recognize it as a portrait of a smaller and quite different world that
was already ending by the time Dylan showed up. Most of the singers and players who were
on the Village scene in 1959 or 1960 did not evolve into the folk stars of the next decade.
With the exception of Van Ronk and the New Lost City Ramblers, they were swept away by
the wave of out-of-town talent or lost interest when the scene shifted from a righteous cult of
folk devotees to a commercial circus. The feeling of camaraderie, of being a small band of true
believers sleeping on each other’s couches and swapping songs till dawn, was replaced by dreams
of stardom. A lot of terrific music was made in the Village after 1960—arguably much better
music than had been made before—but it was now the center of a national and international
trend. Within a few years the intimate Greenwich Village where all the singers knew each
other, sang and played with each other, sometimes slept with each other and broke each other’s
hearts, already felt in some ways as ancient and far away as the sharecroppers’ shacks of the
Mississippi Delta and the hamlets of Appalachia had seemed to Van Ronk and his young peers in
Washington Square.
Elijah Wald is a musician and writer who spent much of his teens sleeping on Dave Van Ronk’s couch near
the corner of Fourth Street and Seventh Avenue, and co-authored The Mayor of MacDougal Street.
★
37
LINER NOTES FROM THE SOUNDTRACK ALBUM
W
hat was the fifties/sixties-era folk-music revival? There’ve been great accounts of
it, including by Dave Van Ronk, the merchant marine turned jazzman turned
country-blues interpreter whose life and music (though not personality) loosely
inspire this film. What was it, though, in the sense of, why did it happen? Was it some kind
of pop-cultural pivot, between the Beats and the Hippies? Or a more appealing version of the
politically engaged agit-folk of the forties? Or could it have been something deeper? Was part of
the country—faced with the specters of atomic war and political violence—doing what societies
do at times of existential crisis, reaching down into the tribal soil, what passes for it, and singing
against the dark? Possibly all of those things played a role. And as another great Coens character,
H. I. McDunnough, might put it, “Then over here you have marketing.”
You don’t sing folk music—it sings you. A beauty of this movie is how you can watch that
happening, watch the buried rivers of these songs, with their simple, bottomless themes, surface
in characters’ lives. This happens most powerfully in the scene where Llewyn performs for a
Chicago club-owner. An informal audition. He could do something crowd-pleasing—he should,
really—but instead he decides to play something weird and old, “The Death of Queen Jane,” a
song about a pregnant woman whose life is in danger, and about her baby, if it will live or die.
By that point in the film we know these subjects aren’t abstract for Llewyn. The forces that take
the queen’s life and spare her child move through him and the lives of people he loves (poorly).
But he’s trapped in his fate. He can sing about it but can’t sing his way out of it. The movie takes
the form of a folk song: there’s a first verse, then a series of verses—in each of which something
awful happens—and finally the first verse comes around again, seeming changed.
38
The casting of Oscar Isaac in the role of Llewyn allowed this to be a different sort of music
movie. The Coens wanted live performances, very good ones, so that at certain moments, when
the music would be happening, you’d suddenly be watching a little concert film. It’s easy to find
actors who can play and sing, and it’s easy to find musicians who believe they can act, but to
find someone who can do both at the level needed, and at the same time, is rare. Oscar Isaac had
played some classical guitar in his youth, which helped with the fingerpicking. More than that,
he turned out to have unnaturally good rhythm. The problem with putting live performances
in a narrative movie, the reason nobody does it, is you can’t splice the film together later; if the
tempo is even a hair off, between takes, the flow is ruined. So you have the actors lip-sync to a
prerecorded track. But that invariably looks cheesy. In order to get around the problem, T Bone
Burnett (who produced this record) sat off camera with a stopwatch, timing Isaac’s individual
measures. If the actor were to vary by a split second, they’d have to go back and re-shoot. But there
was no variance. “I know it sounds like hyperbole,” Burnett said, “but the whole time I sat there,
he never varied.” It isn’t just Isaac, either. This movie brims with hybrid actor/musician talent.
Listen closely to “The Auld Triangle”—that’s famous-for-his-falsetto Justin Timberlake doing
the bass part.
The finest moment here is probably “Fare Thee Well (Dink’s Song),” as done by Isaac and
Marcus Mumford of Mumford & Sons. Scores of people have recorded this song, but you’ll
rarely hear it sound as solid and pretty. It’s a tune heard, if the story is true, by the folk-song
collector John Lomax (father of the better-known Alan) in Texas in 1908, sung by a woman
living near a levee camp. They called her Dink. Nothing else is known about her. “Muddy river
runs muddy and wild,” she sang, “but can’t give a bloody for my unborn child.” Her words come
out of Llewyn Davis’s mouth meaning something different, but still meaning. That’s his hope.
John Jeremiah Sullivan is the author of Pulphead.
★
39
O
SCAR ISAAC (Llewyn Davis) most recently appeared in The Bourne Legacy, the fourth
installment of the Bourne franchise, directed by Tony Gilroy. Isaac also recently starred
in W.E., directed by Madonna, Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive (opposite Carey Mulligan,
his Inside Llewyn Davis co-star), and as King John in Ridley Scott’s Robin Hood.”
Upcoming films include Two Faces of January from director Hossein Amini and Therese based
on the Émile Zola novel Thérèse Raquin. Other films include the Anchor Bay ensemble feature
Ten Years for which Oscar wrote an original song that he performs in the film; Zak Snyder’s
Sucker Punch; Agora, directed by Alejandro Amenabar; Balibo for which Oscar received an AFI
Award for Best Supporting Actor; Ridley Scott’s Body of Lies; Daniel Barnz’s Won’t Back Down;
Steven Soderbergh’s Che; Vadim Perelman’s The Life Before Her Eyes; HBO’s PU-239; and as
Joseph in The Nativity Story.
Off-Broadway, Isaac appeared in Zoe Kazan’s play We Live Here at Manhattan Theatre Club,
as Romeo in Romeo and Juliet; and in Two Gentlemen of Verona, the latter productions for the
Public Theater’s Shakespeare in the Park. Oscar also appeared in Beauty of the Father at Manhattan
Theatre Club and in MCC Theater’s Grace.
Other theatre credits include: Arrivals and Departures; When It’s Cocktail Time in Cuba
and Spinning into Butter. While a student at Juilliard, Isaac played the title role in Macbeth;
he also co-wrote and performed in the show American Occupation, and was seen in
The Marriage of Figaro; The Birds; Three Sisters and many other productions.
40
In 2009, CAREY MULLIGAN (Jean Berkey) was widely acclaimed for her performance
in Lone Scherfig’s An Education, winning a Best Actress BAFTA Award as well as receiving
Academy Award and Golden Globe nominations. Mulligan was also named Best Actress of the
Year by the National Board of Review, the Chicago Film Critics Association, the London Film
Critics Circle and the Toronto Film Critics Association, just a few of the many accolades she
received for the film.
Mulligan’s other recent film appearances include Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive (opposite Oscar
Isaac, her Inside Llewyn Davis co-star); Steve McQueen’s Shame; Mark Romanek’s Never Let Me
Go and Oliver Stone’s Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps.
Upcoming fi lms include Thomas Vinterberg’s Far from the Madding Crowd. Other fi lm
appearances include Michael Mann’s Public Enemies and Jim Sheridan’s Brothers. She made her
film and professional acting debut in 2005 in Joe Wright’s adaptation of Pride and Prejudice.
Carey Mulligan was born in London, and raised in England and Germany. Her early career
included appearances on British television in “Dr. Who” and in TV adaptations of Charles
Dickens’ Bleak House, Agatha Christie’s The Sittaford Mystery; and Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey
for the BBC, among several other TV productions.
On stage, Mulligan appeared at London’s Almeida Theater in The Hypochondriac and was praised
for her performance in Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull at London’s Royal Court Theater, a role she
reprised on Broadway. In 2011, Mulligan appeared in the Atlantic Theater Company’s production
of an adaptation of the Ingmar Bergman film Through a Glass Darkly.
She stars as Daisy Buchanan in Baz Luhrmann’s film adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s
The Great Gatsby.
JUSTIN TIMBERLAKE (Jim Berkey) was nominated by the Screen Actors Guild in the
category Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture for his work in David Fincher’s
The Social Network, in which he portrayed Sean Parker, the founder of Napster.
His recent film credits include Clint Eastwood’s Trouble with the Curve; Will Gluck’s Friends
with Benefits; Jake Kasdan’s comedy Bad Teacher; and In Time, directed by Andrew Niccol.
Other film credits include the crime drama Alpha Dog and Black Snake Moan, writer-director
Craig Brewer’s follow up to his Sundance hit Hustle & Flow.
Timberlake’s multi-platinum album ‘FutureSex/LoveSounds’ garnered multiple Grammy Awards
and produced four consecutive #1 singles, as well as a critically acclaimed 2007 tour. Timberlake’s
latest album released in March 2013; ‘The 20/20 Experience’ topped the charts at #1, selling
nearly a million albums the first week of release. Along with his continued success as a recording
artist, he continues to receive acclaim as an actor for a variety of work in both comedy and drama.
A four-time Emmy Award winner, he has hosted five memorable episodes of “Saturday Night
41
Live” and several of his sketches have become viral video sensations, including “D**k in a Box,”
which not only has been viewed over 100 million times on YouTube but earned Timberlake his
first Emmy Award. He won a second Emmy Award in 2009 for Outstanding Guest Actor in a
Comedy Series for hosting “SNL.”
JOHN GOODMAN (Roland Turner), an acclaimed veteran of stage, film and television, has
garnered many accolades during his career, including a Golden Globe Award for Best Actor and
seven Emmy nominations for his role in “Roseanne.” He earned a Golden Globe nomination
in 1992 for his chilling performance in the Coen Brothers’ Barton Fink; after delivering a
breakthrough motion picture performance in the Coen Brothers’ earlier Raising Arizona. He
has since teamed with them in The Big Lebowski and O Brother, Where Art Thou? He also earned
Emmy nominations for his starring roles in TNT’s Kingfish: A Story of Huey P. Long and CBS’s
production of Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire.
In 2007, Goodman won an Emmy for Outstanding Guest Actor, on “Studio 60 on the Sunset
Strip.” His performance in the recent HBO biopic You Don’t Know Jack earned him an Emmy
nomination for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Miniseries or a Movie and a SAG nomination
for Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a Television Movie or Miniseries.
Goodman starred in the fourth season of DIRECTV’s “Damages,” playing the CEO of a
mysterious military contractor who is put on trial in a wrongful-death suit. In addition, Goodman
joined NBC’s “Community” in its third season as the new vice dean of Greendale’s well-known
air-conditioning program. Other recent TV credits include the HBO drama “Treme.”
Goodman won the 2013 National Board of Review Spotlight Award for his work in Argo, Flight
and Trouble with the Curve. Goodman’s recent film projects include Ben Affleck’s drama Argo,
which won the 2013 Academy Award for Best Picture, the Robert Zemeckis’ thriller Flight and
Clint Eastwood’s sports drama Trouble With the Curve. Previous film credits include The Artist,
Extremely Loud Incredibly Close, Red State, In the Electric Mist, Confessions of a Shopaholic, Speed
Racer, Bee Movie, Pope Joan, Alabama Moon, Gigantic, Marilyn Hotchkiss’ Ballroom Dancing and
Charm School, Beyond the Sea, Masked and Anonymous, Storytelling, Coyote Ugly, What Planet Are
You From?, One Night at McCool’s, Bringing Out the Dead, Fallen, The Borrowers, Blues Brothers
2000, The Runner, The Flintstones, Mother Night, Arachnophobia, Always, Pie in the Sky, Born
Yesterday, Matinee, The Babe, King Ralph, Punchline, Everybody’s All-American, Sea of Love, Stella,
Eddie Macon’s Run, C.H.U.D., Revenge of the Nerds, Maria’s Lovers, Sweet Dreams, True Stories,
The Big Easy, Burglar, and The Wrong Guys.
Goodman has lent his voice to numerous animated films, including Monsters, Inc., The Emperor’s
New Groove and The Jungle Book II. He also voiced a main character in NBC’s animated series
“Father of the Pride” and provided the voice of Ed “Big Daddy” Roth in the documentary Tales
of the Rat Fink.
Goodman starred on Broadway in Waiting for Godot, for which he received rave reviews as Pozzo.
His regional theatre credits include Henry IV, Parts I and II, Antony and Cleopatra, As You Like It
42
and A Christmas Carol. He starred in two Broadway shows, Loose Ends in 1979 and Big River in
1985. In 2001, he starred in the New York Shakespeare Festival staging of The Seagull directed
by Mike Nichols. The following year Goodman appeared in the National Actors Theater’s
production of Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui.
Goodman went to Southwest Missouri State intending to play football, but an injury forced
him to switch his major to drama. He never returned to football and graduated with a degree in
Theatre. Goodman and his family have homes in Los Angeles and New Orleans.
GARRETT HEDLUND (Johnny Five) made his motion picture debut as part of the all-star
cast in Wolfgang Petersen’s Troy, the big-budget movie based on The Iliad, Homer’s epic account
of the Trojan War and the bloody battle between the Achaeans (Greece) and Trojans.
Hedlund was recently seen in a starring role in Walter Salles’s On the Road, based on the novel by
Jack Kerouac, TRON: Legacy for Walt Disney Studios, and Country Strong. He recently completed
a starring role in Andrew Levitas’ Lullaby and is in pre-production on Matthew Carnahan’s Violet
Talent and William Monahan’s Mohave where he will co-star with Oscar Isaac.
Hedlund was also seen in Twentieth Century Fox’s Death Sentence; Georgia Rule for director
Garry Marshall, and the film Eragon. Hedlund also starred in Four Brothers, for John Singleton,
and in Friday Night Lights, directed by Peter Berg.
F. MURRAY ABRAHAM (Bud Grossman) won the 1983 Academy Award for Best Actor for
his performance in Amadeus.
Abraham was born in Pittsburgh, attended the University of Texas at Austin and studied acting
with Uta Hagen. His early film credits include The Big Fix and Scarface. Abraham also appeared
in Last Action Hero, Mighty Aphrodite, Children of the Revolution, Mimic, Star Trek: Insurrection,
Muppets from Space, Finding Forrester, Joshua and The Bridge of San Luis Rey, among many other
films.
Along with his work in movies, Abraham has worked in the classical theatre and on television.
His stage credits are extensive. Off-Broadway he appeared in David Mamet’s Sexual Perversity in
Chicago and The Duck Variations, Uncle Vanya, Waiting for Godot; Harold Pinter’s The Caretaker;
The Merchant of Venice; the Public Theater’s Shakespeare in the Park production of Twelfth Night;
and the Public Theater’s Landscape of the Body, The Master and Margarita and The Seagull, among
many other productions.
Most recently he appeared Off-Broadway in Ethan Coen’s short plays, Almost an Evening and
Offices, presented at the Atlantic Theater; as well as Bertolt Brecht’s Galileo at the Classic Stage
Company.
On Broadway Abraham has appeared in The Ritz, Angels in America, A Month in the Country,
43
Triumph of Love and more recently Mauritius, among several other productions.
Television credits include “Saving Grace,” “Law & Order: Criminal Intent,” “The Good Wife” and
“Homeland.”
STARK SANDS (Troy Nelson) is a two-time Tony Award Nominee. He is currently starring
on Broadway in Kinky Boots, for which he received a 2013 Tony Nomination for Best Actor in a
Leading Role in a Musical.
Most recently, Sands appeared as Tunny in the Broadway production of Green Day’s musical
American Idiot. In 2007, Sands received a Tony nomination for Best Featured Actor for his
performance in R. C. Sherriff ’s anti-war drama, Journey’s End. Additional theatre credits include
the title role in Bonnie and Clyde at the La Jolla Playhouse, the Classic Stage Company’s production
of The Tempest, and the Public Theater’s production of Twelfth Night.
Sands made his feature film debut in Die, Mommie, Die! and also appeared in Flags of Our
Fathers, Shall We Dance, Pretty Persuasion, and Catch That Kid.
Included among Sands’ many television credits are HBO’s “Generation Kill” and “Six Feet
Under.” He also starred in the CBS series “The 2-2.”
Sands grew up in Dallas, Texas, and received a BFA in acting from the University of Southern
California.
ADAM DRIVER (Al Cody) is well known to television viewers for his role in the hit HBO series
“Girls,” in which he plays the anti-hero love interest of Lena Dunham, the show’s star-creator.
Driver also appears in Noah Baumbach’s film Frances Ha, starring Greta Gerwig.
His other film credits include Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln; Clint Eastwood’s J. Edgar; Lance
Edmands’ Bluebird; and several short films. On television, Driver has appeared in “Law and
Order SVU,” HBO’s “You Don’t Know Jack,” and the HBO pilot “The Wonderful Maladays.”
Driver appeared on Broadway co-starring in Terrence Rattigan’s Man and Boy with Frank
Langella, and in George Bernard Shaw’s Mrs. Warren’s Profession, both at the Roundabout. OffBroadway at the Roundabout’s Laura Pels Theatre, he starred in John Osborne’s Look Back In
Anger, receiving a Lucille Lortel Award as Outstanding Feature Actor.
Driver studied drama at Juilliard. He recently completed filming John Curran’s Tracks opposite
Mia Wasikowska, and Shawn Levy’s This Is Where I Leave You with Jason Bateman, Tiny Fey and
Jane Fonda. Driver is co-founder of the non-profit ARTS in the ARMED FORCES Inc.
★
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JOEL COEN (Director/Writer/Producer) was honored at the Cannes Film Festival in 2001 as
Best Director for The Man Who Wasn’t There, and in 1991 as Best Director for Barton Fink. He
was named Best Director by the New York Film Critics Circle, the National Board of Review,
and the BAFTA Awards for 1996’s Fargo; and also won the Academy Award for the Best Original
Screenplay for Fargo, which he co-wrote with his brother Ethan. The screenplay for O Brother,
Where Art Thou?, also co-written with Ethan, was nominated for a BAFTA Award and the
Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. Other films that he has directed and co-written
are Intolerable Cruelty, The Big Lebowksi, The Hudsucker Proxy, Miller’s Crossing, Raising Arizona,
and Blood Simple. Joel co-directed and co-wrote the 2004 comedy The Ladykillers with Ethan.
Joel & Ethan Coen’s 2007 adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men brought
them the Directors Guild of America, BAFTA, and Academy Awards; the Golden Globe Award
for Best Screenplay; Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Screenplay from the New York Film
Critics Circle; and Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay from the Oscars and the National
Board of Review. The film’s cast was voted the Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding
Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture, and Javier Bardem won the Screen Actors Guild
Award and Academy Award as Best Supporting Actor, among other accolades.
Joel & Ethan Coen’s film Burn After Reading was nominated for the BAFTA Award and the
WGA Award for Best Original Screenplay, and their film A Serious Man received Academy Award
nominations for Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay, and was also nominated for the
BAFTA Award and the WGA Award for Best Original Screenplay.
45
Joel & Ethan Coen’s most recent film, True Grit, received ten Academy Award nominations
including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Actor (Jeff Bridges) and Best
Supporting Actress (Hallie Steinfeld).
ETHAN COEN (Director/Writer/Producer) has produced and co-written such critically
acclaimed films as Miller’s Crossing; Barton Fink, which won the Palme d’Or (Best Picture), Best
Director and Best Actor (John Turturro) Awards at the 1991 Cannes International Film Festival;
and O Brother, Where Art Thou?, which was nominated for two Academy Awards, five BAFTA
Awards, and two Golden Globe Awards (winning one).
One of 1996’s most honored films, Fargo, which Ethan produced and co-wrote, received seven
Academy Award nominations and won two—including Best Original Screenplay. Among
the other films that Ethan has co-written and produced are Blood Simple, Raising Arizona,
The Hudsucker Proxy, The Big Lebowski, The Man Who Wasn’t There, and Intolerable Cruelty. He
co-directed and co-wrote the 2004 comedy The Ladykillers with Joel.
In 2007, the Coen Brothers were honored with numerous accolades for their adaptation
of Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men, including the Directors Guild of America,
BAFTA, and Academy Awards for Best Picture, Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay. The
film also won the Golden Globe Award for Best Screenplay; Best Picture, Best Director, and Best
Screenplay from the New York Film Critics Circle; and Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay
from the Oscars and the National Board of Review. The film’s cast was voted Best Outstanding
Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture by the Screen Actors Guild, and Javier Bardem won
the Screen Actors Guild Award and Academy Award as Best Supporting Actor, among other
accolades.
The Coens’ 2008 comedy Burn After Reading was nominated for the BAFTA Award and the WGA
Award for Best Original Screenplay. The brothers’ next film, A Serious Man, received Academy
Award nominations for Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay, and was also nominated for
the BAFTA Award and the WGA Award for Best Original Screenplay.
The Coens’ True Grit, released in 2010, was nominated for Oscars in ten categories, including Best
Picture, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Actor (Jeff Bridges) and Best Supporting
Actress (Hallie Steinfeld).
“Almost an Evening,” comprising three of Ethan’s short plays, was staged in 2008 off-Broadway
by Neil Pepe at the Atlantic Theater Company’s Stage 2 and then at the Bleecker Street Theater.
In 2009, the same director and company staged his three new short plays under the title “Offices.”
In 2011, Ethan’s one-act play “Talking Cure,” along with one-act plays by Elaine May and Woody
Allen, under the collective title “Relatively Speaking,” was staged on Broadway by John Turturro.
46
SCOTT RUDIN (Producer). Films include Frances Ha, Moonrise Kingdom, The Girl With the
Dragon Tattoo, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, Moneyball, Margaret, The Social Network, True
Grit, Greenberg, It’s Complicated, Fantastic Mr. Fox, Julie & Julia, Doubt, No Country for Old
Men, There Will Be Blood, Reprise, The Queen, Margot at the Wedding, Notes on a Scandal, Venus,
Closer, Team America: World Police, I Heart Huckabees, School of Rock, The Hours, Iris, The Royal
Tenenbaums, Zoolander, Sleepy Hollow, Wonder Boys, Bringing Out the Dead, South Park: Bigger,
Longer & Uncut, The Truman Show, In & Out, Ransom, The First Wives Club, Clueless, Nobody’s
Fool, The Firm, Searching for Bobby Fischer, Sister Act, and The Addams Family.
Theatre includes Passion, Hamlet, Seven Guitars, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the
Forum, Skylight, The Chairs, The Blue Room, Closer, Amy’s View, Copenhagen, The Designated
Mourner, The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia?, Caroline, or Change, The Normal Heart, Who’s Afraid of
Virginia Woolf?, Doubt, Faith Healer, The History Boys, Shining City, Stuff Happens, The Vertical
Hour, The Year of Magical Thinking; Gypsy, God of Carnage, Fences, The House of Blue Leaves,
Jerusalem, The Motherf**ker With the Hat, The Book of Mormon, One Man, Two Guvnors, Death
of a Salesman, The Testament of Mary.
Television includes “The Newsroom.”
Inside Llewyn Davis is ROBERT GRAF’s (Executive Producer) eleventh film with Joel and
Ethan Coen. A fellow Minnesotan, Graf began working with the brothers in 1995 on Fargo
serving as location manager. He was location manager as well on the Coens’ follow-up film,
The Big Lebowski. Graf was then associate producer on four successive Coen brothers movies,
O Brother, Where Art Thou?, The Man Who Wasn’t There, Intolerable Cruelty, and The Ladykillers.
He executive produced the Coens’ Academy Award® winning film, No Country for Old Men,
as well as Burn After Reading, A Serious Man, and True Grit. Among Graf’s other credits as
executive producer are Joe Carnahan’s Smokin’ Aces; Greg Mottola’s Paul; and Jonathan Dayton
and Valerie Faris’ Ruby Sparks. Graf currently lives in Los Angeles.
OLIVER COURSON (Executive Producer) is Chairman and CEO of StudioCanal, which he
developed during the past six years into a prominent European film studio. Today StudioCanal
is a leader in feature film production, acquisition, and distribution, distributing directly in all
media across three countries in Europe—France, the United Kingdom, and Germany—as well
as in Australia and New Zealand.
Courson oversaw the development of StudioCanal productions including Tomas Alfredson’s
Tinker; Tailor, Soldier, Spy, adapted from John le Carré’s novel; Hossein Amini’s The Two Faces
of January; Michel Gondry’s Mood Indigo; Jaume Collet-Serra’s Non-Stop; and Pierre Morel’s The
Gunman.
In 2012, StudioCanal made a strategic move into the TV business by taking a majority stake in
Tandem Communications (“World Without End,” “The Pillars of the Earth”). One program
from this entity, “Crossing Lines,” is a new series now on the air in many countries.
47
RONALD HALPERN (Executive Producer) is StudioCanal’s Executive Vice President of
International Production and Acquisitions. He oversees international productions and acquisitions
for the company. Current productions include Pierre Morel’s The Gunman, Jaume Collet-Serra’s
Non-Stop, Hossein Amini’s The Two Faces of January, and Susanne Bier’s Serena.
Previous productions include the BAFTA-winning and Academy Award-nominated Tinker,
Tailor, Soldier, Spy, as well as The Tourist, The Last Exorcism, and Chloe. StudioCanal also produced
Jaume Collet-Serra’s Unknown.
Additionally, Halpern oversees the theatrical adaptations and productions of StudioCanal
properties, including Mel Brooks’ The Producers, The Graduate, and The Ladykillers.
Before joining StudioCanal in 1996, Halpern worked for CBS Sports. He holds a BA and MBA
from Columbia University.
BRUNO DELBONNEL (Director of Photography) was born in Nancy, France and graduated
from Paris’ École Supérieure d’Études Cinématographiques. One of France’s foremost
cinematographers, Delbonnel was nominated in the US for three Academy Awards—for two
films directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet, Amélie and A Very Long Engagement, and for Harry Potter
and the Half-Blood Prince. Amélie was also nominated for a BAFTA Award, and A Very Long
Engagement won a Cesar Award for Best Cinematography.
Delbonnel’s other French films include Tout le monde n’a pas eu la chance d’avoir des parents
communistes, C’est jamais loin, Maria, Nonna, la vierge et moi, The Cat’s Meow, Ni Pour, Ni Contre,
and the ‘Tuileries’ section of Paris, je t’aime directed by the Coens.
He recently collaborated with Jean-Pierre Jeunet for the third time on the upcoming The Selected
Works of T. S. Spivet.
JESS GONCHOR (Production Designer) received acclaim for his work on Bennett Miller’s film
Capote, starring Philip Seymour Hoffman. He went on to design the blockbuster The Devil Wears
Prada; the Coen Brothers’ Academy Award-winning No Country for Old Men, for which he was
an Art Directors Guild Award winner, and Burn After Reading and A Serious Man, which each
earned him a nomination from the Art Directors Guild for Excellence in Production Design.
His most recent films are the Coens’ True Grit, Bennett Miller’s Moneyball and Gore Verbinski’s
The Lone Ranger.
The native New Yorker first honed his craft in off-off-Broadway theatre productions. Segueing
into films, he worked in the art departments of such features as Nicholas Hytner’s The Crucible;
Clint Eastwood’s A Perfect World; and Rob Reiner’s The American President.
Mr. Gonchor worked as an assistant art director on Edward Zwick’s The Siege, and was later an
48
art director on the filmmaker’s The Last Samurai, sharing in the design team’s Art Directors Guild
Award nomination.
He was production designer on Sam Mendes’ Away We Go and, most recently, on Doug Liman’s
Fair Game.
Inside Llewyn Davis is MARY ZOPHRES’ (Costume Designer) twelfth consecutive collaboration
with the Coen Brothers as costume designer, following Fargo, The Big Lebowski, O Brother, Where
Art Thou?, The Man Who Wasn’t There; , The Ladykillers, No Country for Old Men, Burn After
Reading, A Serious Man, and True Grit. Earlier, she was assistant costume designer for the Coens
on The Hudsucker Proxy.
She has been the costume designer on several movies for Steven Spielberg including The Terminal,
Catch Me If You Can, which brought her a BAFTA Award nomination for Best Costume Design;
and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.
Zophres’ other films as costume designer include the Farrelly Brothers’ first three movies (Dumb
and Dumber, Kingpin and There’s Something About Mary); Timothy Hutton’s Digging to China;
Oliver Stone’s Any Given Sunday; Terry Zwigoff ’s Ghost World; Brad Silberling’s Moonlight Mile;
Bruno Barreto’s View from the Top; Nora Ephron’s Bewitched; Joe Carnahan’s Smokin’ Aces; and
Robert Redford’s Lions for Lambs.
She earned a degree in art history and studio art from Vassar College before beginning her
professional career working in the fashion industry for Norma Kamali and Esprit. She began
working in the film industry as the extras wardrobe supervisor on Oliver Stone’s Born on the
Fourth of July. Zophres designed the costumes for two films directed by Jon Favreau, Iron Man 2
and Cowboys & Aliens. Other recent credits include People Like Us and Gangster Squad.
T BONE BURNETT (Executive Music Producer) is a musician, songwriter, soundtrack and
record producer. He has produced the music of Roy Orbison, Lisa Marie Presley, John Mellencamp,
Los Lobos, Counting Crows, Elton John and Leon Russell, Elvis Costello and Diana Krall, Tony
Bennett and k. d. lang, among many other artists.
Burnett won a Grammy for producing the soundtrack of the Coen Brothers’ film O Brother,
Where Art Thou? as well as for his work with Alison Krauss and Robert Plant. Burnett also
produced the music for the Coen Brothers’ The Ladykillers; as well as for the Johnny Cash film
Walk The Line. Nominated for an Academy Award for his work on Anthony Minghella’s Cold
Mountain, Burnett won the Oscar for his song ‘The Weary Kind’ for the film Crazy Heart.
He produced the music for the first season of the ABC television series “Nashville.”
49
MARCUS MUMFORD (Associate Music Producer) is the English lead singer of the Grammywinning band Mumford & Sons. He plays the guitar, drums and mandolin.
Mumford was born on January 31, 1987 in Anaheim, California. His family moved back to
their native England when Mumford was six months old. He attended King’s College School in
Wimbledon, where he met fellow band member Ben Lovett, before going on to study classics at
the University of Edinburgh. Mumford then returned to London to focus on his music career
after his first year of study. It was in Edinburgh that he penned most of Mumford & Sons’ debut
album, ‘Sigh No More.’
Mumford & Sons second album ‘Babel,’ released in September 2012, debuted at #1 on both the
UK Albums Chart and the US Billboard 200. It became the fastest selling album at the time of
release in both the US and UK, and won the 2012 Grammy Award for Album of the Year.
Mumford began his musical career playing drums for Laura Marling on tour, along with
the other current members of Mumford & Sons. It was through touring with Laura that the
bandmates came to the decision to form their own group in 2007.
SKIP LIEVSAY (Supervising Sound Editor) is one of the most respected sound technicians in
the film industry today, having worked on more than 100 feature films. He has been nominated
for four Academy Awards (for Sound Mixing and Sound Editing for No Country for Old Men,
and for Sound Mixing and Sound Editing for True Grit).
In addition to editing sound for the Coen Brothers’ first film, Blood Simple, and either mixing,
editing, or supervising the sound on all of their subsequent films, Lievsay has also worked
with Martin Scorsese (The Color of Money, The Last Temptation of Christ, Goodfellas, The Age
of Innocence, Casino, and many others); Spike Lee (Do the Right Thing, Jungle Fever, Mo’ Better
Blues, Crooklyn, and others); John Sayles (Matewan, Passion Fish); Alfonso Cuarón (Y Tu Mamá
También); Terrence Malick (The New World ); and Jonathan Demme (The Silence of the Lambs).
Lievsay’s credits also include John Waters’ Polyester; James Bridges’ Bright Lights, Big City; Robert
Altman’s O.C. and Stiggs’s Prêt-à-Porter; Julie Taymor’s Titus; Barry Sonnenfeld’s Get Shorty and
Men in Black I and II; and Tim Burton’s Sleepy Hollow.
More recent films include Francis Lawrence’s I Am Legend, Kevin MacDonald’s State of Play;
Cameron Crowe’s Elizabethtown; Bryan Singer’s Valkyrie; Francis Lawrence’s Water for Elephants;
Stephen Daldry’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close; the documentaries An Inconvenient Truth
and Waiting for “Superman”; and Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris’s Ruby Sparks; among many
others. Lievsay also recently completed work on Alfonso Cuaron’s Gravity.
Lievsay received BAFTA nominations for Best Sound for No Country for Old Men, True Grit, and
The Silence of the Lambs. Lievsay has also received honors from the Cinema Audio Society (for
No Country for Old Men and True Grit) and the Motion Picture Sound Editors Awards (for True
Grit, A Serious Man, Waiting for “Superman,” and No Country for Old Men).
50
PETER KURLAND (Sound Mixer) has worked in the sound department on every Coen
Brothers film beginning with the brothers’ first feature, Blood Simple. Kurland first stepped into
the role of sound mixer on O Brother, Where Art Thou? and has been the sound mixer on all of
the Coens’ subsequent films: The Man Who Wasn’t There, Intolerable Cruelty, The Ladykillers,
No Country for Old Men, Burn After Reading, A Serious Man, and True Grit.
Among Kurland’s other credits are Barry Sonnenfeld’s The Addams Family and Men in Black I,
II, and III; Lasse Hallström’s Something to Talk About ; Hugh Wilson’s The First Wives Club;
Robert Redford’s The Legend of Bagger Vance; James Mangold’s Walk the Line; and many others.
Kurland was nominated for Academy and BAFTA Awards for his work on Walk the Line,
No Country for Old Men, and True Grit, winning the BAFTA for Walk the Line. In 2002, he
received two Grammy Awards for his work on O Brother, Where Art Thou?, for Best Soundtrack
and Album of the Year.
Kurland is the recipient of three Cinema Audio Society (CAS) Awards, for True Grit, No Country
for Old Men, and Walk the Line, and earned a CAS nomination for Men in Black.
GREG ORLOFF (Mixer) won an Academy Award for Sound Mixing for his work on Ray and
was nominated for Oscars in this category for two Coen Brothers films, No Country for Old Men
and True Grit.
Among Orloff ’s many film credits are Footloose, Mike’s Murder, The Karate Kid Part II, Beverly
Hills Cop II, Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, The Abyss, Little Man Tate, The Last of the Mohicans,
My Best Friend’s Wedding, Forget Paris, Alien: Resurrection, and, in more recent years, The Bourne
Supremacy, All the King’s Men, Apocalypto, and Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen.
Orloff also worked on the Coen Brothers’ O Brother, Where Art Thou?, Intolerable Cruelty,
The Ladykillers, No Country for Old Men, Burn After Reading, A Serious Man, and True Grit.
★
51
CAST/CREW LIST
Written and Directed by
JOEL COEN & ETHAN COEN
Produced by
SCOTT RUDIN
ETHAN COEN
JOEL COEN
Executive Producers
ROBERT GRAF
OLIVIER COURSON
RON HALPERN
Director of Photography
BRUNO DELBONNEL, a.f.c., a.s.c.
Edited by
RODERICK JAYNES
Production Designer
JESS GONCHOR
Costumes Designed by
MARY ZOPHRES
Executive Music Producer
T BONE BURNETT
Supervising Sound Editor
SKIP LIEVSAY
Casting Director
ELLEN CHENOWETH
OSCAR ISAAC
CAREY MULLIGAN
JOHN GOODMAN
52
GARRETT HEDLUND
F. MURRAY ABRAHAM
JUSTIN TIMBERLAKE
STARK SANDS
ADAM DRIVER
JEANINE SERRALLES
MAX CASELLA
ETHAN PHILLIPS
ROBIN BARTLETT
a
STUDIOCANAL
Presentation
In Association with
ANTON CAPITAL ENTERTAINMENT
Unit Production Manager
First Assistant Director
Second Assistant Director
Associate Producers
ROBERT GRAF
BETSY MAGRUDER
JOHN SILVESTRI
DREW HOUPT
CATHERINE FARRELL
THOMAS JOHNSTON
Script Supervisor
Production Sound Mixer
PETER F. KURLAND
Additional Editor
KATHARINE MCQUERREY
★
CAST ★
Llewyn Davis OSCAR ISAAC
Jean CAREY MULLIGAN
Jim JUSTIN TIMBERLAKE
Mitch Gorfein ETHAN PHILLIPS
Lillian Gorfein ROBIN BARTLETT
Pappi Corsicato MAX CASELLA
Mel Novikoff JERRY GRAYSON
Joy JEANINE SERRALLES
Al Cody ADAM DRIVER
Troy Nelson STARK SANDS
Roland Turner JOHN GOODMAN
Johnny Five GARRETT HEDLUND
53
Marty Green ALEX KARPOVSKY
Janet Fung HELEN HONG
Joe Flom BRADLEY MOTT
Arlen Gamble MICHAEL ROSNER
Dodi Gamble BONNIE ROSE
Elevator Attendant JACK O’CONNEL
Nunzio RICARDO CORDERO
Ginny SYLVIA KAUDERS
Cromartie IAN JARVIS
Receptionist DIANE FINDLAY
Studio Man IAN BLACKMAN
Abortion Doctor STEVE ROUTMAN
Nurse SUSAN BLOMMAER
Oasis Waitress AMELIA MCCLAIN
Cop on Road JAMES COLBY
Chicago Waitress CHARLOTTE BOOKER
Man in Gate of Horn SAMUEL HAFT
Bud Grossman F. MURRAY ABRAHAM
Youth in Car JASON SHELTON
Union Hall Man 1 FRANK RIDLEY
Union Hall Man 2 JOHN AHLIN
Danny JAKE RYAN
Irish Singer DECLAN BENNETT
Additional Irish Singers ERIK HAYDEN
DANIEL EVERIDGE
JEFF TAKACS
Elizabeth Hobby NANCY BLAKE
Mr. Hobby STEPHEN PAYNE
Bouncer ROBERTO LOPEZ
Young Bob BENJAMIN PIKE
Stunt Coordinator JERRY HEWITT
Llewyn Stunt Double ED GABREE
Llewyn Stunt Drive JENNIFER LAMB
Production Supervisor PATTY WILLETT
Production Accountant JOAN ALTMAN
54
Location Manager TYSON BIDNER
Camera Operator BRUNO DELBONNEL
First Assistant Camera ROBERT MANCUSO
Second Assistant Camera SCOTT TINSLEY
Film Loader NICOLE COSGROVE
Steadicam Operator MACEO BISHOP
Camera Production Assistant ANTHONY COAN
Post Production Supervisor CATHERINE FARRELL
First Assistant Editor DAVID MASSACHI
Post Production Assistant TIMOTHY FEELEY
Art Director DEBORAH JENSEN
Assistant Art Directors HINJU KIM
STEVEN GRAHAM
Art Department Coordinator LEANN MURPHY
Graphic Designers ERIC HELMIN
GREGORY HILL
Nibdipper J. TODD ANDERSON
Art Department Production Assistant NICOLE ECKENROAD
Set Decorator SUSAN BODE TYSON
Assistant Set Decorator JENNY ALEX NICKASON
Set Decorating Buyer IMOGEN LEE
Set Decorating Production Assistant ERICA HOHF
Leadman BRUCE GROSS
Set Dressing Forepersons OMAR VAID
ANTHONY NAVARRO
JASON BROWN
PHIL POZNICK
On-Set Dresser ADAM GOODNOFF-CERNESE
Set Dressers PETER ANSEL
RUSSELL BERG
DIMITRA BIXBY
LUIS CORTES
ANGELO DIGRIGOLI
BRIAN DURHAM
JERRY ENGRASSIA
KLEY GILBUENA
ALIJA SEHAPOVIC
ZACH SELTER
BEN WEPMAN
JIM WHELAN
55
Property Master TOM ALLEN
Assistant Property DAVID ALLEN
ANN EDGEWORTH
KAREN KATES
Boom Operator RANDY JOHNSON
Utility Sound TIMOTHIA SELLERS
Chief Lighting Technician WILLIAM O’LEARY
Best Boy Electric JOE GRIMALDI
Lamp Operators JEREMY KNASTER
MIKE MAURER
ROB VUOLO
SCOTT KINCAID
Genny Operator BOB STEVERS
Basecamp Generator Operator GEORGE HARRINGTON
Rigging Chief Lighting Technician RICHIE FORD
Rigging Best Boy Electric LOUIE PETRAGLIA
Rigging Electrics TAMU-RA BAKR
PAUL OSEKOSKI
CASEY FORD
JIM LITTEN
Key Grip MITCH LILLIAN
Best Boy Grip PAUL CANDRILLI
Dolly Grips RICK MARROQUIN
KEVIN LOWRY
Company Grips TRISTAN ALLEN
MARCEL CIUREA
JOHN GATLAND
SHAHEN GUIRAGOSSIAN
Key Rigging Grip ERIC GEARITY
Best Boy Rigging Grip DANA HOOK
Rigging Grips JUSTIN HOOK
KEITH MARSHALL
Assistant Costume Designer AMY ROTH
Costume Supervisor NANCY CAPPER
Key Costumer LEIGH BELL
Set Costumers MEGAN ASBEE
FIONNUALA LYNCH
KAT ST. JOHN
Seamstress SUSAN BAKULA
Ager/Dyer ASHLEY SINGER
Costume Pas JOHN PORTO
LUCY COBBS
56
Makeup Department Head NICKI LEDERMANN
Key Makeup Artist CASSANDRA SAULTER
Hair Department Head MICHAEL KRISTON
Key Hairstylist NATHAN BUSCH
Production Coordinator MARK HAGERMAN
Assistant Production Coordinator ALEXANDER BARROW
Production Secretary SEAN C. NATTINI
Office Production Assistants JOHN HAY, JR.
WILLIAM THOMPSON
Assistant Location Managers KAT DONAHUE
ALEX BORYS
Locations Assistants VICTORIA CARTER
SAMSON JACOBSON
ANNA MARANDI
SPENCER REISS
JONATHAN URBAND
Location Scouts JOHN SPADY
MICHAEL GROSKY
Location Coordinator KATE LILLIE
Unit Production Assistants CAMERON BELL
SEAN MATTHEWS
Parking Coordinator JON JOHNSON
First Assistant Accountant ADAM WOLENSKI
Second Assistant Accountant SUSAN STRINE
Payroll Accountant KERRY ROBERTS
Accounting Clerk TODD BAXLEY
Payroll Clerk JOANNA OGANDO
Casting Associate AMELIA MCCARTHY
Extras Casting Director DEBBIE DELISI
Extras Casting Assistants KATI BATCHELDER
ADAM DELISI
Sound FX Editor PAUL URMSON
Music Editors TODD KASOW
JEN MONNAR
Assistant Sound Editor IGOR NIKOLIC´
ADR Editor KENTON JAKUB
ADR Mixer BOBBY JOHANSON
57
ADR Recordist MICHAEL RIVERA
Foley Artist MARKO A. COSTANZO
Foley Mixer GEORGE LARA
Voice Casting SONDRA JAMES
JASON HARRIS
Re-Recording Mixers SKIP LIEVSAY
GREG ORLOFF
Re-Recorded at SONY PICTURES STUDIOS
Special Effects Supervisor STEVE KIRSHOFF
Special Effects Coordinator MARK BERO
Special Effects Technicians WAYNE MILLER
DOUG COLEMAN
DAVID KIRSHOFF
Unit Publicist LARRY KAPLAN
Still Photographer ALISON ROSA
Video Assist NILS JOHNSON
Second Second Assistant Director MATT LAKE
DGA Trainee AIDAN TUMAS
Construction Coordinator JOSEPH A. ALFIERI, JR.
Head Carpenter MIKE ACEVEDO, JR.
Shopcraft Foreman JAMES CAPPELLO
Shopcraftsmen RAY HUBBARD
FRANCISCO ANDRACA
Key Construction Grip STEVE FRATTIANI
Best Boy Construction Grip JEFF POUND
Construction Grip GAVIN A. HOLMES, JR.
Construction Electric COLLIN QUINLAN
Construction Production Assistant BRIDGET SIEBERT
Charge Scenic ALEX GORODETSKY
Foreman Scenic QUANG NGUYEN
Scenic Artists CHRIS WEISER
CHARLES SUTER
MARIA SUTER
YONG XI CHEN
CHRISTOPHER HEBEL
JAY HENDRICKX
JAMES DONAHUE
JORDAN LOVELACE
58
Lead Shopman STAVROS STAMAT
Shopman Scenics MARIA GORODETSKY
RAPHAEL COHEN
Camera Scenic JAMES HOFF
Animal Wrangler DAWN BARKAN
Assistant Animal Wrangler JIM WARREN
New Guy DAVID SALES
Assistant to Mr. Rudin JESSICA HELD
Assistant to Mr. Graf TARYN BENESTA
Set Production Assistants JUSTIN BISCHOFF
MICHELLE ISRAEL
ELIZABETH NEVEU
RYAN HOWARD
ED GATELY
WILL LEVINE
KELSEY O’LEARY
NIKI HOSSACK
Transportation Captain JAMES WHALEN
Transportation Co-Captain MICHAEL J. O’BRIEN
Set Medics RICH FELLEGARA
KATHY FELLEGARA
Catering by FEATURED CUISINE
Craft Service by WILSON RIVAS
Post Production Accountants LIZ MODENA
TREVANNA POST, INC.
Titles by RANDY BALSMEYER
BIG FILM DESIGN
Dailies and Digital Intermediate by TECHNICOLOR POSTWORKS NY
Supervising Digital Colorist PETER DOYLE
Dailies Colorist MARTIN ZEICHNER
Dailies Project Manager MICHELLE MORRIS
Dailies Color Assists CHRISTI LEFTWICH
PATRICK ROSSI
Digital Media Assist CHRIS LUNDY
Digital Media Supervisor CARLOS MONFORT
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Di Producers MICHELLE MORRIS
KEVIN VALE
Di Editor GRACE LAN
Optical Compositor JESSICA ELVIN
Grading Technical Support NIKLAS ALDERGREEN
Chief Engineer COREY STEWART
Account Executive CLARK HENDERSON
Color by FILM LAB NY
Visual Effects by FRAMESTORE
Visual Effects Supervisor ALEX LEMKE
Visual Effects Line Producer ANDREA ATWATER
Visual Effects Producer SARAH DOWLAND
Visual Effects Editor YVETTE WOJCIECHOWSKI
Visual Eeffects Production Assistant JAMES YATES
Compositing Supervisor CORRINA WILSON
Digital Compositors JARNAIL BHACHU
OLIVER ARMSTRONG
ELLA BOLIVER
MICHAEL QUEEN
JESSE SPIELMAN
MIYUKI SHIMAMOTO
Paint And Roto Artists MAYUKO SAITO
ALEX LING
ANDREW BERRY
Pipeline tds JESSE LUCAS
ZI LI
Engineer HARRY CHUNG
SOUNDTRACK AVAILABLE ON NONESUCH RECORDS
Associate Music Producer MARCUS MUMFORD
Songs Recorded & Mixed by MIKE PIERSANTE
JASON WORMER
Music Production Coordinator IVY SKOFF
★
MUSIC ★
“HANG ME, OH HANG ME”
Traditional
Arranged by OSCAR ISAAC and T BONE BURNETT
Performed by OSCAR ISAAC
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“REQUIEM IN D MINOR, LACRIMOSA DIES”
Written by WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART
Performed by SLOVAK PHILHARMONIC ORCHESTRA AND CHORUS
Courtesy of NAXOS OF AMERICA
AMERICA
“THE LAST THING ON MY MIND”
Written by TOM PAXTON
Performed by STARK SANDS
“PLEASE PLEASE MR. KENNEDY”
Written by ED RUSH, GEORGE CROMARTY, T BONE BURNETT,
JUSTIN TIMBERLAKE, JOEL COEN AND ETHAN COEN
Performed by OSCAR ISAAC, JUSTIN TIMBERLAKE and ADAM DRIVER
“BALLADE NO. 2 IN F MINOR, OP. 38”
Written by FRÉDÉRIC CHOPIN
Performed by PETER FRANKL
Courtesy of VOX MUSIC GROUP
By arrangement with SPJ MUSIC
“LEAVING THE CAT”
Written and performed by TODD KASOW
“THE DEATH OF QUEEN JANE”
Traditional
Arranged by T BONE BURNETT and OSCAR ISAAC
Performed by OSCAR ISAAC
“SYMPHONY NO. 4 IN G: IV. SEHR BEHAGLICH – WIR GENIESSEN DIE HIMMLISCHEN FREUDEN”
Written by GUSTAV MAHLER
Performed by DANIEL HARDING/MAHLER CHAMBER ORCHESTRA/
DOROTHEA RÖSCHMANN
Courtesy of VIRGIN CLASSICS
Under license from EMI FILM & TELEVISION MUSIC
“THE OLD TRIANGLE”
Written by BRENDAN BEHAN
Performed by CHRIS THILE, CHRIS ELDRIDGE, GABE WITCHER,
MARCUS MUMFORD and JUSTIN TIMBERLAKE
“STORMS ARE ON THE OCEAN”
Written by A.P. CARTER
Performed by NANCY BLAKE
“FAREWELL”
Written and Performed by BOB DYLAN
Courtesy of COLUMBIA RECORDS
By arrangement with SONY MUSIC LICENSING
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“DINK’S SONG”
Traditional
Duet arranged by MARCUS MUMFORD, T BONE BURNETT and OSCAR ISAAC
Performed by MARCUS MUMFORD and OSCAR ISAAC
Solo version arranged by T BONE BURNETT and OSCAR ISAAC
Performed by OSCAR ISAAC
“FIVE HUNDRED MILES”
Written by HEDY WEST
Performed by STARK SANDS, JUSTIN TIMBERLAKE, CAREY MULLIGAN
and JOY WILLIAMS
“PIANO SONATA NO. 15 IN D MAJOR, OP. 28 — PASTORALE”
Written by LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN
Performed by DANIEL BARENBOIM
Courtesy of EMI RECORDS LTD
Under License from EMI FILM & TELEVISION MUSIC
“GREEN GREEN ROCKY ROAD”
Written by LEN CHANDLER AND ROBERT KAUFMAN
Performed by OSCAR ISAAC
End credit performance by DAVE VAN RONK
Courtesy of TRADITION & MODERNE GMBH
“COCAINE”
Written by REV. GARY DAVIS
Performed by OSCAR ISAAC
“OLD MACDONALD”
Traditional
Arranged by JESSE BELVIN
Performed by NOLAN STRONG & THE DIABLOS
Courtesy of FORTUNE RECORDS
By arrangement with WESTWOOD MUSIC GROUP
“SHOALS OF HERRING”
Written by EWAN MACCOLL
Performed by OSCAR ISAAC
“3 ROMANCES, OP. 28: NO 2 IN F SHARP MAJOR”
Written by ROBERT SCHUMANN
Performed by PETER FRANKL
Courtesy of COUNTDOWN MEDIA
Completion Guarantee Provided by FILM FINANCES INC.
Collection Account Management FINTAGE CAM B.V.
Music Clearances by CHRIS ROBERTSON
Rights & Clearances by ENTERTAINMENT CLEARANCES, INC.
LAURA SEVIER
CASSANDRA BARBOUR
WENDY COHEN
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Additional Legal Services O’MELVENY & MYERS LLP
Serious Matters PATRICIA MARY MURPHY, ESQ.
Filmed with the Support of the
NEW YORK STATE GOVERNOR’S OFFICE
FOR MOTION PICTURE & TELEVISION DEVELOPMENT
Special Thanks to:
ELIJAH WALD
ANDREA VUOCOLO
JEFF ROSEN
ADAM TUDHOPE
JASON COLTON
LARRY JENKINS
COLUMBIA RECORDS NAME AND LOGO COURTESY OF SONY MUSIC ENTERTAINMENT
MSG ENTERTAINMENT AND THE BEACON THEATRE
WESTCHESTER COUNTY
TOWN OF RIVERHEAD, NY
CITY OF NEW ROCHELLE, NY
NYC MAYOR’S OFFICE OF FILM, THEATRE AND BROADCASTING
MICHAEL R. BLOOMBERG, MAYOR
KATHERINE L. OLIVER, COMMISSIONER
NYPD MOVIE & TV UNIT
NEW YORK CITY TRANSIT AUTHORITY
GENERAL MILLS ARCHIVES
NORMAN’S RARE GUITARS
THE RED LOTUS ROOM
AMERICAN HUMANE ASSOCIATION
MONITORED THE ANIMAL ACTION.
NO ANIMALS WERE HARMED ® (AHAD 03417)
MPAA #:47939
© 2013 LONG STRANGE TRIP LLC ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
This is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and locations portrayed and the names herein are fictitious,
and any similarity to or identification with the location, name, character or history of any person, product or entity
is entirely coincidental and unintentional.
This motion picture photoplay is protected pursuant to the provisions of the laws of the United States of America and
other countries. Any unauthorized duplication and/or distribution of this photoplay may result in civil liability
and criminal prosecution.
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