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Interview [Written]: Joel and Ethan Coen (“Inside Llewyn Davis”)

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Anne Thompson at Indiewire landed an interview with Joel and Ethan Coen about their latest movie Inside Llewyn Davis.

Anne Thompson: What music did you grow up listening to and caring about?

Joel Coen: During this period, we were very young. I wouldn’t say we even listened to music; it was 1961, I was 5, 6 years old and Ethan was 3.

Ethan Coen: The music that we first started listening to was what everyone else was listening to. A lot of Bob Dylan, maybe more than most people, but a lot of rock and roll.

Joel: It was music that came out of this music, so we discovered this music retrospectively in terms of going back to what the roots of the things were that we listened to when we were kids and adolescents: rock and roll, Bob Dylan, who was top 40 radio, weirdly. We did have some records. It was interesting. We had a Pete Seeger, Bill Bill Broonzy record that was a live recording of a concert in Chicago from the late 50s that was important enough to us such that we actually stole things from it for the soundtrack of “Raising Arizona,” which was essentially Pete playin on a banjo. That’s also how we met T Bone. He didn’t realize we stole that from Pete Seeger.

What made you come up with this character? The pursuit of purity in artistic expression is something that you two have adamantly fought for over the course of your career and you’ve achieved it to a remarkable degree.

Ethan: We achieved it not by any design but just because, to the extent that we were interested in selling out–which is as much as anybody–nobody was interested in buying. So when that happens early on you have to do it yourself by default. You get to kind of do it your way. There’s nothing noble about purity, you just kind of want to do what seems to be the right way.

Joel: You’re sympathetic to the character in certain ways even though he may be a very difficult character to like in other respects. In life he’s not so easy but when he performs he’s good and there’s something charismatic about that.

For the rest of the interview, go here.

You can follow Anne Thompson on Twittter: @akstanwyck.


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