O Brother, Where Art Thou?

Joel Coen directed this film and wrote it with his brother Ethan, sending three men off a Mississippi chain gang in the thirties. Working Title and StudioCanal financed it alongside Universal. The songs were cut before a camera turned, with T Bone Burnett working while the script was still being written. The voice you take for George Clooney is Dan Tyminski; Clooney has said he was called in only because he is Rosemary Clooney’s nephew, and could not sing. The picture was regraded digitally at Cinesite. Roger Deakins drained the greens so the frame would resemble an old hand tinted postcard, since Mississippi in summer was overwhelmingly green; the negative was scanned at 2K and laser recorded back onto 35mm. He recalls that the harder they pushed, the more noise appeared. Neither Coen had read the Odyssey. Ethan joked that this is very freeing and they could adapt something nobody has read. Tim Blake Nelson, who studied classics, was the only one on set who had. The film took two nominations, one for cinematography and one for the screenplay, and won neither; the record took two Grammys, one of them album of the year. A good fit if you want scenes assembled around songs that already existed. Not for you if you expect the treasure hunt to progress.