Following its almost uniformly rapturous reception yesterday at the Cannes Film Festival (you can read our take here) today the ‘Inside Llewyn Davis’ team showed up in force for the press conference. With Joel and Ethan Coen, Oscar Isaac, Carey Mulligan, Justin Timberlake, Garrett Hedlund, T-Bone Burnett and cinematographer Bruno Delbonnel comprising the panel, it really felt like of the principals, only John Goodman and perhaps “Doogie Howser” alum Max Casella
(who incidentally, is totally having a moment right now) were absent.
It wasn’t perhaps the most illuminating press conference ever, with
hard-hitting questions ranging from “How much did you laugh on set?” to
“Oscar Isaac, you were amazing, how did you manage to be so amazing?”
but one tiny detail caught our attention.
The most interesting moment came, as these things
inevitably go, as the answer to the very final question, posed by the
moderator, about whether and how soon we might see the songs as
performed by the actors in some sort of album form. Burnett demurred a
little initially, but did say, after claiming that finding Isaac for the
part was “like a 1 in 17 million chance — I haven’t done exact
calculations,” that there is plenty of material already laid down from
the many, many rehearsals they did. “There were a lot of recording
rehearsals… You wanna know you’ve got it down before you [go on set]
especially when you’re going live… So we recorded the whole show in
advance in studio and we recorded the whole show live too, so we have
two different libraries of material to work with.” But perhaps more
intriguingly he referred to other stuff that might happen with the
film’s standout music.“But there’ll also be other events…we basically
did all this ourselves” he said, going on to insinuate that the level of
everyone’s personal investment in the project meant they were going to
do whatever they could to get it out there.
Time frustratingly ran out before he could say anything
more concrete, but perhaps we should be looking forward not just to
studio and live versions of the soundtrack’s songs when the album does
come out, but also a concert or two? Maybe? We should find out closer to the release of “Inside Llewyn Davis,” on December 6th.
