After dishing out a new film every year for the past year, 2011 will be Coen-less. But that doesn’t mean the Oscar-winning brothers aren’t at work on their next project. As we reported over the summer, Joel and Ethan Coen are working on a “music-intensive” project and that the film would be “loosely based one of the 1960s Greenwich Valley folk scene’s most revered names: Dave Van Ronk.” Variety now reports that the film will be entitled Inside Llewyn Davis and “centers around Llewyn Davis’ struggles as a folk musician during the genre’s 1960s heyday in New York City.” That pretty much follows what we had heard thus far and it sounds pretty great. The Coens have heavily used bluegrass (O Brother, Where Are Thou?) and gospel (The Ladykillers) in the past and I can’t wait to see what they do with folk music.

On a related note, the Coen Brothers will reteam with producer Scott Rudin while Studio Canal will co-finance and handle international sales for the flick. Rudin previously worked with the Coens on No Country for Old Men and True Grit and that worked out pretty well. Now that there’s financing, hopefully this film will speed into production and we can get our next Coen film by 2012.
http://collider.com/coen-brothers-insid ... is/112372/

van Ronk worked in a variety of different musical genres (ballards, blues, gospel, jazz, swing), but his main inspiration is said to have been famed blues and gospel guitarist Gary Davis, a.k.a. Reverend/Blind Gary Davis. He was a prominent member of the Greenwich Village coffeehouse folk culture back in the day, and worked alongside the likes of Bob Dylan, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, and Joni Mitchell, among others.

IWatchFilmsNotMovies wrote:They should cast Jeff again!

After the runaway success of “True Grit,” which nabbed a quarter of a billion dollars worldwide, you’d figure Joel and Ethan Coen would cash in their chips with a major studio, try to get something expensive made, or force the major studios to pony up prior to shooting. The Coens haven’t operated independently for awhile, as a distributor has been in place for their last few films before the project was even shot. This time, however, the brothers are doing something different: out of the Toronto International Film Festival, the rumor is that the Coens’ latest, “Inside Llewyn Davis,” will be filmed without a domestic distributor attached, with only Studio Canal backing the picture for international rights.

Joel and Ethan’s next project showcases the rise of the folk scene in Greenwich Village, New York during the 1960s, an approach that necessitates an exacting attention to detail and idiosyncrasies. Shooting is set to start early next year, and old friend Scott Rudin is producing, but otherwise, this is brave new territory for the most accomplished filmmaking team of their generation. Studio Canal chief Olivier Courson claims the script is like “The Big Lebowski,” and while the film is a major favorite today amongst Coen lovers, many forget that upon its initial release that critics and audiences truly rejected the film.

Given the Coens’ intriguing track record of crowd-pleasers versus crowd-alienators (“The Big Lebowski” was not the first, or last Coen film, to leave mainstream audiences scratching their heads), it’s interesting that, if this film is one of their more abstract pictures, they’ll have to rely on their names to sell the project to a distributor. In the end, this shouldn’t be difficult for a duo that have won every major award and are coming off a major box office hit, but you know there’s going to be some egghead executive trumpeting the need for clear marketing and the possibility of “F” Cinemascores.
http://blogs.indiewire.com/theplaylist/ ... wyn_davis/

oracle86 wrote:Oscar Isaac has been cast as the lead.

http://www.deadline.com/2011/10/oscar-i ... usic-film/

Calikid must be exhilarated now.

oracle86 wrote:Oscar Isaac has been cast as the lead.

http://www.deadline.com/2011/10/oscar-i ... usic-film/

Calikid must be exhilarated now.