The Coen Brothers 'O Brother, Where Art Thou?’ George Clooney

"It started as a 'three saps on the run' kind of movie, and then at a certain point we looked at each other and said, 'You know, they're trying to get home-let's just say this is The Odyssey. We were thinking of it more as 'The Wizard of Oz'. We wanted the tag on the movie to be: 'There's No Place Like Home.'"

Although Homer is given a co-writing credit on the film "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" (2000), Joel and Ethan Coen claim never to have read "The Odyssey" and are familiar with it only through cultural osmosis and film adaptations. According to the brothers, Tim Blake Nelson (who has a degree in classics from Brown University) was the only person on the set who had read "The Odyssey". At the time, Nelson was Joel Coen's neighbor. Joel hadn't really seen him act in anything. When the Coens sent him the script, he thought they were asking his advice as a former Classics major.

George

George Clooney agreed to do this film without having read the script. The Coen Brothers visited him in Phoenix while he was making "Three Kings" (1999), wanting to work with him after seeing his performance in "Out of Sight" (1998). Moments after they put their script on Clooney's hotel room table, the actor said "Great, I'm in." He stated that he liked even the Coens' least successful films.

However, once he DID read the script, Clooney did not immediately understand his character, and so sent the script to his uncle Jack, a tobacco farmer who lived in Kentucky, and asked him to read the entire script into a tape recorder. Unknown to Clooney, in his recording, Jack, a devout Baptist, omitted all instances of the words "damn" and "hell" from the Coens' script, which only became known to Clooney after the directors pointed this out to him in the middle of shooting. Jack had never been on a plane before flying in for the premiere.

According to Joel Coen, there was a snake catcher onset. "We hired this guy and he came to set with a golf club and what he would do is he would look around for snakes. If he saw one he would rope it with the golf club and put it in this bag. I asked him what you called somebody with this profession, and he said, 'An idiot.'" (IMDb)

Ethan & Joel Coen