CraveOnline: As far as his self-destructive tendencies, do you think someone like Llewyn can ever get his act together?
Oscar Isaac: What do think getting his act together means?
Specifically maybe just being more reliable.
I guess maybe that would get him more “success” but I don’t know. That’s what’s so, I think, beautiful about the movie is it asks a lot of questions but doesn’t try to answer them. I think the role of a good art does that.
I think what I meant was I can look at a guy like Llewyn and have some personal judgments, but what you get from the film is we’re not judging him. We’re on this ride with him. Was that a difficult balance to strike?
Yes, I’ll tell you it definitely felt like jumping into the deep end, saying he is never going to try to charm anybody or to elicit sympathy in any way. He is just going to be on the ride and half the time be overwhelmed with the despair of his life. That was a big one. He’s not going to make a bid for sympathy because that’s just not what he does. He doesn’t try to ingratiate himself.
Yes, maybe that’s what getting your act together is too, compromising a little bit for the sake of the greater good. But, I think it’s also a recognition that success and failure is on such a knife’s edge and so many things have to go your way to be able to live the life of an artist that doesn’t compromise and be successful. I think the Coens realize that because that’s exactly what they have been able to do. They’ve been very lucky. Yes, they’re geniuses but I think they’re lucky geniuses.
I know they did their Odyssey movie in O Brother, Where Art Thou, but did you see Llewyn Davis or ever talk about it being The Odyssey too?
A bit but they don’t really like to talk about thematic type stuff and the greater symbolism of things. I guess they feel it’s impractical just as far as when it’s about doing the work, and I guess there’s something about that that I understand. Now, since the movie’s been done, we have talked about it a few times, this idea that it’s an odyssey where Odysseus just never goes anywhere.
You have some pretty outstanding filmmakers in your upcoming movies too. Hossein Amini for The Two Faces of January, Alex Garland for Ex Machina and William Monahan for Mojave. What sort of characters do you get to play and how different were each of those experiences?
Oh yeah, they were all vastly different. In Hossein Amini’s film, it’s a Patricia Highsmith adaptation so I play a young American in Greece who’s hustling a little bit and being a tour guide, trying to find his voice as a poet. He gets involved with two luxurious Americans on the run and it becomes this heated triangle. So there’s an innocence about him, a boy becoming a man kind of thing.
In Alex Garland’s, it’s a very cerebral and muscular character. He’s almost a Kubrick-like genius that has a real, real darkness to him. In Mojave he’s a psychopath. He’s a desert psycho killer.
Fred Topel is a staff writer at CraveOnline and the man behind Best Episode Ever and Shelf Space Weekly. Follow him on Twitter at @FredTopel.
