Oscar Isaac’s star turn in Joel and Ethan Coen’s Inside Llewyn Davis is earning the breakout star serious plaudits, not least for his accomplished musical performances, presented in the film live and in full. Totally Dublin talked to him about irony, success, compromise and the possibility of a fatalistic optimism.
You’ve talked about trying to affect a ‘comedy of resilience’ with your performance in the film. Could you talk a little about what you mean by this?
Well, you know, I read the script, and I saw someone there struggling, and yet I found myself laughing a lot, and why is that funny? Is it because I’m sadistic? Is it a relief that it’s not me? Investigating what that’s all about led me to Buster Keaton. Just as an inspiration, not that I was trying to be Buster Keaton at all. As if I could! But just as an interesting example. I watched his movies and I thought, well that’s interesting, you know, he has this melancholic impasse, of a face. His face doesn’t change, his expressions don’t really change, whether he’s in love or in front of a speeding train or a house is falling on top of him. And we empathise with him, and we laugh, both at what’s happening to him, but also at his spunk, you know? We laugh at his resilience, and I took that as an inspiration.
I guess what you’re talking about there relates to deadpan, as well, which is a recognisable feature of a lot of the Coen Brothers’ films. In order for that to work, for it to be both funny and sad at the same time, does that require a great deal of trust between you and the directors? To know exactly how your sincerity, as an actor, will end up sort of ironised on screen?
Absolutely. It’s an experiment in context. The context is what makes it funny. The contradiction of the tragic and the difficult, and the stoicism in the face of that. It causes relief, you know? There’s something about knowing something that that person doesn’t know. That’s why I think the deadpan is funny. Because of the situation: we know what that guy is feeling, but he’s not showing anybody else, and we find it titillating.
You’ve said that the Coen brothers make films not necessarily about what life looks like, but what it feels like. Could you explain what you mean by this?
Well, they’re not doing cinéma vérité. Although it’s a bit of a documentary movie the way the music is done: it’s all live, it’s a concert movie. But they’re a little bit more expressionistic. Their characters, for instance, often feel quite strange and bizarre, but that’s because that’s how Llewyn is seeing the world. He feels like an outsider among all these aliens. He’s isolated. And so they take on greater proportions in his own psyche. They’re a little bit more monstrous, a little bit more alien. And the same thing with Llewyn: he’s being overwhelmed by life. So, sure, maybe if, literally, Llewyn was sitting in a room with you behaving exactly the same way, you might say, this guy is really weird, so disconnected, but it’s a slight heightening of what he’s feeling. It’s a little bit of an outward expression of what he’s feeling, which is: he’s so overwhelmed in trying to survive that he doesn’t even have time to register… [laughs] empathy. By the time he realises how he should be behaving with someone, the scene’s done.
So the film’s perspective is oscillating between this sort of wider context, and getting something of Llewyn’s own perception of things as well…
Yeah, I mean, it’s called Inside Llewyn Davis, and I think in certain moments they take that quite literally.
Llewyn is a musician who decidedly doesn’t ‘make it’. What do you think the film has to say about the nature of success?
Well I think it says that success and failure is on a knife’s edge. It can just as easily tip one way or the other, and so many things factor into that, not the least of which is luck. Hard work and talent goes a long way, and you have to be ready for the opportunity when it comes, but it… still has to come! You can’t just will it into existence, you know, [laughs] I don’t think I believe in the whole secret thing… So that plays a big role in it. And for Llewyn, you know, he has self-destructive tendencies, and he also wants to fail just as much as he wants to succeed, and that’s probably because he’s realising that to succeed would be to compromise, and that would be a bigger failure.
Can you personally relate to that unwillingness to compromise?
Absolutely. The longer that you do this, the more opportunities you get, especially if people start seeing your work and responding to it. And the more opportunities you get, the more chances you have to do something really shitty. Or at least you get offered shitty things and they normally want to pay you more to do the shitty thing because they know it’s shitty. And, you know, that’s when you have to kind of examine what your motives are, and what you want to do, and why you’re doing what you’re doing. For me, I’ve made the choice to just try to keep on the same path, which is to just do things that inspire you, and the rest, all the other stuff, will hopefully fall into place, and if it doesn’t, well then at least you’ve got a really great body of work.
We get the sense throughout the film that things aren’t going to work out for Llewyn, and yet within this sort of fatalistic story there are moments of real beauty — I’m thinking of his musical performances — do you think, then, that despite this narrative fatalism, this is an optimistic film?
I do. I think that it ends on a hopeful note, in that although he’s not above hypocrisy, you’re seeing a man that’s being true to himself. He’s really attempting to do that, he’s someone that’s attempting not to compromise, and that as an ideal is — well, maybe in practical terms it doesn’t work — but he’s willing to sacrifice himself for this ideal. And I don’t know, I think that at the end there, I get the impression that he’s gonna continue. He’s not gonna quit, he’s gonna keep doing it. Even when he wanted to quit, he couldn’t. Dave Van Ronk [who’s life in part is the basis of Llewyn Davis’ character], at one point, said: “Would I have loved to make more money? Sure. But I got to play music my whole life, and that’s all I ever wanted to do.”
Is this a hopefulness you were personally bringing to the role?
Yeah, again we go back to that resilience thing. I think he’s resilient. I think he’s gonna press on.
There’s a moment in the film that I found particularly affecting, when Llewyn drives past Akron, OH. There’s a poignant sort of reticence, that tension between action and inaction: is that something you could dredge up easily?
Yeah. It’s a very Hamlet moment, right? It all boils down to to be or not to be? And that is one of those moments where, yeah… just as you put it, I mean, that’s really very well put, between action and inaction, and that hair’s breadth between the two. How everything can change in that moment, that one moment of suspension. And doing that scene was, as we talked about, an act of faith in context. I had to see Akron and know what it means to me, and trust that the Coens would give you that context for what that moment is.
There’s a big scene that book-ends the film, where Llewyn sings Hang Me, Oh Hang Me. The film, as we find out, is structured, temporally, sort of like a noose, if you’ll permit me that leap. What does the film, and your performance in it, have to say about leaving, or the act of leaving something behind?
Yeah, it’s one of the big scenes, and one of the things that’s happening to the character is that he’s in grief, he’s grieving. It starts off with Fare Thee Well, the duet he had with his partner, who has killed himself, and by the end of it he’s singing it as a dirge, as a goodbye. And I think that’s the first time that he acknowledges that this is what’s really been happening. So yeah, I think that this is a film about the grieving process.
Be in with a chance to win tickets to the premiere over here and read our review of the film over here.
Words: Oisín Murphy-Hall
