T blake nelson12/21/2023 ![]() ![]() The horse was fine with it, but I’m riding a neck-reined horse. ![]() I’m playing the real chords and playing along with the track, but - I don’t know who ended up playing the guitar on the recording, but I’m really playing the guitar I have there.Īnd the horse was absolutely fine with it? Now, understand that I’m playing the guitar, but when you hear the recording, it’s just my voice. I worked on those skills - it’s like Napoleon Dynamite, “my skills” - every day for months and months, because they have to seem like it’s easy. Guitar lessons and the pistol stuff - that was also tough to learn. We started shooting in June, and I started preparing for this role in January. I would say that I should play more, because it’s a skill I want to hold onto. Yes, I learned to play the guitar specifically for this.Ī little bit. And then when they said, “Alright, we want you to do it,” all I remembered was, “Alright, you’ve got to learn these pistol tricks and you’ve got to learn to play the guitar, and there’s going to be singing.” I went to dinner with them and we just started going over what the process of learning all that would be, and I said, “But he doesn’t really talk much, does he?” And Ethan said, “‘Doesn’t really talk much?’ The guy doesn’t shut up!” And then I realized, “Oh, there are a lot of words to learn, as well.”Īre you really playing the guitar in the film? ![]() They said, “Yeah, we’ve gotta write these other ones.” I read it, and I loved it, and I thought, “My God, what a great opportunity, to get to do that, that’s fantastic” - but it was so appealing to me that I wanted to put it away, otherwise I would just keep thinking about it all the time, and asking Joel and Ethan about it and annoying them. The change in the way films are displayed now actually ended up helping them.ĭid you hear about just the Buster Scruggs part when they first talked to you about it? He would say, “Someday, we’re gonna do that Buster Scruggs, so be ready.” It was brought up from time to time, and yet I have to say, as the industry started to change, with the rise of Netflix and Amazon and fewer screens for arty movies, I did begin to wonder how they would ever get it made, even Joel and Ethan. What was the conversation between then and now? Occasionally, Joel would mention it. I understand that the Coens wrote this 25 years ago, and you were sent the screenplay in 2002. Less so the cowboy musicals, just because, since I loved the Sergio Leone ones, I was bound not really to like the singing cowboy. Was the cowboy musical also something you enjoyed? Those are a very different kind of Western from Buster Scruggs. I constantly watched the Sergio Leone Westerns whenever they were on television. They were probably always on television everywhere in the country, but in particular in Oklahoma. I grew up in Oklahoma, and Westerns were always on television. The day after its premiere at the New York Film Festival, we spoke about the film, musicals (Western or otherwise), and getting into the Watchmen groove. Though they initially seem to be cut from the same yokel-y cloth, it only takes a few minutes of the Coens’ latest movie (and a very bloody shoot-out) for it to become clear that they’re yin and yang - Scruggs is much more dangerous than he looks. It’s also a range that’s evident in the two characters Nelson has now played for the Coens: escaped convict Delmar O’Donnell in O Brother, Where Art Thou?, whom Nelson gently terms “not so smart,” and now Buster Scruggs. Though he credits his three sons for his awareness of the last, it’s a breadth of knowledge (and enthusiasm) that stretches to pretty much each topic we cover. The artists he names range from Hank Williams (“I just don’t think there’ll be another troubadour like him, ever”) to A Tribe Called Quest to Okkervil River to A$AP Rocky. When we sit down to discuss his latest role, in the Coen brothers’ Western anthology film The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, we - perhaps inevitably, given that he’s playing a singing cowboy - end up chatting about what music we’ve been listening to. ![]()
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