The career of any great movie actor often can be traced back to a single moment, or series of moments, in a single film, where the audience takes notice as a star is born.
You know what I mean: Tom Cruise sliding across the floor in “Risky Business”; Liza Minnelli exploding onto the stage in “Cabaret.”
Oscar Isaac (“Drive”) has a scene like that about two-thirds of the way through “Inside Llewyn Davis,” the great new film from Joel and Ethan Coen.
Isaac’s Llewyn Davis, a brilliant folk singer in New York City circa 1961 who simply can’t find his way to professional success, performs the English ballad “The Death of Queen Jane” in a crucial audition. It’s an aching, heartbreaking eruption of pain and hope; despair and passion.
amNewYork spoke with Isaac about the movie, which is in theaters now.
You’re a musician and an actor and you performed the songs live here. Talk to me about that challenge.
On the practical side, actually, performing live at a show is scarier, because you only have one chance to get it right. In the film, if I f—– up, we could just do it again. … However, you have to add the element of the camera being there and the fact that it is a crucial element to the character.
The folk style was new for you. How’d you go about learning it?
You get the script. Or the audition at least, we just got a couple of scenes. And a recording of “Hang Me,” Dave Van Ronk, which I hadn’t heard before. The first thing I do is fine everything that Dave Van Ronk has ever recorded and listened to. Then it was a process of listening to his type of guitar playing, listening to what it is and then deciding, I needed to record the song, so ‘How am I going to do it?’ It was very difficult but I had something very serendipitous and fortunate happen. I was doing a small film in Long Island. There was a guy, who was playing a featured extra, old guy at the bar, and in between takes there was a guitar lying around. He picked it up and started playing in exactly the Dave Van Ronk style.
So what happened?
He was incredible. So I went up to him and started talking to him and I said, “Wow man, you’re amazing. What’s your story.” He said, “My name’s Eric Franzen, I’ve been in New York forever, I’m an actor.” I said, “Wow, I’m auditioning for this thing, it’s loosely based on Dave Van Ronk, have you ever heard of Dave Van Ronk?” He said, “Yeah I played with Dave.” I said, “Do you give guitar lessons”? He said, “Absolutely, come to my place” and I asked, “Where do you live”? And he said, “I live on MacDougal Street above the old Gaslight.” … So then, he started teaching me this style.
Is it hard to move on from a project like this, given who you worked with and the acclaim it’s received?
I don’t think I’ll ever move on from this. It was such a seminal moment in my life and more than anything, because I developed a friendship with Joel and Ethan. They’ve enriched my life just with talks with them about anything. … And my work with T-Bone [Burnett, the film’s music supervisor]. He’s a musical revolutionary. That was such singularity for me that it’s impossible to move on. At the same time, I like to work, and so I’m interested in bringing some of what I’ve learned from that experience onto the next thing, but I don’t know if I’ll ever have something that’s quite as seminal in my life as this one.
