The towering, imposing, and yet, gentle-voiced T-Bone Burnett strolled into the room occupied by a few eager journalists. Oscar Isaac, quiet and kind, followed close behind. The two artists, one a musician who has been inching closer and closer to becoming a household name for three award-winning decades, the other an actor who is sharply on the rise, not wholly but in part due to his incredible performance as the lead role in the Coen brother’s newest masterpiece, Inside Llewyn Davis, sit down at the table. Without pause, we jumped into conversation…and it wasn’t hard to get T-Bone going…
What are your five favorite film soundtracks?
T-Bone Burnett: God, I don’t know. I can’t even think of any.
Oscar Isaac: The Mission. Ennio Morricone.
T-Bone: Yeah, that was a good one. I like My Fair Lady. Even though I think that Dr. Strangelove is a much more strange and subversive film and should’ve won the Academy Award…I’m talking like a Hollywood insider, like a movie person <<laughter>>… but I loved that musical. You know the song, “I’ve Grown Accustomed To Her Face”? I can barely make it through that song, it’s just so beautiful. And “On the Street Where You Live,” It’s just beautiful songwriting and one beautiful melody after another. It beat Dr. Strangelove, which is one of the most important movies ever.
So, one of the reasons why I called the Coen brothers was because I had become a fan of theirs after their first movie, Blood Simple, because it just had so much of my home (Texas) about it and there was a style of storytelling that I thought was really great. And their next movie came out, Raising Arizona, that just had this insane soundtrack — “Ode to Joy” on the banjo with whistling and yodeling. And every joke of it landed for me. And one thing about the Coens is that there’s history in every shot. Isn’t that right?