#The ballad of buster scruggs cast movie

Nelson described the brothers as formalists - their visual compositions are precise - who are also self-aware about the medium of movies. “I never had a conversation with them about, ‘Who is this woman, where is she from, what is she like?’ All the information I really needed was on the page.” “I think they are, with Ben Hecht and Billy Wilder, some of the all-time great screenwriters. “I’d say that their direction starts in their writing,” Kazan says. “It was a big help imaginatively.”īoth she and Nelson talked effusively of how wonderful it was to work with Joel and Ethan Coen. “It makes you feel like you have time traveled,” Kazan says. There’s just nothing as far as the eye can see except for grass, and you’re looking at a bunch of Conestoga wagons. “You look around and you can’t see any sign of civilization,” she says. Where Nelson’s story was shot in New Mexico, most of Kazan’s was filmed in western Nebraska, on remote ranch lands that made it easy to slip into character.

A love interest forms, the shy young woman starts to find her strength, Native American warriors attack, and - well, it wouldn’t be fair to give away the story of Alice, her beau Billy (played by Bill Heck, with whom she’d previously played a married couple in the play “Angels In America”), and a noisy little terrier named President Pierce, would it? Where Nelson’s chapter is more a comedic musical, Kazan’s is a romantic drama. “I can can count them on one hand, roles that you read and go, ‘No, that’s the middle of the target for me.’” Unlike some roles where she has to work to find its heart, this one fit from the start. Her fate seemed so important to me, like, I worried for her and wanted the best for her, the way I would feel about a friend.” “Then to read the part and have it be this incredibly richly drawn, real person. “You wait for that email or that call to come in,” she says. “I look great in a bonnet - got a face for it,” she jokes.) (This is her second wagon train movie, though, after “Meek’s Cutoff” in 2011. Kazan, who plays a hesitant young woman who suddenly finds herself alone and unprepared on a wagon train to Oregon, says she, too, jumped at the chance to work with the Coen brothers for the first time. “That’s the aesthetic of these movies, that’s what was so extravagantly silly about those movies: This Western guy out on the terrain, but he’s perfectly clean, and the makeup’s almost foppish, and he’s playing a guitar on a horse. “It’s the look Joel and Ethan wanted,” he says.

#The ballad of buster scruggs cast movie

The movie opens with Buster riding his horse Dan through some picturesque canyon, singing and playing guitar in brilliant white cowboy wear, his face made up in the thickest pancake makeup Nelson had ever worn.

It’s visuals are spectacular - filmed mostly in New Mexico and Nebraska - and the storytelling has that mix of humor and violence, fate and deliverance for which the Coens are known. The cast includes Zoe Kazan, who you’ll meet in her own chapter momentarily, as well as actors such as James Franco, Liam Neeson, Tom Waits and Tyne Daly. 16, is an anthology film, its six standalone chapters set in the Old West telling archetypal stories of that dusty genre with the signature Coen brothers style.

“The Ballad of Buster Scruggs,” which opens in theaters and on Netflix on Friday, Nov. That was in 2002 - no, that’s not a typo - and Joel Coen replied along the lines of great, we’ll get back to you when we’ve written the rest of the movie. “I didn’t tarry, I said, ‘OK, I’ll do it,’” he says. He wanted to make sure that the role, his first for the Coen brothers, was a good fit for him, because his biggest fear was he’d get to the set and disappoint them, Nelson says. “Which was a bit of a departure for me with them because when they gave me ‘O Brother Where Art Thou’ I said I’ve got to sleep on it.” “I said, ‘Oh, yeah, I’ll certainly do it,’” Nelson says during a recent interview at the Four Season Los Angeles at Beverly Hills. When writer-director Joel Coen gave Tim Blake Nelson the script for a part he and his brother Ethan Coen hoped he would play - the title role in “The Ballad of Buster Scruggs” - he didn’t hesitate.