Tim Blake Nelson (O Brother, Where Art Thou?) is absolutely hilarious as the title character (the aforementioned singing cowboy), whose story kicks off the anthology. He ed the Coens on stage following the screening for a discussion of the work. Here’s some highlights:

On the origins of the project:

Joel Coen: The first story [we wrote] was the first story in the movie. These are stories that were written over 25 years really, so that goes way back, that one. They follow, with a couple of exceptions, in a kind of chronological order in of when they were written, roughly. They just got put in a drawer because they were short movies and we didn’t know what we were gonna do with them. We probably didn’t even expect to make them until maybe eight or ten years ago when we started thinking, “well, maybe we could do these”. They could be seen as a sequenced series of stories or tracks on a record album or something like that. It’s a weird animal in of the format.

On whether or not they considered merging the stories into one larger narrative:

JC: No. Like I said before we had these stories, they were all westerns so there was that and then they seemed to relate to each other, but kind of retrospectively, rather than consciously when we started doing it. There was never the impulse to [combine them] but as I said it’s kind of a strange form but it grew out of just the odd nature of how they came into existence.

On the experience of the actors:

Tim Blake Nelson: We all got to read the entire script before we shot our individual constituent parts, unrelated to the others, but I think probably as actors we all felt a responsibility toward the genre of each film in which we appear. Because what I think is astonishing about this is it’s six different movies within the Western genre but then each one is in the vernacular of a sub-genre in and of itself. And that, at least for me, and I’m pretty sure with the other actors, just underscored one’s responsibility to appear indelibly within the genre in which you appeared. And so understanding that and then getting to see the successes of the others, it was just really rewarding to encounter that in all the stories. So that’s what was most gratifying about seeing the whole, was experiencing the success of others.

On how Joel and Ethan have evolved over the years as filmmakers:

TBN: Yeah they finally know what they’re doing. They figured it out on this movie. [Big laughs from the crowd.] At a previous Q&A I suddenly realized the oxymoronic nature of who and what Joel and Ethan are as directors and filmmakers, because they’re incredibly, unbelievably, in an unparalleled way, meticulous and prepared as filmmakers. So that when you get to the set there really are no decisions being made during the shooting time that could’ve been made earlier, and that rigor pays off in an interesting way because it allows for the actors inside of that meticulous preparation, to be utterly free, to have all the time an actor could possibly want. So I think it’s the amount of preparation, with which I became familiar on O Brother, and I’d never encountered before in any movie I’d done with any director, or directors. And it’s repeated once more here, with the added challenge I think for Joel and Ethan that they were making effectively six films with six different linguistic principals inside the language of the Western and I found the specificity with which they were working on the one I’m in, unbelievable in of its extremes and its fearlessness. And the way that they were pushing me, and in certain cases allowing me to do certain stuff. And then seeing the whole movie, watching five other versions of that, was truly astonishing. So what I guess I really mean to say is that the opposite of my joke is true: they continue to be unparalleled in of the work they put in, the preparation they do, and the specificity borne out of the shooting and also in the result.