T Bone Burnett

"Yeah, that’s a good one."

"And their next movie, Raising Arizona, came out and had this insane soundtrack. That crazy Pete Seeger “Ode to Joy” on the banjo with whistling and yodeling and it was totally mad. And every joke on it landed for me — one of the things about the Coens is there’s history in every shot. Some people say “Where do you want to put the camera?” but in the morning, they’ll draw up signs and give the actors with the lines and below a drawing from the storyboard of the camera angle they’ll be in when they have those lines. They have it all cut in their head when they do it. This is why they have control. Economy is the essence of art you know. I was looking at the detail in Raising Arizona and I thought, “We must have seen all the same films growing up because it was just speaking to me.” And it got to the part where John Goodman and his cohort come out of the ground and go into the service station to comb their hair and in the mirror you can see in spray paint OPE POE backward in the mirror. And I thought, “Really interesting this is how detailed they are.” They would take a quote from Dr. Strangelove like “Purity of essence, peace on earth” and put it backwards on a mirror and spray paint it on the wall somewhere backwards in Arizona."

"I liked My Fair Lady, though I thought Dr. Strangelove was a much more adventurous, subversive film that year, and should have won the Academy Award — listen to me talking like a Hollywood insider — but I loved that musical. So it beat Dr. Strangelove which is one of the most important films ever to me."

"Strangelove was one of the reasons I called the Coen Brothers. I became a fan after their first movie [Blood Simple], because it had so much of my home about it — I’m from Texas and I knew people who’d worked on it. And it had a sound and style of storytelling I thought was great."