With filming completed on the Coen brothers' next film Hail, Caesar!, Joel and Ethan are now in the post-production stage, part of which is the musical scoring. Their regular composer Carter Burwell has the gig, and while not much has been revealed about the project so far, Burwell has just filled in some details during a masterclass at the Tribeca Film Festival.
The word on the street to date has been that the film is set during Hollywood's golden age and focuses on a private detective-turned-fixer (Josh Brolin) for the movie companies, who tracks down and covers up scandals among its contracted players and directors. His current case involves him digging into the mysterious disappearance of a big star mid-way through a shoot.
"It takes place on a Hollywood backlot, so you pass through all these pictures that are in production there," says Burwell. The film will feature various musical sequences relating to the films-within-the-film, including "a tap-dance water number. It's actually pretty complicated, musically — you'll see, the themes that I'm writing for the movie have to relate to the themes of the movies within the movie. So it's actually this rug with all these threads going in and out."
Clarifying later to THR{
"I wouldn't actually call it a musical comedy," he explains. "There are movies within the movie, and those movies might have comedic music, but the movie we're making is actually not comical. I haven't written the music yet, but I'm quite certain it's actually going to be quite the opposite. It's going to be rather serious, and it's about faith. It's not about the music."
Along with Brolin, Hail, Caesar! boasts an astonishing cast including George Clooney, Channing Tatum, Ralph Fiennes, Tilda Swinton, Scarlett Johansson, Jonah Hill, Christopher Lambert, Frances McDormand, Clancy Brown and Dolph Lundgren. It's out in the UK on February 26 next year.