Before Christopher Nolan, The Coen Brothers Made An Odyssey Movie (Without Even Reading It)

As I write this, the world is gearing up for Oscar winner Christopher Nolan's take on Homer's epic "The Odyssey," set to release in 2026. There's actually another great adaptation of "The Odyssey" out there for you to watch, and it's called "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" With that said, it's important to note that this film's directors, Joel and Ethan Coen, claimed that they never bothered to read Homer's longform poem before they crafted this story.

Speaking to The Guardian in 2000 — the year that "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" hit theaters — the Coen brothers admitted that star Tim Blake Nelson, who leads the film alongside John Turturro and George Clooney, is likely the only person who ever read the book before filming. After joking about whether or not Nelson, who was a classics major at Brown University, "read it in Greek," Joel confirmed he read it. "Between the cast and us, Tim Nelson is the only one who's actually read the Odyssey," Ethan went on to clarify.

Not only that but the brothers saw fit to joke about being pretty unfamiliar with monsters from "The Odyssey" like Scylla and Charybdis — to the point where it's hard to tell how those dangers from the poem even found their way into the movie. "It's very, you, usually know selectively based on 'The Odyssey,'" Joel quipped.

In the same article, Joel admits that the brothers didn't really do any research on the movie's time and setting either — it's set in the South in 1937, and as Joel put it, "We weren't going out and doing research and trying to apply it to a story, it's all much more haphazard." But you know what? That doesn't actually matter. "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" is just that good.

Knowing that Joel and Ethan Coen didn't read "The Odyssey" before directing their own take on the story, what does happen in "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" We first meet Everett, Delmar, and Pete — played respectively by George Clooney, Tim Blake Nelson, and John Turturro — as they embark on a daring escape from their chain gang, with Everett claiming that he knows the location of buried treasure. (Also, it's important to note here that Everett's real first name just so happens to be Ulysses, the Latin version of Odysseus, the main character of "The Odyssey" who will be played by Matt Damon in Christopher Nolan's film.) As it turns out, the whole buried treasure thing is a ruse; just like Odysseus spends Homer's epic poem trying to find his way back to his wife Penelope, Everett is hellbent on stopping his wife Penny's (Holly Hunter) upcoming wedding. 

Along their journey, Pete, Delmar, and Everett encounter a number of obstacles that definitely echo ones faced by Odysseus, including a group of singing sirens who enchant and bewitch them, a cyclops in the form of a Ku Klux Klan leader (portrayed by John Goodman, a Coen brothers regular), and a blind seer who predicts Everett's fate. Oh, and along the way, Delmar becomes convinced that the sirens turned Pete into a toad — they did no such thing — and the trio manages to become a music sensation as the Soggy Bottom Boys with the song "Man of Constant Sorrow." (Did I mention the music is great in this movie? The music is great in this movie.) "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" isn't the world's most faithful adaptation of "The Odyssey," but it's genuinely incredible anyway.

If you're familiar with the Coen brothers as writers and directors and love their projects, you might have noticed that, after "The Ballad of Buster Scruggs" in 2018, the two have basically parted ways. So what gives? Unfortunately for fans of their collaborations like "O Brother, Where Art Thou," the brothers have elected to work separately in recent years ... and as their frequent musical collaborator Carter Burwell told "The Score" podcast in July of 2021, Joel branched out as a solo director with "The Tragedy of Macbeth" because Ethan was considering quitting directing all together.

"Ethan just didn't want to make movies anymore. Ethan seems very happy doing what he's doing, and I'm not sure what Joel will do after this," Burwell shared at the time. "They also have a ton of scripts they've written together that are sitting on various shelves. I hope maybe they get back to those. I've read some of those, and they are great."

Thankfully, in August 2025, Ethan put rumors of a real rift to rest as he returned as a director with another oddly punctuated movie, "Honey, Don't!" "Neither of us knew what the other would be doing or not. After the last movie we made together, 'The Ballad of Buster Scruggs,' I was like, 'I can't do another one. This is too hard. I'm out,'" Ethan told Collider, saying that Joel made "Macbeth" and then the COVID lockdowns happened. "Now, there was never a decision by the two of us to do movies separately," he concluded, giving us all hope for an eventual reunion. Maybe this time, they'll adapt "The Iliad" without reading it.