20 Things You Didn't Know About O Brother, Where Art Thou?

From its opening title card invoking the muses to its blind prophet foretelling the story like the ancient Greek Tiresias, O Brother, Where Art Thou? borrows liberally from The Odyssey throughout, even if it's not the most literal adaptation.

Whether it's the big plot outline like Ulysses (the Roman name for Odysseus) Everett McGill returning to his wife Penny (equivalent to the original story's Penelope) before she marries a new suitor, or in the individual scenes of the adversaries along the way, like seductive singing sirens and a violent one-eyed giant, there is plenty of Homeric content in the movie.

It may come as a surprise, then, to learn that neither of the Coen brothers have ever actually read Homer's epic.

When beginning to develop the movie, the brothers first conceived of the idea of a trio of fugitives from a Depression-era chain gang. Only when settling on the idea that their goal was to return home did they decide that this was a good match for the classic story structure of The Odyssey, which they had absorbed through cultural osmosis rather than actual contact with the original.

The film was written using comic book adaptations and the 1954 Kirk Douglas film Ulysses. "It's very freeing, man," said Ethan when describing adapting a literary source without reading it, suggesting it was simply "much easier that way."