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

Some viewers have found themselves a little confused by the film's title. What does it refer to? Nobody in the movie even has a brother.

The name, however, is borrowed from another movie. Or, to put it more precisely, borrowed from a fictional movie inside another movie.

O Brother, Where Art Thou? is the dream project of director John L. Sullivan (Joel McCrea) in Preston Sturges's 1941 satirical picaresque comedy Sullivan's Travels. In the film, Sullivan is a successful director of lighthearted comedies who feels unfulfilled and wants to make a serious drama about the plight of "the common man", a drama called O Brother, Where Art Thou?

Sturges, one of the first Hollywood screenwriters to direct his own work, has always been a huge influence on the Coens through his use of fast-paced, idiom-heavy screwball dialogue and their O Brother doesn't just pay tribute to him in its title.

Elements of its odyssey of hobos and prison gangs in Depression-era America are also reflective of that in Sullivan's Travels. The scene in which a gang of convicts watch a movie screening (in Sullivan's Travels a Disney cartoon which makes him realise the value in making work that makes people laugh) is lifted wholesale for this movie.

Joel has even suggested, only semi-jokingly, that their O Brother, Where Art Thou? is intended to be the movie that Sullivan would have made after all his adventures in his own story.