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

Easily the toughest part of the O Brother, Where Art Thou? shoot was the mass baptism in the Mississippi River where Pete and Delmar become born again.

With a huge cast of extras crowded in the muddy banks of the river, an ambitious rising crane shot had to be set up with slow, heavy equipment, leaving cast and crew at the mercy of the local wildlife.

"By the time you got all the timing down — because it starts low and tracks all the way up — all of the actors were up in mud and getting bit by crawfish," legendary cinematographer Roger Deakins, lensing his fifth of twelve collaborations with the Coens to date, recalled, "It was disgusting."

Worse than the crayfish, though, were the local venemous snakes, which proved such a menace that a snake catcher had to be hired as part of the crew.

Noticing the man trapping snakes around the river bank with nothing more than a golf club and a sack, Joel Coen approached him: "I asked him what you called somebody with this profession, and he said, 'an idiot!'"