Michael Stuhlbarg is A Serious Man

People may or may not be familiar wth Michael Stuhlbarg from his lead role as Larry Gopnik in the Coen Brothers' A Serious Man. Certainly the Coen Brothers have achieved a rather bold mixture of masterful film making with a purposefully convoluted storyline complimented by a perfect no-name cast. As singular as A Serious Man comes across it has the comic chops to be regarded as one of the Coen's best, especially in upcoming years. Similar accolades found The Big Lebowski years after its initial release.
While A Serious Man marks Stuhlbarg first role in a Coen Brothers film he had met them years ago when they saw a play he was in. "I had done a read through of a play years ago with Frances McDormand and we had met," Stuhlbarg tells Free Press Houston in phone interview to promote the release of A Serious Man on DVD this Tuesday (February 9). Stuhlbarg has divided his time between television, some feature film work and notable roles on Broadway. In 2005 Stuhlbarg was nommed for a Tony Award for his part in The Pillowman.
Stuhlbarg admits he "fell in love with the script the first time through. They [the Coens] want you to honor each 'ellipse' or 'um' that's written. What you hear on the screen is what was written on the page," notes Stuhlbarg. When asked what scene was the most difficult in terms of keeping from cracking up Stuhlbarg mentioned two. "It was hard to keep a straight face the first time we shot the lawyer scene with Adam Arkin. That and the cot in the living room scene I did with Richard Kind [Uncle Arthur]. The situation was so ridiculous you had to laugh."
A Serious Man was shot in the Twin Cities area of Minnesota and while the story takes place in the mid-1960s in a suburb called St. Louis Park the house scenes were lensed in an inauspicious neighborhood in nearby Bloomington. Stuhlbarg recalls the scenes that took place on the roof of the house when he climbs up to adjust the television antenna. The fantastic thing about the sequence is how the perspective establishes that there are are no fences anywhere in this quaint middle class subdivision. "They removed trees for the duration of the shoot, they re-sodded the lawns so they matched," recalls Stuhlbarg. Some small bits of digital trickery were used to make the leaves of different trees match. Interiors of the Gopnik residence were "a few blocks away from where we shot the front of the houses."
A set prop referred to throughout the film, Uncle Arthur's Mentaculus, or a probability map of the universe, turns out to be page after page of psychotic scribbling. "That was created by L.A.-based artists Michael Sell and Eric Karpeles. It was unreal to thumb through it," says Stuhlbarg adding, "All through the film Larry is constantly learning things about himself and others."