News that a second-unit team (no actors, no Coens) was in southern Minnesota last weekend to shoot some bare-trees scenes for Joel and Ethan Coen’s upcoming “Inside Llewyn Davis,” reminds me of the last time the filmmakers were in Minnesota, searching for winter: “Fargo.”
As most movie fans know, the film is almost entirely set in Minnesota, despite its title, and the brothers wanted a snowy Minnesota but the year they shot “Fargo” — 1995 — was not a particularly snowy one in the Twin Cities, so they had to keep venturing farther and farther in search of the snow-covered roads they sought for the film. This time, they reportedly wanted trees without buds for the New York-set “Davis” (which stars Justin Timberlake and Carey Mulligan, and is about the ’60s folk scene Minnesota native Bob Dylan was a part of). But trees in Minnesota were too leafy, so they sent a crew here to get the goods.