Nick Clement to HE: “I absolutely cannot wait to see Inside Llewyn Davis, which is probably my most anticipated movie for the rest of 2013. I don’t want to hear any spoilers but what’s the deal with the cat? Is the cat as big of a part of the movie as one might think due to how many shots of it that are featured in the trailer? Is the calico cat a “character” in the film? My wife and I are cat lovers so we’re both curious.”

HE to Clement: “The Llewyn Davis cat is cool but you should probably take it easy and not look for anything special or…you know, nirvana-like to happen. The cat has an identity, yes, and is a life force of a certain kind, but he’s basically a motif. He certainly has no ‘cat personality’ except that he’s willful and crafty enough to escape apartments and run off into the streets of Manhattan and travel dozens of city blocks on his own. He’s basically just an orange object to be held and lost and found and held and lost and found. In and of himself he’s more or less meaningless. At most I see him as a kind of wandering Manhattan Ulysses. But he’s really a kind of MacGuffin.”

Clement to HE: “Love it! I watch A Serious Man every few months, so your recent comparisons have gotten me very excited.”