Power Ballad  SXSW Premiere, John Carney Interview

"Once we had Paul Rudd in place, there's two men in this film and they're fighting over a song. And so we had Paul, but Paul came on board because I knew Paul a little bit from talking about another project. So he fitted in and then once he came in, you had to then sort of think about, well, what's this—what's the yin—who's the person to oppose now that we know this guy? And I spoke to a few actors and there were a few actors kind of who were really good, who wanted to do the role. But it became quite apparent that we should get a musician. And I don't know why that is. I think it's because we were asking Paul to play a musician. If we got another actor to play, it might just seem—I don't know, there'd just be an interesting chemistry if we got somebody who had really been in the music industry and just knows the feel of that. And so when I met Nick, he was that guy immediately. Like he—he didn't try too hard to get the role or he didn't try and tell me—he was cool and calm and it was like, 'That guy's done this. He's been around.'

I hope they're singing the song and I hope that—I don't know, there's an interesting message in the film in a way. It's kind of like when all is said and done at the end of creativity, we die and we leave our bones behind us for a while, but then the bones fade. Hopefully, something that doesn't fade is what you do on the earth, you know? Whether it's you create or you write something or whatever it is. That will outlast you and ultimately you're not going to care—nobody's going to care who wrote it or who did it. It becomes a kind of a free thing. Do you know what I mean? Like that bird song going past there. Nobody can copyright that. And that's what happens to all art in the end, you know? There's nobody cashing in from Shakespeare and I don't know what the stories with like Gershwin now are, but eventually that's going to go out of copyright. All—all art eventually becomes free. And so this movie is about two guys disputing who owns this song, but what the main character I think overcomes and learns in it is that, you know, this is a battle for now but—but there's a bigger battle which is—takes the philosophical sort of wisdom that he gains throughout the movie."