Filmmakers Ethan and Joel Coen, AKA The Coen Brothers. BROTHERS' KEEPERS
By
Alex Simon
Editor’s Note: This article originally appeared in the April 1998 issue of Venice Magazine.
Joel and Ethan Coen have been labeled (perhaps rightfully so) the makers of America's most eccentric and unpredictable films. Joel (43) and Ethan (40) were born and raised in St. Louis Park, Minnesota, a suburb of Minneapolis, the second and third child born to parents who were highly-regarded academics, their father in economics and their mother in history. Joel attended NYU film school, after which he began his career in movies as an assistant editor, cutting his teeth on several low-budget horror films, including pal Sam Raimi's now-legendary übergorefest, The Evil Dead in 1982. Ethan graduated Princeton with a degree in philosophy that same year and the two decided to branch out on their own. Although their credits list Joel as the director, Ethan the producer and both as co-writers, the brothers share all their duties evenly on-set.
The brothers' first entry into the Coen collection was Blood Simple (1985), a stylish and clever film noir that earned the young siblings international critical kudos. The film also starred a fresh young face named Frances McDormand, whom Joel would later marry. They followed this with the outrageous comedy (and the first of their, so far, three kidnap-themed movies) Raising Arizona in 1987, with Holly Hunter and Nicholas Cage, creating what many agree is the finest portrayal of white trash in screen history. This was followed by the off-beat and riveting gangster drama Miller's Crossing in 1990 and then Barton Fink, the tale of a 1930's Hollywood screenwriter who slowly descends into madness. The film won Best Picture, Director, and Best Actor (John Turturro) at the 1990 Cannes Film Festival, as well as two New York Film Critics Awards, three Oscar nominations and one Golden Globe nomination. Next in 1994 was the Joel Silver-produced Hudsucker Proxy, a Preston Sturges/Frank Capra homage that featured Tim Robbins as a naive young Capitalist in training and Paul Newman as the crafty industrialist pulling his strings. Finally there was Fargo, the now-classic tale of a pregnant Minnesota police chief's search for three of the most inept criminals in the annals of crime movies. The film won 1996 Oscars for Best Screenplay for the frères Coen and Best Actress for Mrs. C., Frances McDormand.
The Coens latest opus is The Big Lebowski, a mistaken-identity comic adventure in the Raymond Chandler mold, about a 60's leftover named Jeff "the Dude" Lebowski (Jeff Bridges) who's mistaken for another Jeff Lebowski--this one being the very rich Jeff Lebowski. The Dude, as he likes to be called, takes this misunderstanding and uses it as a psychedelic roadmap for one stony adventure after another through the back streets, bowling alleys and mansions of L.A. And through the Coens' eyes, L.A. has never looked quite like this! Lebowski is a feast for the eyes, the ears and the funnybone and is populated with the most outrageous cast of eccentric characters in any film since bizarro icon Federico Fellini took the long good-bye to that big studio in the sky. Check it out.
The Coens sat down recently to discuss the amazing collection of celluloid canvas that they've given the world. They are an interesting contrast. Joel, tall and thin, has a stillness and focus about him, never moving from the chair he's firmly planted himself in, while Ethan, smaller, wiry and more intense, is given to sudden fits of pacing about the room which he is currently occupying. They frequently finish each other's thoughts and, as one journalist rather perceptively put it, one can almost picture them as a latter-day Laurel & Hardy, sharing the same bed, wearing matching monogrammed pajamas and night caps. In reality, they are just a couple of nice, midwestern Jewish guys who happen to have an unquenchable appetite for movies and talent for movie-making.
So how do a couple kids from St. Louis Park, MN fall in love with the movies?
Joel Coen: Well, they had this show on TV called Mel Jazz's Matinee Movie. Mel Jazz was the guy who introduced the movie and he also sold Munce TV's and, what was the other thing, Eth'?
(Ethan Coen is pacing the room now).
Ethan Coen: His other sponsor was Downtown Chevytown.
Joel: Yeah, he was really, in a way, a very eclectic programmer...
Ethan: He was a visionary...
Joel: A visionary, yeah. And sort of a precursor to a lot of the sort of, great film programmers that turned up on cable networks later on. One day he'd show, like,
8 1/2, and the next day he'd show Son of Hercules. (laughs). Ethan's theory was that he'd bought the whole Joe Levine catalogue...
Ethan: Right...
(Ethan stops pacing and sits).
Joel:...and would just indiscriminately show whatever was...
Ethan: He'd just kind of interrupt the middle of 8 1/2 and go "Wow! This movie is really wild, isn't it?"
(Both Coens laugh)(So does the interviewer).
Joel: He had other really insightful things to say during the break. So we'd watch The Matinee Movie as kids...Steve Reeves, Fellini, Doris Day movies...
Ethan: Then later at night, at eleven, there was Downtown Chevytown Theater. And they had Tarzan movies on that frequently. And those Johnny Sheffield Tarzan knock-off movies. He played "Boy" in the old Tarzan movies, then he got too old to play "Boy," so they gave him his own series of movies.
Joel: That was Bomba the Jungle Boy, wasn't it?
Ethan: Was it?!
Joel: Yeah. Downtown Chevytown was kind of a mix of Tarzan and A Touch of Mink. That was the stuff we really liked.
Ethan: Yeah. Isn't it interesting, though...
(Ethan gets up and paces some more).
Ethan: The whole Johnny Sheffield phenomena is kind of a Jean-Pierre Leaud thing, you know? He got older so his character had to get older.
"The 400 Blows of the Jungle"?
Joel & Ethan: Yeah! (laugh).
Did you start out making little super 8 films as kids?
Joel: Yeah. When we got a little older around 11 or 12...we remade a lot of the stuff we'd seen on Mel Jazz's Matinee Movie. I remember doing a remake of The Naked Prey...
Ethan: Yeah, jungle movies really made a mark...
How did you film The Naked Prey in St. Louis Park?
Ethan: Well, we had trees. (laughs)
(Ethan sits for a spell).
Joel: Yeah, we'd have a couple kids who would be natives and much more impressive than that was the remake we did of Advise and Consent, which is a Washington, sort of political thriller. I think that was a Super 8 two-reeler. It was...
Ethan: Pretty ambitious...
Did having two academicians as parents help foster a more creative thinking style for you as kids?
Joel: Well they certainly had no connection to the movie business, although they went to movies. They were certainly very open to any kind of, you know, when we first started doing this it wasn't alarming to them in any way.
Were you guys always writing together when you were in college?
Joel: Not really until I'd started working as an assistant editor on low budget, sort of, splatter movies. Then Ethan and I started writing...a lot of these guys came in and wanted scripts written, these producers who were looking for very low budget things.
(Ethan now stops pacing, stands).
What were some of the movies you worked on?
Joel: They mostly had "Dead" in the title. The best one was The Evil Dead, Sam Raimi's first movie, and that's how we got to know Sam, who's an old friend of ours. The rest were all those sort of early 80's Friday the 13th knockoffs: Fear No Evil, Nightmare...you know, they were all...
Scantily-clad girls running from guys with big knives.
Joel: Right. Evil Dead was the only really distinguished one I worked on.
So how did Blood Simple come about?
Ethan (as he sits): Having written these things, especially for Sam, and going through the process of watching people raise the money for their own movies, starting with very limited, or no experience, as we had, in production...we figured, if they can do it, why not us?
Joel: And we'd been writing together, so we thought we'd write something that theoretically we could do for a low enough budget that we could go out and raise the money for ourselves. And Sam was very helpful in terms of he'd sort of gone about setting up a legal entity in order to raise it, what you had to do...
Ethan: And some people aren't very forthcoming with that sort of information and want to treat it as a sort of trade secret, but Sam was really generous in terms of giving us all the benefit of his experience.
Joel: Yeah, he was an early mentor of ours in terms of showing us how to get something off the ground.
How difficult was that first one? Was it a major hurdle?
Joel: Very difficult. It's a very frustrating process raising money that way, especially in the economic climate at the time...It took about a year to finally raise the money. To be honest with you, it was the last time we had any real trouble getting money for a movie.
I thought you perfectly captured Arizona in Raising Arizona. Did you research the area at all before you shot there?
Joel: We'd never even been there before we shot the movie! We liked the landscape, or the idea of the landscape...
Ethan: We had this sort of cartoon idea about cactus, really...
Joel: Yeah because you really only get the Saguaros around there, you know?
Ethan: We didn't know anything. We were going to shoot in Tuscon, but when we went there, it was much greener, not the sort of classic desert with Saguaro, which was what we were after.
Joel: It was the landscape we wanted and then the title that we came up with.
You came up with the title and then the story?!
Joel: Early on...
Ethan: Yeah, early on...
Do you guys outline before you write, or just write?
Ethan: Just write...
Joel: Generally we do. Depending on the script, we may have a sort of vague idea where we want things to end up...but never outlined or rigorously laid out in any way before we write.
How long do you generally work on a script, or is there no set amount of time?
Ethan: No set amount of time. Some take longer than others. Then it also gets complicated by the fact that frequently, actually more and more, we'll put one aside and then move onto something else, or because an actor that we're writing a part for isn't available for whatever reason. It might be years after starting a script that we actually get around finish and shoot it.
Do you usually cast in your head before you shoot?
Joel: There's a little bit of a mix always going on. Even from Blood Simple on, we would write specific parts for a specific actor, someone whose work we knew or who we knew personally and were friends with. So there's always been a mix of parts for specific actors and parts where we're not sure who's going to play them. In Blood Simple, for example with Emmet Walsh's part, we wrote that for him. We knew his work. Holly's part in Raising Arizona, was written for her, but Holly was an old friend of ours.
Ethan: Yeah, Holly was Fran (McDormand's) roommate when Fran did Blood Simple.
Joel: John Turturro we knew before Miller's Crossing because he went to school with Fran...you know...
You guys have a very distinctive visual and narrative style. Were there any specific filmmakers who influenced you heavily as you got older?
Ethan: Well that's hard to say. You can look at specific movies. I mean, when we brought Barton Fink to Cannes, we said to Roman Polanski that we were very lucky he was President of the jury because that film certainly owes a lot to Polanski with films like Repulsion and The Tenant. I think it's kind of like, movie-to-movie the influences vary and I think they've tended to be more literary influences than filmic. Miller's Crossing is pretty much a Dashiell Hammett story, but it was his novels we were thinking of, not the movies (adapted from them).
The Big Lebowski actually reminded me of something Raymond Chandler would have written.
Joel: Yeah...
Ethan: Yeah...
Joel: And again (Ethan gets up and starts pacing again) we were thinking of his novels, except in certain passages. The scene where Jeff Bridges passes out and Sam Elliott narrates saying "Darkness washed over The Dude..." that was sort of lifted from a different language, from Murder My Sweet, the Edward Dmytryk movie.
Was Barton Fink partially born from your own experience as writers and the insanity that the writing process can create?
Joel: I don't know...We both read this book called "City of Nets" by Otto Freidrich...
Ethan: It was about Hollywood in the 40's, specifically about German expatriates in Hollywood. You know, Schoenberg and Thomas Mann living in Santa Monica. It just sounds so funny...There was this other book called "Faulkner In Hollywood." It was kind of reading that book and thinking, uh...
Joel: Again, we thought of the two Johns (Goodman and Turturro), putting them in a movie, one next to the other. That's sort of how that got started. And also thinking about this idea of a big, deserted hotel. So it was those three things: the Otto Freidrich book, those two actors and thinking about the hotel.
Ethan: There was a lot of Jim Thompson influence there, as well...
Joel: Yeah, Jim Thompson has this novel set in an empty hotel, called "Hell of a Woman."
So it was kind of a weird mix.
(Ethan sits).
Hudsucker was your first foray into "mainstream" Hollywood with Joel Silver producing. Were you hoping that would be your breakthrough into the mainstream?
Ethan: Well yeah, sure...
Joel: It's the lowest-grossing movie we've done. And the most expensive.
Ethan: It's not that we were looking for a mainstream success necessarily, but anytime we do a movie, we want the people who financed it to come out well.
Joel: Yeah, we generally work with people we like and they put a certain amount of trust in you to make something that's going to work. So you're disappointed when it doesn't. You know, it happens. It's hard to predict, that's for sure. I mean, I never would have predicted that Fargo would have been the movie that grossed the most of all of our...
Ethan: Right...Hudsucker was the movie that was most directly influenced by other movies, Preston Sturges and that kind of thing.
(Ethan starts pacing again)
If anything, when people read Fargo did they say that nobody outside of the midwest is going to get this?
Ethan: Yeah, but then again, we knew the movie's cost would be so cheap, that it'd be hard to lose. So we thought that, okay, maybe it wouldn't be a huge, big commercial hit, but for $6 million...
Joel: Who cares?
Ethan: Right. Who cares?
Fargo was based on a true story, right?
Joel: No. It says it was a true story at the beginning, but it was actually all made up. We wanted to write a movie that was a "true story" sort of genre. We thought that if we did something where we told the audience up front was a true story, that they'd allow you to do things they wouldn't normally allow you to do, if they thought it was fiction. So it allowed us to introduce the heroine after 40 minutes without pissing people off. Or Fran's scene with the Japanese guy that doesn't seem to have anything to do with the plot. It'll make people more accepting if they're not prepped for a thriller. That way they'll be like "Well, it must've happened this way, 'cause it's true, right?"
How did people in Minnesota react to Fargo?
Joel: Well, it was very split. People either thought it was very funny and that they were in a unique position to appreciate it, or they felt that we were distorting and exaggerating and being very patronizing and cruel. The other funny thing we kept running into were the people who'd say "I don't talk like that, but I know someone who does." (laughs) The reaction to the movie everywhere was bigger and more widespread than we expected...Even with Raising Arizona, which is pretty hard to be offended by. It's such a broad comedy. But people in Arizona were very offended by it.
You've experimented with pretty much ever genre of storytelling. What's next?
Ethan: Well, we've never done a dog movie, like Old Yeller, or a western. (Ethan sits).
Joel: Raising Arizona got close to it in parts. We wanted to do a movie with Fran and a pal of Fran's as toxic waste inspectors. They'd walk around in the big suits, you know, inspecting toxic waste dumps.
Ethan: Kind of a Troma comedy.
Joel: We did write a western actually called The Sons of Ben Coffee. It's more of a TV movie, though, because it's only like a half hour long.
Ethan: It's kind of a contemplation of man's passage on this earth in the old west.
Joel: And we've been working on an adaptation of The Odyssey...
Ethan: Updating The Odyssey...
Joel: Yeah. Set in the American south during the depression. Mostly because we want to see in the opening during the titles "Based upon The Odyssey by Homer." (Coens laugh) (Interviewer laughs)
Gonna stick Kirk Douglas in there somewhere?
Joel: No. Goodman was the Cyclops, though. He's a member of the Ku Klux Klan and he's wearing one of those hoods with only one hole cut out. (laughs).
Ethan: Yeah, we've actually written a lot of that.
Joel: We've also written a movie about a barber in northern California in the late 40's who wants to go into the dry cleaning business. It doesn't have a title, actually.
Ethan: We need someone to finance our TV movie, really. Ben Coffee. Maybe we could make it one of The Contemplations, Joel, although it's a little long for that.
What are The Contemplations?
(At this point both Coens trade knowing glances and start laughing in synch. It borders on being disturbing and the Interviewer almost bolts from the room, expecting their braying cackles of laughter to perhaps summon the Devil Himself. The laughter soon subsides, along with the Interviewer's uneasiness).
(Ethan starts pacing again).
Ethan: Over the years we've written a bunch of shorts to be used in an anthology, The Contemplations. It starts with a guy going through this dusty old library and he finds this old leather-bound book called The Contemplations. Each contemplation is then a chapter of the movie.
(Ethan stops pacing. Looks at Joel. Joel looks at Ethan. That synchronous laughter starts again. Heart-in-throat, the Interviewer musters up courage for a final question:)
Any advice for first-time filmmakers?
Joel: Make the shooting schedule as long as you can, even if you have to sacrifice other things that seem important. The trade-off towards time for shooting is always the smart one to make. The big compromises you make are the result of not enough time to shoot. Cut anything that costs money...pay people less. You're always going to be better off the more days you have.
