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Coen brothers: pictures that do the talking
There’s a presence in the room; a ghostly, disembodied presence. Joel Coen, sitting unconcerned in an armchair, doesn’t appear to feel it. Maybe it’s just me, but isn’t there normally two of them? “I don’t spend much time with Ethan outside of work,” says Joel, in a barely audible drawl. Where is Ethan? Joel mumbles something indistinct, but it doesn’t seem right to press the question. Maybe they’ve had a row; maybe Ethan’s mangled corpse is trussed up and stuffed in the ornate wooden chest under the window ledge. More urgently, will Joel be able to manage to complete a sentence on his own? Past evidence suggests it might be tricky.
Arguably the most unconventional of mainstream American directors, the Coen brothers don’t offer snarling hostility or even sullen wariness, just a helpless, unspoken consternation that they should have to talk about themselves and what they do.
But on his own, a single Coen brother does turn out to be a different animal. Without the other one with whom to trade in-jokes or exchange wondering glances, Coen solo is almost chatty, and prepared to acknowledge the nature of their relationship.
How do they stand spending so much time with each other? “Well, we work together, but it’s limited to that. We spend the working day together, so at the end of the day you never feel the need to say, ‘let’s go out to dinner’, you know what I mean? It’s all kind of limited to work.”
Are your films simply the sum of two sibling personalities that are perfectly meshed? “No . . . it’s difficult to explain. The work that we do together reflects the point at which our interests. It’s been 18 years we’ve been working together, and it’s a reflection of the point at which we’re interested in the same things . . . That is to say, we’re interested individually in different things, but that’s not what gets worked at.” So you don’t necessarily always run on the same track? ‘It’s always reflected in the work — in that it’s a dialogue, it’s an egging-on process, in that one person will suggest something and the other will respond to it or amplify it.” So who actually does what? Do the credits, Joel as director, Ethan as producer, mean anything? “No. We’re both on the set; the movies are co-directed in every sense of the word. Actors often get paranoid before they start working with us — they’re apprehensive that things’ll be confusing. You know, that I’ll say, ‘Slower’, and he’ll say, ‘Faster’ . ..”
When did you realise you had a special affinity as a film-making team? “It was really the point when we started writing together, when I was working as an assistant editor. We started writing scripts for other people, for people who were coming in to work on projects I was working on. It was that point we realised: this works out pretty well.”
Joel is referring to his own apprenticeship in the film industry: his first recorded job was, in 1980, to assistant-edit the debut of another tyro director, Sam Raimi. Raimi had the resource to raise money from family connections to finance his film — which became the savage comedy-horror classic The Evil Dead. Joel, a few years after studying film at New York university, was married at the time (this was well before he met McDormand, but the woman concerned wishes to retain her privacy). Meanwhile, Ethan, three years younger, had graduated from the philosophy department at Princeton (and written a paper on Wittgenstein), and joined his big brother in New York. It was there, as the 80s dawned, that the writing began, often in collaboration with Raimi, who has co-scripting credits on Crimewave (which became his second movie in 1985) and The Hudsucker Proxy (which became the Coens’ fifth, in 1994).
According to legend the Coens were having money problems for their later production, Blood Simple, so they turned to the local branch of Hadassah, the American women’s Zionist charity, who gave them a list of 100 wealthy Jewish philanthropists. Thus it was the brothers scraped together the US dollars 1.3m needed to get Blood Simple off the ground.
Their follow-up, Raising Arizona, set out along a different road entirely — so much so that it fell squarely into the wave of late 80s baby comedies along with Three Men And A Baby (released the same year, 1987), and She’s Having A Baby (1988). But the same stylistic tics that marked out Blood Simple are there, and the Coens’ method was set. A chiselled script, actors that were required to fill out the dialogue but not improvise from it, and a new set of cultural baggage re-formed and re-tooled in the service of storytelling.
It’s a method that has served them beautifully right through their career. It’s a tantalising thought, the Coens and their scripts. You can’t get rid of the feeling that in some bulging bottom drawer lies a stack of unseen treasures waiting for their chance to get in front of the camera. It’s happened before; The Hudsucker Proxy lay unused for a decade, written in the early 1980s with Raimi before Blood Simple had even begun filming.
As film history records, the Coens had to wait until special-effects technology had advanced to realise Hudsucker’s expensive fantasy sequences and to command the budget to cover them. (This, at US dollars 25m, wasn’t achieved until the mid-1990s, with the help of the unlikeliest of partners, action-movie superproducer Joel ‘Die Hard’ Silver.) And despite all they’ve achieved, the brothers have just run slap-bang into the same barrier; their next project, an adaptation of James Dickey’s To The White Sea, starring Brad Pitt and with a budget of US dollars 60m, has lost its backing from 20th Century Fox. The story of a US airman attempting to make his way home after crash-landing in Japan during the second world war, it ran into problems after Fox apparently baulked at the Coens’ decision to film on location in Hokkaido.
What would be the Coens’ biggest film to date is by no means dead yet, but reinforces Joel’s wariness about getting involved with the big boys. “You know, the ease with which we finance projects is completely dependent on what the budget of the movie is, and who’s in it, I guess, more than who we are or what we’ve done. For a certain price it’s easy for us to get things financed because now we’re established . . . you know, let us play in our corner of the sandbox so long as no one gets threatened or hurt. It’s hard for someone to lose money so long as the movies are done very cheaply. But when the movie gets up above a certain amount of money it gets more difficult, more dependent on other factors. —Dawn/ Guardian News Service
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