Trevor Hogg profiles the careers of filmmaking siblings the Coen brothers in the fourth of a four part feature… read parts one, two and three.
Working once again with celebrity actor George Clooney, Joel and Ethan Coen found themselves being accused of having “gone Hollywood” with the release of Intolerable Cruelty in 2003. Morally compromised divorce lawyer Miles Massey (Clooney) falls for a conniving serial divorcé, Marylin Rexroth (Catherine Zeta-Jones).
Channeling the suave comic spirit of Cary Grant, Clooney enjoyed performing in the romantic comedy, “The fun part of these characters is that they both don’t really realize the trouble they’re in emotionally until they run into each other.” Catherine Zeta-Jones (Chicago) found her role to be challenging, “I didn’t want Marilyn to be that deliciously bitchy, because I wanted people to like her. And I wanted George, and my other husband, to like me.” Commenting on how she perceived Marilyn, Zeta-Jones declared, “She really has no idea how much chaos she can create. She is like the eye of the storm. The tornado – all the craziness that happens around her – she just waltzes through it.”
Cast alongside George Clooney and Catherine Zeta-Jones are Billy Bob Thorton, Geoffrey Rush (Quills), Cedric the Entertainer (Be Cool), and Richard Jenkins (The Visitor); capturing their performances on film was veteran Coen brothers collaborator and cinematographer Roger Deakins. “We wanted to make a glossy picture,” says Deakins. “The film is about high-society, rich people, and we wanted the people and the locations to look rich, classy, more glossy than what we usually do on [Coen brothers’] features.
Intolerable Cruelty marked two significant changes for the Coens. The script was composed with three other writers and the movie footage was assembled digitally. “It’s so much more efficient,” Ethan remarked on the reason for embracing computer editing, “and so much easier to mark where you want to mark and review what you’ve marked, as opposed to rolling back and forth on a Moviola and using the brake and getting a general idea within a few frames. It’s also infinitely easier to look at alternate takes as opposed to handling all this film. You find yourself looking at more. You find yourself being more comprehensive or exhaustive than you would be if you were still working in film.” Joel agreed. “You can cut about twice as fast as we’re used to. That’s kind of an issue for us, since we don’t start cutting until after we finish shooting.
Earning twice as much as its $60 million budget, Intolerable Cruelty was well received by film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum of the Chicago Reader, “The Coens do an efficient job of stamping their signature grotesquerie on sumptuous Beverly Hills and Las Vegas settings and ladling on gallows of humour and malice, sometimes with the verve of early Robert Zemeckis.” Ruthe Stein of the San Francisco Chronicle was far less impressed with the picture; she wrote, “Two-thirds through, Intolerably Cruelty shifts to Las Vegas and runs out of steam, like a gambler after an all-nighter.”
Remaking the 1955 British screwball comedy The Ladykillers (2004) was next on the cinema agenda for the American filmmakers though it was not originally planned that way. Initially, the movie was to be directed by the Coen brothers’ former cinematographer Barry Sonnenfeld. “It wasn’t actually something that ever crossed our minds,” explained Joel, “until he [Sonnenfeld] brought it to us and then Ethan and I looked at the movie again, which we hadn’t seen probably since we were kids. We thought this was something we could do something with and have fun with. Then Barry decided not to do it, and we decided we wanted to do it.”
Under the disguise of being musicians, a group of criminals led by Prof. G.H. Dorr (Tom Hanks) rent a basement apartment from the elderly widow Marva Munson (Irma P. Hall) with the intentions of tunneling into the vault of the neighbouring casino.
Finding an actor who could play the mastermind of the casino robbery was not an easy one for the Coens. “It’s a big part,” stated Ethan, “in a sense almost theatrical, and we felt there was a danger if it was in the wrong hands.” The two Minneapolis-born siblings decided to work with Oscar-winner Tom Hanks (Cast Away) who accidentally developed a signature cackle for the dubious character. “The first time I did it there was a joke at the end of one scene,” recalled Hanks, “and I think Professor Dorr surprised himself that he had actually stumbled on such a witticism. It was like, ‘Oh, I’m actually making a joke here,’ so it began there, and it was a question of, how deep is that well? How often can you go to it, to the rat quiver source? It kind of took over the entire body like a petite mal seizure.”
Tom Hanks also created a personal history for his charlatan film persona. “He says he is from Mississippi, although where, who knows? He says he’s on sabbatical from the institution where he teaches, the University of Southern Mississippi in Hattiesburg, which is true, but I think he’s been on sabbatical for fourteen years. He was fired because of a hasty decision by the dean in order to avoid the sexual harassment suit. I do believe he studied at the Sorbonne, but I think he studied drinking. He was essentially accepted, read a couple of the Flaubert books, and then spent the rest of his time in bars.” Hanks did not have any problems handling the endless pontifications by Prof. G.H. Dorr. “The good news is that it’s not unlike doing Shaw or Shakespeare in that the ideas are so easily connected that, once you do the mechanics of memorizing, it just flows out of you.”
Bearing witness to all the cinematic shenanigans is Gwain MacSam, a foulmouthed casino janitor played by Marlon Wayans (Requiem for a Dream). “He has the audience point of view,” remarked Wayans. “He says what everybody else is thinking. He’s a lot smarter in some ways than Hanks’ character, who spits out the big words. He’s like, ‘I don’t know big words, but I know a thing or two. I know a shady man and that Pancake is shady.’’’ The cast for the picture also featured the acting talents of J.K. Simmons (Juno), Tzi Ma (The Quiet American), and Ryan Hurst (Patch Adams).
All the work Tom Hanks put into his role did not go unnoticed by Claudia Puig of USA Today, who wrote, “It is Hanks pitch-perfect timing and eccentric portrayal that makes the movie. You can’t wait to hear what sardonically archaic utterance comes out of his mouth next.” Not everyone was impressed. Film critic Anthony Lane of The New Yorker, scathingly wrote, “Everybody pulls a silly face, or sports a behavioral tic, or shouts his lines a little to loud, for too long, with the camera hanging in close to record the comic effect. After half an hour we realize that instead of enjoying a funny film, we were being lightly bullied into finding fun where precious little exists.”
At the Cannes Film Festival, The Ladykillers was nominated for the Palme d’Or. The picture, which saw Joel and Ethan share the directing and producing credits for the first time, earned $77 million worldwide.
Taking on the role of producers, the Coens supported John Turturro’s directorial debut Romance & Cigarettes (2006). The musical romantic-comedy featured performances by Kate Winslet (Titanic), Susan Sarandon (Atlantic City), and Christopher Walken (The Deer Hunter) as well as songs from Tom Jones, James Brown, and Bruce Springsteen.
Asked to contribute one of the eighteen short films for a project entitled Paris, je t’aime (2006), Joel and Ethan worked with Steve Buscemi to create Tuileries. An American tourist (Buscemi) traveling on the Paris Metro unwittingly becomes drawn into a conflict when he makes eye contact with a feuding young couple (Axel Kiener and Julie Bataille). “We met him in an audition,” recollected Joel regarding Buscemi who has appeared in four of the Coen brothers’ films. “When there’s a great collaboration like the one with him, you want to work together again.” Ethan sheepishly admitted, “We always end up killing his character for some reason.” As to whether the actor resents getting killed, Ethan answered, “He hasn’t complained yet. Maybe that’s why we continue to do it.”
After attempting to write a screenplay during the 1980s, author Cormac McCarthy abandoned the idea and expanded the tale into a novel. A year before No Country For Old Men was to be published, producer Scott Rudin acquired the movie rights and approached the Coens about adapting the story for the big screen.
While out hunting in Texas, Vietnam War veteran Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) comes across the aftermath of a drug deal gone fatally wrong, and a satchel containing two million dollars. Moss takes the satchel only to find himself becoming the target of a homicidal killer (Javier Bardem) seeking to reclaim the stolen money.
Acknowledging that the major problem in converting the works of Cormac McCarthy into movies is their graphic content, Joel remarked, “Violence is an important element in many of the books [he] writes, and it seems to us to be completely misguided to try to soften that in the adaptation.” A more pressing concern for Joel was figuring out how to translate the structure of the novel cinematically, “The initial challenge was what to do in those alternating chapters in the book. You get monologues from the sheriff essentially unrelated to the story. We didn’t want to eliminate them entirely.”
Two of the three critical film roles were cast early on. Native Texan and Oscar-winner Tommy Lee Jones (The Fugitive) was signed to play local Sheriff Ed Tom Bell and Spanish actor Javier Bardem (Before Night Falls) for part of the relentless hired assassin Anton Chigurh. The latter role could easily come across as a mechanical and cold-hearted killer which was something the Coens wanted to avoid. “Clearly he’s not the good guy; I’ll concede that,” said Ethan. “I don’t even know that I’d describe the character as evil. He’s a little more complicated than that, a little more elusive than that. He’s mysterious, he’s withheld, so that was a casting challenge in a way. I have no idea why we thought about Javier except we thought that whatever Javier supplies, he’s a great actor and it’ll be interesting.” Aiding Bardem’s menacing performance as a murderer who uses a cattle gun as his weapon of choice is the actor’s onscreen appearance. “The wardrobe department had found this picture of a guy at a bar in West Texas in 1979 and it was that alarming haircut and actually that kind of wardrobe as well. And we looked at it and thought, well, he looks like a sociopath.”
Choosing an actor to play Llewelyn Moss was a long and drawn out audition process for the Coen brothers. “Tommy Lee Jones and Javier having been cast, the third person had to be able to hold his weight with those two actors,” stated Ethan. “That’s setting the bar pretty high. We saw everybody and we hadn’t met anybody we liked and whom we felt wouldn’t be something of a letdown coming from Tommy to Javier to person X.” Due to the persistence of his agent, Josh Brolin (Milk) was able to get the Coens to agree to meet with him on their last casting call for the movie. “They just hired me,” recollected Brolin, “and said, ‘We really get a sense from you that you’re right for this part. So come up with something interesting.’” On how he perceived Moss, the actor stated, “I think he’s an incredibly heartfelt, compassionate character just in the way the story goes. The fact that he goes back and gives water to what we call “agua man.” It gets him into a lot of trouble. He would have had major obstacles anyway but that one in particular got him shot.”
Playing the role of the ill-fated wife of Llewelyn Moss, is Kelly Macdonald (Gosford Park) who had to forego her Scottish accent for a Texan one. “She wasn’t your typical trailer trash kind of character,” stated Macdonald of Carla Jean Moss. “At first you think she’s one thing and by the end of the film you realize that she’s not quite as naïve as she might come across. And it’s not like she’s just following her husband blindly. She goes along with his plan but it’s because there’s a real love there and a real respect.”
Josh Brolin, who had broken his collarbone in a motorcycle accident a couple of weeks before shooting began, was glad he did not abandon the picture despite the excruciating pain. “The great thing about No Country for Old Men, more than these other movies, is that there are a lot of questions that surface for people and they want to talk about it, which I think is just so satisfying as a filmmaker or an actor…I can’t remember the last movie I saw that I’ve thought about for days.” As for the controversial conclusion of the film, Brolin said, “The reaction only defines the fact that we chose a good thing. If people weren’t reactionary to the ending, then we would not have done our jobs.”
Made on a budget of $25 million, No Country for Old Men earned $162 million worldwide and was nominated for eight Academy Awards; it won the Oscars for Best Picture, Best Supporting Actor (Javier Bardem), Best Director, and Best Adapted Screenplay. At the BAFTAs, the movie received nine nominations and was awarded with the trophies for Best Cinematography, Best Director, and Best Supporting Actor (Bardem). The Golden Globes lauded the picture with Best Screenplay and Best Supporting Actor (Bardem) while the American Film Institute listed it as the Movie of the Year for 2007.
To celebrate the 60th anniversary of the Cannes Film Festival, Joel and Ethan along with previous winners of the event created a series of short films called Chacun son cinema (To Each His Own Cinema) in 2007; the Coens’ contribution was called World Cinema starring Josh Brolin as a rancher who wanders into a repertory theatre; he seeks the advice of the ticket booth salesman on whether to see Jean Renoir’s The Rules of the Game (1939) or Climates (2006) by Nuri Bilge Ceylon.
Seven years after their aborted attempt to work with Brad Pitt, Joel and Ethan cast him in Burn After Reading (2008); Pitt was not the only actor making his Coen brother film debut but also John Malkovich (Places in the Heart) and Tilda Swinton (Michael Clayton). Summarizing the dark satire, Joel declared that the story “is about the culture of the Central Intelligence Agency and the culture of physical fitness in Washington, D.C. and what happens when those two worlds collide. It’s also about internet dating.”
Accompanying the acting newcomers were veteran Coen collaborators Frances McDormand and George Clooney. “The day we wrapped,” recalled Ethan, “we called wrap on George’s last shot, and he said, ‘All right, that’s it. I’ve played my last idiot.’ So we told him it was sad that he wouldn’t be working with us anymore.” Joining in on the subject, Joel added, “George loves to play idiots for us. We always have a really good time with him.” Ethan went on to say, “George is interesting. The last two movies we’ve done with him, our discussion of the character would take place in the hallway about five minutes before we started shooting.”
Tilda Swinton marveled about the quality of the screenplay. “The script is absolutely written down on paper. You mess with that at your peril because they write it so well. How could you possibly improve it? It feels like the invitation to play with them is exactly that, it’s come and let’s all amuse ourselves with this script.” John Malkovich agreed with Swinton, “As per Tilda’s remarks, there is nothing to change or improve with a good script. You just do it. There is a reason they say a football field has boundaries. There are a million ways to do a good script within those boundaries.” Playing a moronic fitness club trainer who attempts to enter into the world of espionage so to pay for a co-worker’s cosmetic surgery was not a daunting role for Brad Pitt, “You just start understanding their arithmetic, how they view the world.”
“If we put actors in comedies who aren’t normally associated with comedies, it’s just simply a reflection of our interest in them as actors,” explained Joel. “Most of the parts in this movie were written for the people who played them.” Despite the presence of box office stars, egos did not rule the film set. “When big actors work on our movies,” said Joel, “it’s a pretty stripped-down version of what they’re used to on a full-blown, Hollywood studio picture. Those two guys, Brad Pitt and George Clooney, we know well enough for it to be like working with friends.”
With Roger Deakins unavailable due to a scheduling conflict, Joel and Ethan recruited cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki (Children of Men) to shoot the picture. Despite Burn After Reading being set in Washington, D.C., most of the principal photography took place in Brooklyn Heights as the two moviemaking siblings wanted to stay close to their New York City-based families.
Outperforming its Oscar-winning predeccesor at the box office by $2 million, the picture earned $164 million worldwide. Film critic Lisa Kennedy wrote in The Denver Post, “The ensemble is at once loose and pitch perfect. Hardly one of them plays a wholly likeable person, yet each reveals the desperate or stupid humanity of their characters.” David Denby of The New Yorker begged to differ in his review, “Even black comedy requires that the filmmakers love someone, and the mock cruelties in Burn After Reading come off as a case of terminal misanthropy.”
Burn After Reading received BAFTAs nominations for Best Original Screenplay, Best Supporting Actor (Brad Pitt), and Best Supporting Actress (Tilda Swinton); while at the Golden Globes, it was nominated for Best Picture – Comedy or Musical and Best Actress – Comedy or Musical (Frances McDormand).
By placing their Jewish heritage into the forefront with A Serious Man (2009), the Coen brothers have been constantly asked if the movie is autobiographical. “I guess everything having to do with your background has some influence on how you tell stories,” reflected Joel. “There were other things which were probably much more culturally influential on us than that in particular, things like television, pop culture that other kids are exposed to at the time.” In regards to the coincident that the protagonist of the story shares the same profession as his family’s patriarch, Joel remarked, “Our father was a university professor, but beyond that, he wasn’t really anything like the character in the movie.”
Like his Biblical predecessor Job, Larry Gopnick (Michael Stuhlbarg), a Jewish physics professor and family man, encounters one personal catastrophe after another.
“If you go to theatre in New York, you’re going to know Michael,” said Joel of his leading man who was making his cinematic debut in the picture. “He read for two parts: for Larry and also for Uncle Arthur. We knew that we would use him but we weren’t sure at first for which part, which has never happened to us before. It’s a very difficult role: it’s very passive but, at the same time, he has to carry the movie.”
“I wouldn’t say that Larry’s anxiety rubbed off on me,” stated Michael Stuhlbarg, “but I did have to try to live through [the role] as truly as I could. My job is to ask questions of each dramatic circumstance and then try to make it concrete.” For Stuhlbarg, the message of the story extends beyond the big screen, “I think the quote at the beginning of the movie, ‘Accept with simplicity everything that happens to you’, has resonance for both that first parable and the rest of the movie. It’s a goal to shoot for in one’s life, and he tries to do that the best that he can. I don’t know that there’s much more one can do. I’ve found in my own life, if you try to struggle against what the universe is telling you, you set yourself up for more of a battle.”
Explaining why the timing was right to produce the script which was written a number of years ago, Ethan replied, “It would have been hard to do this early on. For one thing, who would give somebody money for this movie about a loser in the Midwest as a first feature? So the fact that we are established helps. But also, who’s interested in their childhood when they’re only in their twenties and their thirties?” A prevailing concern for the Coens was how the members of their spiritual community would react, “We were both curious about whether there would be hostility, but religious Jews who’ve seen it so far have been surprisingly open to it. I guess one’s concern is that a lot of Jews see things through the prism of ‘Is this good for the Jews?’”
Film critic Ann Hornaday wrote in The Washington Post, “Mostly, A Serious Man succeeds because it engages questions worth asking. What is integrity? Does our atavistic need for stories illuminate the meaning of life or further obfuscate it? What does it mean to be good and how are we to achieve it?” For Elizabeth Weitzman of the New York Daily News, there was nothing cerebral about the story, “Since everyone is turned into such a caricature, the answers feel optional. It’s hard to forget that Larry’s fate is being controlled not by God or luck or his own worst instincts, but the Coens.”
Earning $21 million worldwide, A Serious Man has been nominated for Best Original Screenplay at the Oscars. The BAFTAs and the Writers Guild of America also rewarded the movie with nominations for Best Original Screenplay. At the Golden Globes, Michael Stuhlbarg was up for Best Actor – Comedy or Musical.
Though the much rumoured sequel for The Big Lebowski has yet to come to fruition, it has not prevented the Coen brothers from collaborating once again with Jeff Bridges. Trading the role of “The Dude” for one made famous by “The Duke”, Bridges stars as U.S. Marshall Rooster Cogburn who assists Mattie Ross, a teenage girl seeking to avenge the murder of her father. Scheduled for a Christmas Day release in 2010, True Grit features Matt Damon (Good Will Hunting) as La Boeuf, the Texas Ranger who joins in the manhunt while Josh Brolin plays the killer Tom Chaney.
“We saw it [the original movie] as kids,” recalled Ethan. “It made very little impression on me. We subsequently both read the book [written by Charles Portis] and the book made a huge impression on us, and I guess that’s why we’re interested in doing the movie.” Questioned why he was not inspired by the cinematic adaptation in which John Wayne (The Alamo) won an Academy Award, Ethan answered, “It’s partly a question of point-of-view. The book is entirely in the voice of the fourteen year old girl. That sort of tips the feeling of it over a certain way. I think [the book is] much funnier than the movie was so I think, unfortunately, they lost a lot of humour in both the situations and in her voice. It also ends differently than the movie did. You see the main character — the little girl — twenty-five years later when she’s an adult.” He went on to add, “Another way in which it’s a little bit different from the movie — and maybe this is just because of the time the movie was made — is that it’s a lot tougher and more violent than the movie reflects. Which is part of what’s interesting about it.”
Other projects in development for the Coens are: Hail, Caesar!, a 1920s comedy about a group of idiots attempting to stage a play based on the Greek tragedy; a remake of the Michael Caine (The Cider House Rules) and Shirley MacLaine (Terms of Endearment) jewelry theft picture Gambit (1966); Suburbicon, a dark comedy which George Clooney may direct; and an adaptation of Michael Chabon’s alternative world history and murder mystery novel The Yiddish Policemen’s Union.
“It’s funny, as a film director, you don’t meet other directors often,” reflected Joel. “In New York you can live your whole life in the film business and, if you choose, have nothing to do with other people involved in the same business. That’s one of the nice things about New York – It’s not a company town like L.A.. It’s the actors who meet lots of film directors, because they go from movie to movie. So most of the directors I know are people I met through Fran. I’m very good friends with John Boorman [Deliverance], for example, because of Fran doing a movie, Beyond Ragoon [1995], with him.”
Ethan is not surprised that A-list performers are drawn to the characters composed by him and Joel. “There are a lot more good actors out there than there are good parts,” reasoned Ethan, “so if you write something that’s interesting to an actor, you’ll have good actors to choose from.” When it comes to the subject matter for their movies, Ethan sheepishly admitted, “It seems we’re incapable of writing a movie which, in one way or another, doesn’t get contaminated by comic elements.”
Joel and Ethan Coen do not view themselves as a singular creative entity. “The work that we do together reflects the point at which our interests intersect,” remarked Joel. The end result has been a filmmaking collaboration which has spanned over twenty-five years and fourteen feature length pictures. “I can’t watch our old movies – I’m overcome with a fog of boredom,” confessed Ethan. Joel echoed his brother’s sentiment, “I just see it as moving from story to story. There’s no development, except you try to do something a little different each time, different at least from what you did just previous to it, so you keep the exercise interesting to yourself.”
For more on the Coen brothers visit fansites You Know, For Kids! and Coenesque.
Trevor Hogg is a freelance video editor and writer who currently resides in Canada.
