The Coen brothers, it has been written, can be tricky. As the two fraternal film-making mavericks drift higher into the Hollywood firmament — loaded with Oscars from No Country for Old Men, glowing with kudos from Fargo, Barton Fink and half a dozen modern classics — their creeping disdain for the interview process becomes ever more apparent.
The pair, who today claim the No 3 spot in the Times Top 100 films of the Noughties (for No Country . . .), are reluctant subjects at best, and these days increasingly press shy. They have been known to scupper the efforts of inquiring commentators through a lethal combination of casual lack of interest and wilful obscurantism. Indeed, a profile for Vogue in the mid-1990s famously concluded with the harried journalist holding his head in his hands and wailing, “This is something of a disaster!” Thus, as I am ushered into the top-secret suite of an opulent West End hotel for a rare encounter, only one simple questions thunders through my mind: how do I break the ice?
Thankfully, and bizarrely, the father of modern French cinema has gone and done it for me. “We just found out that Jean-Luc Godard really hates our movies!” grins an extremely chipper 52-year-old Ethan Coen, lightly bearded, dressed down in denims, and clinging to the arm of the room’s large leather sofa. Joel, 54, sitting next to him, in denims also, but slumped askew on the sofa-side, chuckles quietly to himself. Together they project the mien, not of haughty auteurs, but of wickedly snickering schoolboys. “Too bad Luis Buñuel didn’t live longer,” Ethan continues. “It would be interesting to hear that Buñuel hates our movies too. Or what about Pasolini?” Joel, giddy now, interrupts, “Although Pasolini, being Italian, he’d be more like, ‘Heeeey!’ ” He accompanies his impersonation with a stereotypical Italian shoulder shrug, which is complemented by Ethan, now attempting the same caricature, “Eees funny s***!” They giggle some more, until Joel sighs, seemingly serious, “Well, Godard is Swiss anyway.” A pause. “That makes him practically German!” The pair erupt. Hilarity ensues.
And so it is with the Coen brothers, two unlikely iconoclasts from the American Midwest (Minnesota) who have become perhaps the most influential film-makers of their generation — without the Coens there is no Wes Anderson, no Juno, no Reservoir Dogs, no quirky independent voices at all. And while others from their era have been co-opted by the mainstream (Tim Burton) or relegated to the margins (John Sayles), the Coens alone have maintained a consistent commitment to their own unique aesthetic standards, never bowing to convention, always probing, subverting.
In Miller’s Crossing they dared to invoke art-house symbolism (a black hat blows freely across the frame, apropos of nothing in particular) in a meditative gangster movie released in 1990, the same year as the more conventional Godfather III and Goodfellas. In Raising Arizona they matched a screwball comedy with a morally unstable universe where hero criminals steal babies, and the Devil himself emerges in the third act armed to the hilt and riding a motorbike. Later, with The Big Lebowski, they proved the naysayers wrong, creating in their loveable stoner The Dude (Jeff Bridges) a protagonist who would have enduring emotional appeal and inspire an international phenomenon of weekend festival tributes (“Lebowski-Fest”) in cities as diverse as Louisville, Los Angeles and London. In No Country for Old Men they demonstrated, remarkably, that they could loyally adapt a sparse, bleak Cormac McCarthy novel and simultaneously deliver a startlingly propulsive action thriller — one with shoot outs, a dizzying narrative momentum and an all-time screen villain in Javier Bardem’s floppy fringed Anton Chigurh.
The pair are ferociously intelligent but quick to champion the apparent intellectual transparency of their work. “Our movies are designed primarily to entertain,” is Joel’s favourite mantra. They hold two screenwriting Oscars (for Fargo and No Country for Old Men), but are also responsible for a couple of high-profile stinkers (The Hudsucker Proxy, The Ladykillers). And though they can boast of friendships with Brad Pitt and George Clooney, they have deeply ambiguous feelings about the Hollywood star system — “There are certain stars that are a bit of pain in the ass to work with,” Joel will later admit.
Today, they are here to champion A Serious Man, their most personal movie to date, and a film that throws the door wide open on their cultural and creative origins. As such, there is something revealing about their repeated return to the Godard slight (they will refer to it 11 times over the course of our conversation). For criticism in the shadow of this particular project, from Godard or beyond, is bound to resonate.
The movie itself, which reimagines the biblical story of Job in a Jewish community in suburban Minneapolis c 1967, is bleak and mordantly funny. It is also star-free, and features the New York stage actor Michael Stuhlbarg as Larry Gopnik, a professor whose life slowly unravels through the course of the movie. Larry’s wife Judith (Sari Lennick) leaves him for a bumptious neighbour, his ingrate dope-smoking son Danny (Aaron Wolff) and resentful daughter Sarah (Jessica McManus) abuse him and drain him of cash, while a series of professional calamities and an ominous trip to the doctor suggest only the blackest finale. Larry’s response to these interminable pressures is to consult three consecutive rabbis for advice, but he is left floundering in platitudes — “Help others,” says one with a bored shrug, “it can’t hurt!”
The Coens happily admit to the movie’s autobiographical elements, describing it as an accurate evocation of their childhood world — as the sons of two Jewish academics (the mother was devout, their father less so), they were forced to go to Hebrew school five days a week. “Hebrew school was an incubator for all the worst juvenile classroom impulses,” Joel says. “We sat there, very bored, being instructed in a language we knew we weren’t going to learn, or use.” Ethan then adds: “So it wouldn’t be entirely wrong to say that they made us go to Hebrew school, and now we are making them pay!” Joel, in a quieter, less ironic moment, will reveal that their father — who is widowed, in his nineties and “a little non compos mentis” — has not seen the film. “We tell him about it, though,” Ethan says softly, “and it makes him laugh.”
And Danny’s marijuana-smoking in the film? Is that you? “Yeah, it was around,” Ethan says. “There was lots of marijuana,” Joel adds. “We were maybe a little older than Danny when we started smoking marijuana, but it was everywhere!” They don’t, for the record, admit to smoking it now (“It something you do when you’re young, but you get over it”).
Yet it is not the biographical details but the movie’s desperate recalcitrant tone that makes A Serious Man the most Coen-like Coen movie yet. “Why does God make us feel the questions if he doesn’t give us the answers?” asks Larry, nearing the end of his tether. It’s a beautiful line and seems, more than anything in 25 years of Coen brothers movies, to sum up the same stark, often bleak, often sucker-punched world-view expressed therein. Think of M. Emmet Walsh, the dying killer of Blood Simple, staring up in wonderment at a single drip of condensation in the movie’s final frames. Or John Turturro’s Barton Fink, buffeted by a hostile world that is immune to his higher creative ambitions. Or Kelly Macdonald’s Carla implacably facing another senseless death at the end of No Country for Old Men. Or almost the entire cast of Burn After Reading, lost completely in a moral vacuum, cut adrift from principles and reason.
We talk about the line and the movie as the key to their oeuvre, and their entire world-view. It is an idea shared by Serious Man co-star Richard Kind (he plays Larry’s ailing brother Arthur), who says: “I believe that the movie is how Joel and Ethan Coen view the world and the human condition.”
Typically, the brothers are reticent. Ethan is not sure if it’s their world-view, but it’s definitely Larry’s conundrum. He says, downplaying again, that “there is little mystery to be explained about our movies”. I wonder nonetheless about their allegedly strict Minnesota childhoods, and how this might have fed their movies. There is something akin, for instance, to teenage rebellion in the disappointments and frustrations of their central characters.
“But it was strict compared with what?” Joel protests. “We did go to Hebrew school, we were in synagogue every Saturday, and it was a kosher household, but is that strict? It wasn’t like a Calvinist upbringing!” Ethan adds: “We were still part of suburban America.” Ethan decides that this line of inquiry is futile, that the connection between the Coens as people and the Coens as filmmakers is too nebulous to analyse. “I’m sure, yes, we bring everything that we are to whatever we are doing,” he says, resigned. “But don’t ask us to examine it. Because we don’t do it. And we’re not any good at it.”
When the Coen brothers emerged in 1985 with their noirish debut Blood Simple, the cinematic landscape was vastly different. There was no integrated independent movie scene and no Sundance Film Festival. The Weinstein brothers were still concert promoters on the make. Steven Soderbergh’s Sex, Lies and Videotape and Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing had yet to be written, and Quentin Tarantino had not begun his life-changing employment in an LA video store. The Coens’ peers were equally green novices such as Sam Raimi, with whom Joel edited the micro-budgeted horror The Evil Dead, and New York hipster Jim Jarmusch, who directed the deadpan black-and-white Stranger than Paradise.
“Jim Jarmusch!” interrupts Ethan, smiling at Joel. “Remember when he said our films were ‘Spielbergian’?”
“Yes,” says Joel, giving him a calming big brotherly frown. “It’s interesting because, since you heard about the Godard thing, you’ve been obsessed with all the people who’ve dissed you.” Ethan giggles quietly. Joel continues, still soothing: “And Jim probably didn’t even mean it! Well, yes, he meant it as a little bit of slap. But he probably regrets it.” Ethan explains himself: “No, Jim’s a good guy. But it’s just funny thinking about all the specific people who have, you know ...” He trails off, shrugs.
The Coens were movie obsessives from childhood. They bought a Super 8 camera as pre-teens, and remade TV movies with friends. “We were just f***ing around,” Joel says. “Lots of kids we knew were doing it. We may have done it a little bit more persistently than the rest of our gang, but that’s what it was.” At college age, they split disciplines — Joel studied film at New York University, Ethan took philosophy at Princeton. Consequently, when they were reunited with their first love, film-making, they had become quite a powerhouse duo, with Ethan bringing his philosophical grounding and existential Weltanschauung to Joel’s technical prowess. Today, Ethan will bashfully deny that his academic knowledge has any impact on his work, but he has easy access to the last line of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (“Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent”) when discussing The Man Who Wasn’t There.
Their pop-cultural influences were varied but profound. They devoured the screwball comedies of Preston Sturges and, strangely, the movies of Doris Day for “the weird wooden aesthetic” that is, like their films, anti-naturalistic. They cite influences from Bernardo Bertolucci, The Third Man, and the cartoons of Chuck Jones (Nicolas Cage’s performance in Raising Arizona, they note, is very Woody Woodpecker). But mostly, for inspiration, they return to classic noir novels. “It goes back to Chandler, Hammett and Cain,” Joel would often say. “The subject matter was grim, but the tone was upbeat.”
The pair eventually collected $800,000 from private investors to make Blood Simple, a twisty Texan thriller about a vengeful bar owner who hires a private investigator to kill his wife and her lover. Back then, says Joel, even as the movie made a modest $2 million profit, they had no long-term career plans. “After Blood Simple, we realised that someone would give us another chance to do it again,” he says, before his younger brothers embellishes: “We thought, ‘OK, we can make another movie.’ But that was as far as our ambitions reached.”
Through the subsequent Raising Arizona, Miller’s Crossing, and the award-winning Barton Fink and Fargo, the Coen brothers established a reputation as fearsomely independent film-makers who made witty, cine-literate movies on relatively low budgets. As the so-called indie movie era boomed, and studios scrambled to find the next Tarantino or Shakespeare in Love, the Coens happily availed themselves of studio funding, but never at the expense of casting decisions or final cut. Big-name actors who rushed to work with them occasionally found their confidence unsettling. Nicolas Cage, unhappy on the set of Raising Arizona (perhaps he didn’t like the Woody Woodpecker reference), called them “autocratic” and unwilling to accept his “creative flow”.
“Nic was, what, 22 or 21 at the time, and we were probably not much older than him. So, you know ...” Joel says, chuckling fondly to himself, before Ethan takes up the baton with: “Stars bring problems to the movies in spite of themselves, in terms of paparazzi and attention. And that can be a bit of a pain on set. But, by now, we’ve known [George] Clooney for a long time, and Brad [Pitt] for quite a while, and given what these guys are being paid in our movies, they’re certainly not doing it for the money. The stars who decide to do a movie with us are fairly knowledgeable about what situation they’re getting into.”
The pair, who share writing, directing, producing and editing credits (the latter under the pseudonym Roderick Jaynes), describe their on-set technique as: “Whoever is closest to the question being asked, answers the question. And generally the other one of us is sidling away from the person who is asking that question.” Ethan then launches into an anecdote, gleaned from John Malkovich, which culminates in a pitch-perfect imitation of Woody Allen describing the ideal actor as “someone who doesn’t ask a lot of questions”. The Coens, tellingly, fall about at this punchline.
These days, typically, it’s all change in recession-era Hollywood. The indie brand-leader Miramax (which coproduced No Country for Old Men) is all but disbanded, while production dollars are being concentrated on populist blockbusters such as Transformers and G. I. Joe rather than lower-budget alternatives. In this climate, the Coens confess that, despite the Oscar success of No Country, it is harder than ever to get their movies financed. “The whole movie business has become more conservative and cautious over the past year,” Joel says. “It’s changing. And we are making the kinds of movies that will be pruned first from any roster. They’re not movies that promise huge returns.” Indeed, their next movie, a remake of the John Wayne western True Grit starring Jeff Bridges and Matt Damon, was financed before No Country for Old Men. What will happen after it is wholly uncertain.
Have they thought of retiring? “Only after Jean-Luc Godard retires!” snaps Ethan, grinning. Joel goes for serious with: “We were going to retire after ten movies. It was an agreed strategy. But now we’ve got kids in school to support.” The kids are Ethan’s two and Joel’s one, from their marriages to, respectively, the film editor Tricia Cooke and regular leading lady Frances McDormand. They say that fatherhood has changed them, but mostly in their movie-going habits. “There is no way that, 15 years ago, I would’ve gone to see Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs,” Joel says, adding dryly: “Before that it would’ve just been Godard movies.”
The Godard references clearly signal the beginning of the screwball section of the interview. All subjects here are gags in the making. Interspersed with increasingly hysterical giggling, they joke about everything from their commercial failure The Ladykillers to John Wayne; from 3-D cinema (“Maybe we should remake Godard in 3-D?”) to the travails of Roman Polanski (“Whereof one cannot speak,” says Ethan again, this time with a knowing smirk, “thereof one must be silent”); from their writing process to the lack of sex and drugs on their movie sets (“There isn’t a lot of exciting Hollywood bacchanal going on!”).
As they sit there, knocking punchlines back and forth along the sofa, you finally understand the Coen conundrum. This is who they are, and what they do. They take the range of human experience — from neurotic Jewish professors through to brooding assassins — and transform it with the smart, snickering laughter of two bored brothers stranded at Hebrew school. It’s quite a trick and, on screen, a monumental achievement. But does it mean, looking back on a 25-year career and some of the smartest and funniest movies of the modern era, that they are, well, happy with their lot?
Ethan looks at Joel. They grin conspiratorially, it seems, both at the idea that they would answer the question honestly, and that they would ever have an honest answer to the question. Ethan then beams, and announces archly: “We are goddamn delighted!”
A Serious Man is out on November 20
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