In the movie business Joel and Ethan Coen are known collectively as “the
two-headed director”, having such closely overlapping visions of projects
that actors can approach either brother and get the same answer. The
downside is that if they strike gold at tonight’s Academy Awards each
sibling will pick up half an Oscar as best director to set against the seven
other possible statuettes for which their latest film is nominated.
No Country for Old Men has been hailed as a dazzling return to form by the
Coen brothers, trailing critical prizes and box-office buzz. The bleak
neo-western, starring Josh Brolin, Tommy Lee Jones and Javier Bardem, is in
a stand-off with There Will Be Blood, starring Daniel Day-Lewis, also vying
for eight Oscars.
They may have made some of America’s finest movies of the past 25 years, but a
lukewarm reception greeted the Coens’ last two comedies, Intolerable Cruelty
and a remake of the Ealing Studios classic The Ladykillers. So the plaudits
must have come as a profound relief to Joel, the gnomic older brother of 53,
and Ethan, the giggly and effusive one three years his junior. Not that
either would admit to such feelings, parrying media questions with cordial
evasiveness.
Although the brothers direct and produce their films jointly, until recently
Joel received sole credit for directing and Ethan for producing. There was a
simple reason for this, Joel revealed: “It sort of stakes out the territory
we want to keep exclusively ours. In a sense, we don’t want another
producer, or another director.” They also alternate top billing for their
screenplays while sharing the editor’s film credits under the alias Roderick
Jaynes.
To some critics, this arrangement reflects the brothers' desire for total
control of the product. Actors who miss a single word are politely asked to
repeat the take. Yet George Clooney, who has featured in two of their films,
has claimed the Coens’ jokiness sometimes disrupts filming. Brolin has
described them in apparently affectionate terms as “freaky little people”.
Their trademarks are complex plots, bizarre situations, nasty criminals,
bungled capers, crisp and witty dialogue and beautiful cinematography.
Most interviewers want to know if they bicker. “We frequently get asked that,”
Ethan demurred. “But no. No more than we do with any of the other people we
collaborate with.” Paul Newman, who starred in their 1994 film The Hudsucker
Proxy, was unequivocal on the subject: “I had never [before] worked with two
guys who had equal creative authority who didn’t squabble.”
No Country for Old Men dispensed with the brothers’ troupe of stock players,
such as John Turturro, Frances McDormand and John Goodman. In 1984 Joel Coen
married McDormand after casting her in the brothers’ debut film, Blood
Simple. Holly Hunter had been up for the part, Ethan recalled: “We met Holly
Hunter and liked her but she wasn’t available.” According to Joel: “But she
and Fran were roommates at the time in the Bronx. Holly went back and told
Fran . . . ” Ethan resumed: “She said, ‘There are a couple of geeks you
should meet’.”
Joel and McDormand, who has acted in five Coen films, have adopted a son,
Pedro, from Paraguay. Ethan is married to Tricia Cooke, a film editor. They
all live as a tight-knit family in New York, keeping Hollywood at arm’s
length.
The Coens went back to the windswept Texan landscape of Blood Simple for their
latest triumph. In their adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s novel, a Vietnam
vet (Brolin) stumbles on a briefcase of drug money and is chased by a
murderous sociopath (Bardem), while a tired sheriff (Jones) comes to realise
he no longer understands the border country he patrols. Typically for a Coen
movie, the explosions of desperate violence are contrasted with touches of
black humour.
It was the Coens’ friendship with Ree and Jason Willaford, who live in Marfa,
60 miles from the Mexican border, that led them to make the Texan town the
focus of the movie. By a curious Hollywood doppelganger effect, the rival
film There Will Be Blood was also shot there, even though the plot is set in
California.
Some critics have pointed to these two films as evidence that the “cinema of
cruelty” now commands top dollar in America. However, the Coens’ films have
often tried to depict particular regions and communities with all their
eccentricities, leading to accusations that in the quest for verisimilitude
their films are empty of new ideas and show “contempt” for their characters’
foolishness.
Blood Simple, the tale of a bar owner who hires a private eye to kill his wife
and her lover, is anchored in its Texas setting. Raising Arizona (1987), in
which an ex-convict and an ex-cop steal a baby, paints a picture of the
American southwest. O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000), which stars Clooney
as an escaped convict on the trail of loot, meticulously recreates
Mississippi in the Depression era.
Violence and kidnapping crop up often in the brothers’ films, an observation
that irritates them. “We don’t have any rules about how we depict violence,
or how much violence,” Joel maintained recently. “It’s a calibration on a
day-by-day basis.” However, they acknowledge a debt to the crime genre of
film noir, inspired by Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and James M Cain.
Much of the Coens’ output can be traced to their adolescent experience of
being closeted indoors by frigid Minnesota winters. They grew up with their
younger sister Deborah in St Louis Park, a suburb of Minneapolis, the
children of Jewish professors. During the long winters they spent their
spare time watching movies and animated Disney films. Outside their living
room window was the community they would replicate in one of their
best-received films, Fargo (1996).
As a remedy to boredom they mowed lawns in summer until they had enough money
to buy a Super 8 camera, and embarked on a series of homemade films.
At Tisch School of Arts at New York University, Joel studied cinematography
and directed a 30-minute film, Soundings, which depicted a woman engaged in
sex with her boyfriend while verbally fantasising about having sex with her
boyfriend’s best friend. Ethan studied philosophy at Princeton; his 41-page
dissertation was entitled Two Views of Wittgenstein’s Later Philosophy.
Attempts to elicit his philosophy of film-making have come to naught. “Ooh,
I don’t have one,” he is apt to reply. “I wouldn’t know how to begin. You’ve
stumped me there.”
Both brothers found jobs in the entertainment industry, with Joel working as
production assistant on a variety of industrial films and music videos.
Discovering a talent for film editing, he was hired by the director Sam
Raimi, who was looking for an assistant editor on his first feature film,
The Evil Dead.
Ethan, who had honed his writing skills on the television series Cagney &
Lacey, decided to pool resources with Joel in their first joint film, Blood
Simple. Emulating Raimi, they began raising money from local small
businessmen. “Sam had done this trailer, almost a full-length version of The
Evil Dead, but on Super 8,” Joel recalled. “He raised $90,000 that way,
essentially by taking it around to people’s homes.”
Blood Simple was released on the crest of an independent film wave in the
early 1980s. The Coens, along with such film-makers as Jim Jarmusch, Spike
Lee, Raimi and David Cronenberg, were a big influence on the indie
revolution. However, looking back, Ethan described their first effort as
“crude”. His brother agreed: “It’s a movie that I have a certain affection
for. But I think it’s pretty damn bad.”
A stream of critical and commercial successes followed, including the stunning
Barton Fink (1991), about a scriptwriter with writer’s block, and Fargo, in
which a cash-strapped car salesman hatches a plan to have his wife kidnapped.
After the correction of their recent wobbles, the brothers are fired up for
new projects. This autumn comes the release of Burn After Reading, a dark
comedy about a drunken CIA analyst, in which Clooney and McDormand star
alongside Brad Pitt and John Malkovich. In addition to filming James
Dickey’s novel To the White Sea, they plan to tackle Hail Caesar, a comedy
about a theatrical troupe’s attempt to stage Julius Caesar, and direct an
adaptation of Michael Chabon’s novel The Yiddish Policemen’s Union.
Last year Joel claimed they had written a western “with lots of violence in it
. . . scalping and hanging . . . Indians torturing people with ants, cutting
their eyelids off”. This is probably a wind-up, given their love of
tantalising the media, but they know secretly it’s what they do best.
