Laconic. That’s probably the best way to describe Joel and Ethan Coen. Either that or jet-lagged. There’s probably other things the Coens would rather be doing than participate in a round table interview with a handful of eager student journalists, who don’t seem quite able to believe that they’ve actually been allowed to chat to these purveyors of cinematic cool, but to their credit, they give us our due and patiently answer our every question.
Joel is the older of the two and the more forthcoming, until Ethan comes out of his shell. Both are intelligent and clearly intimately involved with their works. Their latest, A Serious Man, is the subject of today’s interview...
Q: Given the setting and community in which the film is set, it seems this might be a slightly more personal, even autobiographical film?
J: Well it’s a little bit of both, it’s not really autobiographical because the story is made up, but it certainly is a movie that takes place in the community that we grew up in. There are a lot of similarities to our background there, we went to Hebrew school, we were bar mitzvah –ed, our father was an academic, he was a professor at a Midwestern university, we grew up in a house like that, in a neighbourhood like that, all those things I guess you could say in some sense are autobiographical but the story is all fiction.
Q: Does that mean you're very much like Aaorn?
J: No... The character that Michael Stuhlbarg plays in the movie isn’t anything like our father, couldn't be more different in many ways. The characters themselves aren’t meant to reflect real characters or members of our family or anything else like that. But the setting is very much...
E: But you know that's it... Aaron's character is probably a very typical kid of that environment and probably we were too. Not particularly like him but, you know, part of that time and place.
Q: Why is it Jewish boys smoke so much pot? [laughter]
J: We both smoked pot but we were both a little older when we did it, we weren't doing it at 13, but yeah, there was a lot of pot around. We were both a little older when we started smoking dope; neither of us were stoned at our bar mitzvahs, but yeah, there was a lot.
Q: Given the semi-autobiographical theme and the slightly more conventional dramatic style, would you say you're maturing as filmmakers, or do you see this as a continuation of your previous films, which were perhaps more genre pieces?
E: Aaaah I don’t know, we don’t actually compare movies one to the other or think about it much. Maturing? God, who knows? They’re all juvenile to me. Maybe not. I don’t know. Some of them are more genre pieces than others but this one isn’t the only one that’s not... it sits comfortably in a genre, but for us that’s a pretty unexamined question. We don’t actually think about where we're going or relate the movies one to the other and think about how they’re progressing or regressing
Q: How do you think your working relationship has evolved over the decades? Has there been a pinnacle do you think?
J: In our working relationship?
Q: Yeah, between the two of you
J: Honestly it doesn’t feel like it’s changed at all
Q: How has your work ethic changed? When you did Blood Simple were you locked away in a cupboard typing away? What’s your working day when you’re working on a script?
J: I think maybe in a certain respect it’s become a little more professional due to the pressures of y’know... when we were doing Blood Simple we were in our twenties, I remember sharing an apartment or living nearby and blah blah blah... now we’re old fogies, we’ve got kids we go home to at night, y’know we go into an office every day and write... is that what you mean?
Q: Well it’s the amount of writing you get done, you’ve had your short plays recently, are you literally writing every day? A good 2000, 3000 words?
J: Oh shit no.
E: No it does seem funny. Joel may disagree, but we’re fairly lazy, yet relative to other people we do seem to get a fair amount done, but that just seems to reflect poorly on other people as opposed to well on ourselves!... We get very little accomplished and yet we’re outpacing many of our peers. It seems odd to me. And when we were younger we did, as Joel’s suggesting, we did seem to spend more time doing it, actually in production even more than in writing longer days... six day weeks, we haven’t done six day weeks in ages in terms of shooting weeks.
J: We would work longer in the editing room, it’s, y’know, it just er... as you get older we like to go home and spend more time with our kids.
Q: There is a co-dependent sibling relationship between the father and his brother, is that something you enjoyed exploring in this film?
J: Yeah it was a fun part of the story, again it was not reflective of our experience growing up, we didn’t have an uncle that lived in the house. We actually knew someone who did and that kind of informed us. It was the germ of the idea I guess, and there was somebody else we knew, these characters all tend to be based on real people, they’re sort of hybrids of lots of different impressions you get from lots of different people. There was someone else that we knew about but never met that wrote that book that’s in the movie; it’s actually called the Mentaculus.
Q: Is there anything of your own relationship in the brothers in the movie?
J: Between Larry and Uncle Arthur? Jeez, I hope not!
Q: You said you were looking for an essentially unknown actor to play the lead role, why was that?
E: Well partly just ‘cause of how we wanted the movie to feel, kind of a slice of life from that time; we wanted to immerse the audience in that setting, it seems kind of exotic, even though its where we grew up, even with a lot of years of perspective it seems like an exotic place to us and we wanted the audience to feel that too. And putting a familiar movie star face in that setting would not help, it would diminish the whole feeling of ‘here we are in this everyday reality’, this suburban Jewish community in 1967; one doesn’t expect George Clooney to show up. Actually, maybe that would have worked!
Q: Looking back at years of growing up, does this film about a man going through a spectacular mid-life crisis come from you two at all?
E: Yeah... no, no, not in any specific way, but I don’t think either of us would have written this movie when we were thirty.
J: For all kinds of reasons.
E: In a way, yes, only a middle aged person would have written that, but neither of us have any of the specific problems this character has.
Q To what extent do films like A Serious Man and No Country for Old Men suggest searches for order are meaningless? Is the title A Serious Man disparaging in any sense?
J: It’s a little ambiguous even in our minds actually, as to who it’s supposed to be referring to. In our minds it’s both Sy Ableman who is called a serious man in the movie, and Larry who is the protagonist and at some point in the movie aspires to that and the stature it implies, but no its not meant to be... maybe there’s some irony in it, but it’s not meant to take the piss out of him really. And the search for order...?
Q Yeah, I guess in No Country for Old Men you’re left with the feeling that things are random.
J: Yeah it’s interesting, they’ve both kind of got that element in them and it’s interesting to us.
Q: Along those lines, why did you make Larry a physicist specifically?
J: Well that was um... First of all, making his world an academic one was something we wanted right off the bat because it was something to play with and we felt it would be something fun to create in. The physics thing tied into... we wanted to make him a scientist [and see] that way of looking at the world and that sort of rationality was up against, in the face of the things that are happening to him, especially in the face of the more... he’s to a certain extent looking to spiritual leaders for answers for the things he’s going through which was interesting to us and the last thing that was interesting to us was that both mathematicians and the more spiritual parts of the Judaic tradition, the more mystical parts of the Judaic tradition, try and make sense of the world through numbers. That was interesting to play with.
E: Yeah, the whole idea of the character starting off as thinking he has some grasp of how the world works and is a rationalist, that all seemed to conspire to make him a mathematician or a physicist. Yeah, someone who is immersed in numbers, that too tied in nicely with his scribbling on the blackboard [formulae in Larry’s physics lecture] and tied in nicely with the Mentaculus, a deranged version of the same thing.
Q: Given that this is about maths, and that sense of order is kind of displaced, do you think it’s unfair or do you agree that this film has been described as quite nihilistic or misanthropic at all?
E: I don’t know why you’d call it misanthropic, it’s about a character who’s looking for some kind of meaning and he’s getting repeatedly stymied in that quest. But that’s the story... I don’t know, the character doesn’t achieve any kind of clarity or get a grasp any kind of meaning that’s satisfying for him but I don’t know, that just seemed like the story we were telling rather than an expression of a larger point of view that we have ourselves.
Q: When you were saying about using science or Judaic religion or maths to look for meaning where maybe there isn’t any, is that kind of a hit back at film critics and analysts who maybe assign metaphors or meanings onto your narratives?
E: [pause] No [laughter]. No, really, I, no, I don’t think so, no. No way, no. Yeah.
Q: Would you be able to tell us anything about what your next project will be? Do you have anything in mind?
J: We’re doing a movie, it’s an adaptation of a novel called True Grit, it was made into a movie once before actually in the late sixties with John Wayne. It’s a Charles Portis novel, an American writer, it’s a western and it’s going to star Jeff Bridges, Matt Damon and Josh Brolin and a fourteen year girl who we haven’t cast yet who’s sort of the main character in the movie.
Q: Have you always wanted to make a western?
J: Well, I don’t know that we’ve always wanted to make a western, it’s always been interesting and in the back of our minds and things, like maybe it’d be interesting to do. This was just a novel we both really liked and the opportunity was there to do it and so...
Q: Do you still think a western has relevance for an audience today?
J: Um...sure, yeah, why not? Yeah, absolutely. So do vampire movies, so do outer-space movies. I’m just not sure we could make an outer-space movie.
Q: Do you have any advice for budding filmmakers?
J: Just general advice for budding filmmakers? Wow, that’s hard. It’s been so long since we were budding. It’s hard to know whether any of experience is relevant to someone who’s just starting out now. I’m always really cautious about that ‘cause when we were starting it was such a different environment. Maybe things are generally... y’know, maybe there are some constants in it.
E: It might sound like a cop-out, but it’s so difficult to give a prescription, y’know, what are you gonna do? It’s just from firsthand experience, everybody I know in the movie business – which is most of the people I know! – got into it in different ways, they all kind of stumbled into it, many of them with ambitions to get into the movie business, but how you get started is so different in each case. It’s just so hard to give a prescription for it, you know, how to go about it successfully.
J: It’s certainly easier if you can somehow generate or manage to find your own material, as opposed to being reliant on other people for the actual material that you might make into a movie, ‘cause then you have an ownership of something, you can go out and try and do yourself as opposed to waiting for people to offer you the opportunity to make something. So as a general rule, it may still be true, I think it was true when we were starting out; it’s probably still true now.
Q: Do you consider yourselves artists?
J: We don’t really think about it. That’s the honest answer, we, y’know, we consider ourselves filmmakers, we make movies. I wouldn’t put artist down on my passport.
Q: I just thought when were discussing the cold rationality of people like the protagonist in A Serious Man, how would you view the world, as more random or has your academic background influenced you to view in a more rational way?
E: Well we don’t have any scientific expertise or sophistication, so god, maybe by default we’re artists, we can’t figure things out in any organised way, but y’know... yeah!
Q: I remembered reading one of you had a background in philosophy...?
E: [amid laughter] ah... no! Sorry!
And with that, a PA pops her head in the room and informs us are interview time is over. The Coens leave; we gather up our Dictaphones and make our way out of the building. The two guys who got shot down for asking the “is this a hit back at your critics?” and the “are westerns still relevant?” questions are still reeling, but everyone else seems to have had a great time. One guy produces his mobile. “Right,” he says. “Time to start bragging!”
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