Oh brothers, where art thou?

Today, the Coen brothers are playing a game I like to call The Men Who Weren’t There. Of course they are here in the corporeal sense of things. All three of us are curled into the nice comfy chairs of the Mandarin Hotel in Kensington, far, far away (figuratively speaking) from the demented Christmas consumer crush that dominates Harvey Nichols across the road.

They’re polite and cooperative. Ethan, the jollier of the pair, is an absolute delight. Even Joel, the grumpier brother, the one known to respond to interviewers with ‘that’s not an interesting question’, is in amusing, if characteristically sardonic form.
But it’s impossible not to feel like I’m scooping up mercury with a chopstick.
Ask them of their persisting love affair with inhospitable expanses of America and Ethan nods and smiles. “Uh huh”.
“It’s usually a function of where the movie is set,” adds Joel helpfully. “Often they’re sparsely populated, remote places.”
Erm, but you write, direct and edit most of your films, so isn’t that your call?
Ethan nods and smiles some more. “Yeah, that’s true.”
After two decades in a business that demands one to step into the limelight, the Coen brothers are still operating, like The Wizard Of Oz, from behind a vast curtain. Their close and longtime associations with cinematographer Roger Deakins and composer Carter Burwell, with the actress Francis McDormand (Mrs. Joel Coen) and assistant editor Trisha Cooke (Mrs. Ethan Coen) – make you think of a secret society rather than a staff. The Coen players, the impressive constellation of collaborators who seem to be in on the joke, include John Turturro, George Clooney, Michael Badalucco, Sam Raimi, Holly Hunter, Steve Buscemi and John Goodman.
These notable folks report that both brothers direct, even when the credits say otherwise. Some claim that you can approach either brother independently on set and receive precisely the same answer to a query. Everything is meticulously storyboarded in advance. But if there’s a masterplan they’re not telling. Touch on any of their cinematic tics and contrivances – their depictions of unstoppable evil (Raising Arizona, O Brother, Where Art Thou?), the recurring theme of money as the root of all evil (The Big Lebowski, Fargo), their noirish leanings (Miller’s Crossing, Blood Simple, The Man Who Wasn’t There) – and it’s as though you’re asking master magicians to divulge the secrets of their act.
Another nod here. A smile there. Joel mentions something from a Doris Day movie. And round and round we go.
Such playful reticence is to be expected. These are the same gentlemen who edit their own films under the credited pseudonym Roderick Jaynes, a fictional British film editor who supposedly hates their work.
With the release of their latest film, however, even the non-existent Roderick may be forced to concede that the Coen brothers have arrived. No Country For Old Men, an adaptation of the 2005 novel by Cormac McCarthy, has been variously hailed as “the most measured, classical film of their 23-year career” (Village Voice), “pure heaven” (The New York Times) and “a miracle” (Roger Ebert).
“It’s great,” laughs Ethan. “We’ve won even more awards.”
“Yeah, but a lot of those are critics’ awards and you only get pieces of glass or paper,” continues Joel. “They look a bit cheap beside the really great Polish camera one we got.”
“Or the Italian statue of fat guy bowling that was designed by Fellini himself,” says Ethan.
“Or our Oscar which we like because it’s really iconic.”
Cormac McCarthy’s thrilling cat-and-mouse chase between a sadistic, cattle gun wielding assassin (Javier Bardem), a grizzled old sheriff (Tommy Lee Jones) and an ordinary Texan antelope hunter who winds up at the wrong crime scene at the wrong time (Josh Brolin) is the perfect complement for the Coens’ passion for drawling, deadpan hicks. Is our favourite two-headed auteur, like Diane Arbus, in it for the grotesquerie I wonder?
“No, it’s not exactly the same impulse,” says Joel. “Diane Arbus was attracted to extremes and grotesques and shocking images. We just have an interest in all kinds of human beings and the stories they might tell.”
“We like to picture Paul McCartney as a music hall lead,” continues Ethan. “That’s where we’re coming from.”
There is, however, a palpable simpatico here with many of McCarthy’s authorial stamps – his preoccupation with fate, his densely woven plotting – dovetailing neatly with the brothers’ own trademark concerns.
“That’s true,” nods Ethan. “And a lot of people ask if we wanted to do this film because it has similarities to Blood Simple and Fargo. But at the time, we didn’t think of it that way. We just thought ‘this could be good, let’s not fuck it up’.”
No Country marks a welcome return to form after the less-than-ecstatically received Intolerable Cruelty and The Ladykillers, not to mention several projects that failed to come to fruition. Chief among these is To The White Sea, a project that had the plug pulled in 2000 before shooting had even began. Based on the novel by James Dickey, the film was to star Brad Pitt as American WW2 soldier who finds himself stranded in Japan after the firebombing of Tokyo.
“We spent a long time on it,” says Joel. “But what the money the studio was willing to put in simply wasn’t enough. We wanted to recreate the firebombing of Tokyo and a survival story just wasn’t commercial enough to demand $50 million. It’s just the reality of what we do. You get used to it. It’s nobody’s fault.”
You can see why the Coen brothers have made peace with commercial imperatives in their chosen field. Their responses may range from the ambiguous to the downright mischievous, but their passion for the medium shines through.
(We shouldn’t be surprised. As children they were already remaking Cornel Wilde’s The Naked Prey on a Super-8 with a cast drawn from their Minnesota classmates.)
“We wanted to make movies for as long as we can remember,” says Ethan. “Our inspiration came from movies on television. We watched everything. We watched Bob Hope comedies and Hercules and Doris Day and The Maltese Falcon and movies where Thelma Ritter played the maid.”
“That was our film education,” adds Joel. “That’s where we learned everything we know. When we made Blood Simple it was the first time we had ever set foot on a movie set. We kept looking at the size of the trucks and thinking, ‘Wow’. We still want to play around with all the stuff we saw back then. We still want to make a western.”
Haven’t you just done so?
“I guess,” he nods. “No Country does have sort of Peckinpah tough guys with blood in their boots. But we haven’t made a movie with lots of horses and a schoolmarm.”
Will there be bungling in it?
“Bungling?”
Yeah. Bungling. Isn’t that why cruel fate always catches up with your characters? Because they’re bunglers?
“You know, you’re right. They are all bunglers,” says Ethan. “Well, we have watched a lot of Looney Toons and we do carry that larger than life sensibility with us still.”
“And we do like it for everything that can go wrong to go wrong,” nods Joel.
They’re off again, talking among themselves. Like many, many film journalists before me I bid them farewell without the slightest clue as to what makes the brothers Coen tick. And maybe I’m happy about it. Maybe I like playing The Men Who Weren’t There game.