Trevor Hogg profiles the careers of filmmaking siblings the Coen brothers in the second of a four part feature… read part one here.
Midway through the writing of the script for Miller’s Crossing, Joel and Ethan Coen attempted to break their creative impasse by composing another story about a playwright suffering from writers’ block. Motivated by their desire to work again with actor John Turturro (Quiz Show) and to shoot a movie in a huge neglected hotel, the two brothers completed the screenplay for Barton Fink (1991) in three weeks.
Revealing the person who helped to inspire the title role played by Turturro, Joel stated, “The character had a little of the same background as a writer like Clifford Odets [Waiting for Lefty], though the resemblance stops there. Both wrote the same type of plays on proletarian heroes, but their personalities are very different. Odets was much more open to the external world, a very sociable guy even in Hollywood which isn’t the case with Barton Fink!.” A famous author served as the model for the Southern alcoholic writer W.P. Mayhew. “It’s obvious that we chose John Mahoney [Moonstruck] for that part because of his resemblance to [William] Faulkner,” remarked Ethan, “but it was also because we were very keen to work with him.” As for the similarities between the fictional character and the real life personality, Joel observed, “It’s obvious Faulkner had the same disdain as Mayhew for Hollywood, but his alcoholism didn’t paralyze him and he continued to be productive.” For the part of producer Jack Lipnick (Michael Lerner), the Coens turned their attention towards a couple of studio legends. “The incident with the uniform, for instance, came from the life of Jack Warner, who enrolled in the army and asked his wardrobe department to make a uniform,” said Joel. “Lipnick also has the vulgar side of Harry Cohn.”
“We wanted the start of the movie to have a certain rhythm and to take the audience on a kind of journey,” stated Joel. “When Barton awoke and discovered the corpse near him, we wanted it to be a surprise without clashing with what had gone on before.” The director of the picture went on to say, “You don’t know who killed Audrey Taylor [Judy Davis]. We didn’t exclude the possibility it was him, though he proclaims his innocence repeatedly. It’s one of the classic conventions of crime movies to create false trails for the audience as long as possible. With that said, we wanted to remain ambiguous until the end. But what’s suggested is that the crime has been committed by Charlie [John Goodman], the neighbour in the room next door.”
John Goodman (The Babe) was the first choice of the Coens to play insurance salesman Charlie Meadows. “The role was written for the actor, and we were obviously conscious of that warm, affable image the audience feels comfortable with,” explained Ethan. “We exploited that expectation in order to finally turn it around. Yet, as soon as he presents himself, there’s something menacing, disquieting about him.” The choice of the principal filming location was critical in establishing the right tone. “We wanted an art-deco style and a place that was falling to pieces, having known better days,” stated Joel. “The hotel had to be organically connected with the movie – it had to be the externalization of the character played by John Goodman. Sweat falls from his brow like wallpaper falls from the walls. At the end, when Goodman says he’s a prisoner of his own mental state, that it’s like a hell, the hotel has already taken on an infernal appearance.”
Acknowledging there are fantastical elements in the film such as the sequence where Barton Fink flattens the mosquito, Joel replied, “Some people have suggested the whole second part of the movie is only a nightmare. It certainly wasn’t our intention to make it a literal bad dream, but it’s true we wanted an irrational logic. We wanted the climate of the movie to reflect the psychological state of its hero.”
With Barry Sonnenfeld making his directorial debut with The Addams Family (1991), Roger Deakins (The Shawshank Redemption) was hired to replace him. “We very much liked his night shots and interiors in Stormy Monday [1988],” said Ethan of the veteran British cinematographer who has become an indispensable member of the Coens’ inner circle.
Competing against Spike Lee’s Jungle Fever, Jacques Rivette’s La Belle Noiseuse, and David Mamet’s Homicide at the 1991 Cannes Film Festival, Barton Fink won the prestigious Palme d’Or, as well as the awards for Best Director and Best Actor (John Turturro). Also at the Academy Awards the picture was nominated for Best Supporting Actor (Michael Lerner), Best Art Direction, and Best Costume Design.
“[Ethan] does all of the typing,” revealed Joel Coen on how he and his younger brother go about composing a script. “We just sit down together and work it out from beginning to end. We don’t break it up and each do scenes. We talk the whole thing through together.” On how it was determined that the elder Coen would be the one behind the camera, Joel replied, “The standard answer is that I’m bigger than he is – that I can beat him up so I get to direct.” Without missing a beat, Ethan added, “It’s those critical three inches in reach that make the difference.” In the reality, the division of the filmmaking tasks is a blurred affair. “To tell you the truth, the credits on the movie don’t reflect the extent of the collaboration,” stated Joel. “I did a lot of things on the production side and Ethan did a lot of directorial stuff. The line wasn’t clearly drawn. In fact, the way we worked was incredibly fluid. I think we’re both just equally responsible for everything in the movie.” For Ethan, this is not completely true. “Although, on the set, Joel is definitely the director. He’s the one in charge.” After a brief reflection, Joel conceded, “Yeah, I did work with the actors and all that. But as far as the script and the realization, down to the tiniest details and including all the major aesthetic decisions, that’s a mutual thing.”
Collaborating on another script with Sam Raimi, the two Coen brothers produced their first major studio-funded picture, The Hudsucker Proxy (1994). Recent business school graduate Norville Baines (Tim Robbins) is appointed president of a manufacturing company as part of a corporate takeover scheme being orchestrated by ruthless board member Sidney J. Mussburger (Paul Newman).
“We had to come up with something that Norville was going to invent that on the face was ridiculous,” revealed Joel on the decision to have the main character come up with the concept of the hula hoop. “Something that would seem, by any sort of rational measure to be doomed to failure, but on the other hand something that that the audience already knew was going to be a phenomenal success.” The plot device influenced the production of the picture. “The whole circle motif was built into the design of the movie, and that just made it seem more appropriate,” stated Ethan with Joel adding, “What grew out of that was the design element which drives the movie. The tension between vertical lines and circles; you have these tall buildings, then these circles everywhere which are echoed in the plot…in the structure of the movie itself. It starts with the end and circles back to the beginning, with a big flashback.”
Originating back in 1984, the script ran into a major glitch. “We couldn’t figure out how to end the movie,” confided Sam Raimi. “We left it two scenes from the end, with Norville up on the ledge about to jump. I would actually throw firecrackers or ladyfingers at the boys to get them moving, to spark an idea.” Raimi came up with his own solution, or so he thought. “I suggested that Mussburger might turn out to be a nice guy who’d been led astray. When they broke into laughter I realized it’s a film of broad strokes about black and whites, and that changing Mussburger would diminish Norville’s plight.”
Associated with blockbuster action movies such as Predator (1987) and Die Hard (1988), Joel Silver is not a person one would normally associate with the production of a movie by the Coen brothers. “They’ve had a reputation for being weird, off-centre, inaccessible,” said Silver. “They were having trouble getting money for this $25 million script – people were stymied by the fact that Joel and Ethan’s name was on it.” Being a fan of their movies, Joel Silver intervened and arranged a production deal with Warner Bros.; for the male lead he wanted Tom Cruise (Magnolia) but the Coens insisted on Tim Robbins (Mystic River). Unable to sign Clint Eastwood (Million Dollar Baby) for the role of the villainous Sidney J. Mussburger because of scheduling conflicts, the brothers were faced with a problem. “Warner Bros. suggested all sorts of names. A lot of them were comedians who were clearly wrong. Mussburger is the bad guy and Paul Newman [Nobody’s Fool] brought the character to life.” Vying for the character of the journalist Amy Archer were Winona Ryder (Little Women) and Bridget Fonda (Scandal); they lost the part to an actress who previously had failed auditions for Miller’s Crossing and Barton Fink, Jennifer Jason Leigh (Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle). “Making the movie really brought me back to all those childhood days when I was home with stomach flu,” reflected Leigh. “I would watch all those great screwball comedies by [George] Cukor, [Preston] Sturges, and [Frank] Capra and laugh and laugh until it was time to throw up again.”
“It’s almost axiomatic that the movie’s principal characters have to be sympathetic, and that the movie has to supply a moral uplift,” observed Joel. “People like it. But it’s not interesting to us. You’re not suppose to sympathize with Gabriel Byrne in Miller’s Crossing, or with Barton Fink. John Turturro used to say that Fink is the guy who if you’re invited to a party, everybody asks, ‘Is Barton going to be there?’ And you only sympathize with Norville in a certain way – he’s an outsider, and with good reason. He’s not just misunderstood. People feel Jennifer is too tough in the movie, but I don’t feel that at all – that’s the way the movie works. People do find that distance chilly, or cold around the edges.”
With the additional marketing costs raising the price of the production to $40 million, Ethan stated, “The pressures are very visible and very legitimate. It’s all money: Making more money makes it easier to get money for your next film.” Fearing a box office fiasco, film industry magazine Variety reported that Warner Bros ordered reshoots in hopes of saving the picture; it was a claim which Joel Coen refuted, “First of all they weren’t reshoots. They were a little bit of additional footage. We wanted to shoot a fight scene at the end of the movie. It was the product of something we discovered editing the movie, not previewing it. We’ve done additional shooting in every movie, so it’s normal.”
Losing to Pulp Fiction at the 1994 Cannes Film Festival for the Palme d’Or, The Hudsucker Proxy earned a dismal $3 million from American moviegoers. The critical reaction was the same as with their previous efforts – style over substance. “Not even the slightest attempt is made to suggest that the film takes its own story seriously,” wrote Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times. “Everything is style. The performances seem deliberately angled as satire.” Tom McCarthy of Variety echoed the same sentiment in his review; he felt that the picture was “one of the most inspired and technically stunning pastiches of the Old Hollywood pictures to ever to come out of the New Hollywood. But a pastiche it remains, as nearly everything in the Coens latest and biggest film seems like a wizardly but artificial synthesis, leaving a hole in the middle where some emotion and humanity should be.”
The commercial failure of The Hudsucker Proxy did little to diminish the mischievous spirit of the Coens who wrote a mock interview session with the fictional Prof. Dennis Jacobson; it was included in the book version of script. “The intros to screenplays are always by some screenwriter gassing on with self-congratulation or some sort of foggy analysis of what they’ve just down,” stated Joel. “We’d rather do something that’s fun to write.” Caught off-guard by the question of how he and Ethan would handle composing an Oscar acceptance speech, Joel Coen responded, “We’d be so mortified at the thought of having to speak in public that I doubt we’d write anything. We’d probably wing it. I’m always impressed, genuinely, by graceful accept speeches. I think that sort of thing is just beyond my capabilities.” Joel would find his assessment to be greatly mistaken with the release of the sixth picture by the Minneapolis-born siblings.
“In Fargo we attempted a very different stylistic approach, tackling the subject in a very dry manner,” stated Joel Coen of the 1996 film about a desperate salesman (William H. Macy) who hires two inept men (Steve Buscemi and Peter Stormare) to kidnap his wife (Kristin Rudrüd) with the intention of splitting the ransom money with them. “We also wanted the camera to tell the story as an observer. The construction is tied to the original true story, but we allowed ourselves more meanders and digressions. Each incident didn’t necessarily have to be at the service of the plot. We even took the liberty of not introducing the heroine, Inspector Gunderson [Frances McDormand], until the middle of the movie.”
As for what drew him and his brother to the material, Joel responded, “There were two or three things that interested us in relation to that incident. First it happened within an era and a region we were familiar with, which we could explore. Then it concerned a kidnapping, a type of event which has always fascinated us. In fact, we have another very different script on a kidnapping we’d like to film. And finally there was a possibility of shooting a criminal movie with the characters far removed from the stereotypes of the genre.” Ethan agreed with his brother. “It’s probably a subject we wouldn’t have dealt with outside of that context. When we begin to write, we try to imagine very specifically the world in which the story unfolds. The difference is that, up to now, these were purely fictional universes, while in Fargo we needed you to be able to smell the place. As we are from the region, it helped us to understand how it might play with that milieu.”
Though the picture begins with the opening line, “This is a true story”, there are those who find this hard to believe considering the Coens reputation for being cinematic pranksters. “Generally speaking the movie is based on a real event, but the details of the story and the characters are invented,” replied Joel. “It didn’t interest us to make a documentary film, and we undertook no research on the nature or the details of the murders. But, by telling the public that we took our inspiration from reality, we knew they wouldn’t see the movie as just an ordinary thriller.”
Given a prominent role in Fargo is the accent found in the state of the Coens’ childhood – Minnesota. “When we were small, we weren’t really conscious of the Scandinavian heritage that marked the region so strongly because we had no points of comparison,” recalled Ethan. “It was only on arrival in New York that we were astonished there weren’t more, like Gustafsons or Sondergaards. All the exoticism and strangeness of that region comes from the Nordic character, from its politeness and reservation. There’s something Japanese in that refusal to show the least emotion, in that resistance in saying ‘No!’. One of the comic wellsprings of the story comes from the conflict between the constant avoidance of all confrontation and the murders gradually piling up.”
To avoid having the characters become caricatures, Joel remarked, “I suppose it’s partly intuition about the tone, and it particularly depends on the actors’ capacity to know how far they can go. There is, for instance, with Frances a very authentic manner, very open in presenting her character. It prevents Marge from becoming a parody of herself. Frances was very conscious of the dangers of excess, with that mannerism of dragging out words at the very end of each sentence.” The original intention of the story helped make the performances credible. “When we wrote the script and when the actors interpreted their roles, none of us thought of the story as a comedy,” revealed Ethan. Supporting his sibling’s remark, Joel replied, “And that helped to make the characters comical and creditable at the same time. The comedy wouldn’t have worked if it had been played as comedy, rather than with sincerity.”
One of the roles which fascinated the Coens was that of the car salesman who sets off the bloody mayhem. “What interested us from the start with the William Macy [Happy, Texas] character was his absolute incapacity, even for one minute, to project himself into the future and evaluate the consequences of his decisions,” said Joel. “There’s something fascinating in that total absence of perspective. He’s one of those people who would construct a pyramid without thinking for a moment that it could collapse.” The lack of foresight was expanded to include the other cast members. “One of the reasons for making them simple-minded was our desire to go against the Hollywood cliché of the villain as a super professional who controls everything he does,” stated Ethan. “In fact, in most cases criminals belong with the strata of society least equipped to face life, and that’s why they’re caught so often. In this sense too, our movie is closer to life than the conventions of cinema and genre movies.” To prove this point, Joel referenced a true life event, “Look at those people who recently blew up the World Trade Center. They’d rented a van to prepare the explosion, and, once the job was finished, they returned to the rental agency to reclaim their deposit. The absurdity of that, in itself is terribly funny.”
A prominent element in Fargo is the bleak white setting. “On Fargo we had problems with the weather because we needed the snow, but when we shot the winter was particularly soft and dry,” recalled Ethan. “We had to work in Minneapolis with artificial snow. Then, as the snow hadn’t yet fallen, we went to North Dakota for the end of the shoot, the big exterior scenes. We had what we wanted there: a covered sky, no direct sunlight, no line on the horizon, and a light that was neutral, diffused.” There was also another reason why Joel approved of the shift in location. “There, landscapes were really dramatic and oppressive. There were no mountains, no forests, only flat, desolated stretches of land. It’s just what we wanted to convey on the screen.”
With the release of the picture, the Coens had their first major commercial hit. Made on a budget of $7 million, Fargo grossed $61 million worldwide and even had usual naysayer Roger Ebert declaring in his Chicago Sun-Times review, “Films like Fargo are why I love the movies.” Nominated for seven Academy Awards including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Supporting Actor (William H. Macy), Best Cinematography and Best Film Editing, the thriller won Oscars for Best Actress (Frances McDormand) and Best Original Screenplay. The international acclaim spread to Britain and France where the BAFTAs and Cannes Film Festival both lauded Joel Coen with the awards for Best Director.
After tying the matrimonial knot with film editor Tricia Cooke (Solitary Man), Ethan soon found himself and his brother Joel forever tied to a cinematic slacker embodied by veteran actor Jeff Bridges (The Last Picture Show).
Continue to part three.
Read the Oscar-winning screenplay for Fargo (or check out their other scripts here), and 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.
