When Joel and Ethan Coen were growing up, they used to make Super 8 films, including remakes of Hollywood movies that they had watched on TV. Since then, the Coens have continued to let their imagination loose while ranging wide across cinematic and literary genres, drawing on pulp literature ( “Blood Simple,” “Miller’s Crossing” ), screwball cinema ( “The Hudsucker Proxy,” “Intolerable Cruelty”), Homer’s Odyssey ( “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” ), the Bible and their own suburban Minneapolis childhood ( “A Serious Man” ) to make movies that, increasingly, have the quality of an evolving, distinctly American mythopoeia.
In July, Manohla Dargis and A. O. Scott, the chief film critics for The New York Times, met with Joel Coen, now 58, and Ethan Coen, 55, in Santa Monica, Calif., to discuss their work, including their latest film, “Inside Llewyn Davis” (Dec. 6) about a 1961 folk singer (played by Oscar Isaac), who’s struggling with his music, the world, the changing times and — this being the Coens — his comically flawed humanity. The brothers sat across from each other and at times seemed to share a single (very large and fast-moving) brain. These are excerpts from the conversation.
Q. Can you talk about the genesis of “Inside Llewyn Davis”?
Ethan Coen We were in the office and Joel said, “O.K., suppose Dave Van Ronk gets beat up outside of Gerde’s Folk City. That’s the beginning of a movie.”
Joel Coen It was an idea we kept coming back to. We were thinking 1961 is interesting, because it’s the scene that Dylan came into, not the one he created or transformed, because people know more about that. Dylan once said something — and I’m paraphrasing him — “Really, all I wanted is to be as big as Dave Van Ronk.” That’s how limited that scene was, in terms of the people in the broader culture.
Did you grow up listening to that music?
Ethan Yeah, sort of, through Bob Dylan, like everybody else, probably.
Joel I’m a little older than Ethan, but I have very vague early memories of hearing folk music, my mother playing it or something, when I was fairly little.
Ethan We had a fantastic record of a concert, a rock concert, of Big Bill Broonzy and Pete Seeger, which is kind of ——
Joel Yes, that was a really early record that was a concert in Chicago, where Pete played. In fact, that’s how we met T Bone [Burnett]. T Bone called us up sort of out of the blue after he saw “Raising Arizona,” because he thought it was very amusing that we played Beethoven on banjo in the score in the movie. We said to him, “Well, we really stole that from Pete Seeger,” because Pete Seeger played that. We knew it from this concert record.
Ethan Oh, the one disclaimer I should’ve made when we talked about the genesis of the movie: We did start thinking about Dave Van Ronk, and in fact read his memoir, which is kind of great, “The Mayor of Macdougal Street.” But the movie’s not about Dave Van Ronk, although Oscar, the character, has his kind of repertoire. It’s his music. It’s a fictional character we gave his music to.
How did you find Oscar Isaac?
Joel After we wrote the movie and we started casting it, we knew that there was going to be a lot of performance in the movie, and that actually when you heard a song in the movie, we really wanted to hear the whole song. And it’s also a story where we felt like there’s got to be something about the character that you only know through his performance and his music — you know, like a real musician. So we only auditioned real musicians.
Ethan [Laughs.]
Joel You know, that was not so great. It’s often possible — sometimes it’s even easy — to get somebody like that through a scene or two scenes or three scenes or whatever, and it’s great, it’s fine. But this character’s literally in every scene in the movie, so we realized we were going the wrong direction, and we just started seeing actors who could play, as opposed to musicians who could act. And there are more of those, by the way.
Ethan And we’ve been doing this like, 30 years. You’d think we know something as basic as this, that you need an actor.
Joel I know. It was a little insane. Oscar came in and he said, “Most actors, if you ask them if they play guitar, they’ll say they played guitar for 20 years, but what they really mean is they’ve owned a guitar for 20 years.” Oscar’s actually played guitar since he was little little, you know? He played, and we sent the tape to T Bone, and T Bone said, “This guy’s actually a better musician than a lot of the studio guys I work with.” So we went, “We found him.”
Can we talk a little bit about how you write? Are you locked in a room together?
Joel It’s always been the same. We don’t split it up. You know: “You write this scene. You write that.” There’s a lot of just sitting around talking ideas before we start writing anything. So there’s kind of a long period of that, and then we generally start at the beginning and just kind of start hammering the scenes out. We don’t outline stuff or any of that, although there are some movies where we kind of have a pretty good idea of the shape of it. Or we even know how it’s going to end when we start, and then others where we just have no idea whatsoever, and it goes where it goes. They don’t all ——
Ethan This one actually ——
Joel Don’t get finished. They get put aside for a while, you know.
Ethan The rule is: It goes where it goes, although in the case of this one, we kind of knew either at the beginning or near the very beginning, that it was going to circle back.
Who’s typing?
(Page 2 of 2)
Ethan Usually me, because I type faster, but sometimes Joel. We’ll just talk the scene back and forth, and occasionally, one of us will sit down and say, “Oh, wait, I’ve got something.” If it’s an idea that consists of a few lines, an exchange, one of us will type without consulting the other.
Are you comfortable throwing out each other’s bad ideas?
Ethan Oh, sure, yeah.
Joel Perfectly comfortable, very comfortable. But you know, someone asked us once how we adapt novels, and Ethan said, “Joel holds the book open by the spine, while I retype it into the computer.”
Your recent adaptations [of “True Grit” by Charles Portis and “No Country for Old Men” by Cormac McCarthy] are remarkably faithful.
Ethan Yeah, they’re really good books, man.
Joel Don’t change it if it’s not broken!
Has working together changed over the 30 years?
Joel Not really.
Have other things changed?
Joel Well, the craft of it’s changed a lot, just because of digital technology. That’s the thing that’s been the most radical. I mean, outside of that, it’s still the same as when we were making Super 8 movies, basically. This movie was not shot digitally. We shot it on film. It’s probably ——
Ethan Probably the last one.
Joel It might be the last one we ever do on film.
Ethan “True Grit” was the last film that Roger Deakins shot on film.
Joel We were one of the last people to stop cutting on film. And when we stopped, people would say, “Why?” Honestly, the answer was because we couldn’t find assistants who knew how to work on film. They didn’t exist anymore. I mean, it was — I remember being in Ken Loach’s cutting room around then, and I said — he was cutting on a Steenbeck back then — and I said, “How do you do this?” And he pointed like that [points] and there was this, like, 96-year-old guy on the rewinds.
When did you make the shift to digital editing?
Ethan “Intolerable Cruelty” was the first one we cut.
Have you tried out any digital cameras yet?
Ethan We’ve seen Roger’s tests of the Alexa, which are pretty remarkable, which is the eerie thing.
Joel I think both of us — and T Bone I would throw in here, too — are very sort of analog. I’d rather listen to vinyl than to a CD. I’d rather see a movie shot on film. I don’t think they look the same. I think you can duplicate things with digital technology, but what you end up doing is trying to recapture elements of photochemical technology that aren’t there, and they always look a little screwy.
Ethan The analog texture feels so good.
Joel There was a period of time when you could choose whether you were shooting in black and white or in color, and depending on the subject matter — and usually it’s sort of genre-driven and all the rest. It would be great if you could say, “This movie lends itself to digital shooting, this one, black and white,” without there being any kind of arty stigma put on it. It’s just another thing you can try.
You make movies that are released by studios and win Oscars, yet on some level, you are still not mainstream guys. It’s kind of a contradictory position.
Joel Yeah, I know. You know, we’ve talked about that ourselves. It’s weird.
Ethan Yeah. If you’ll pardon me, the indie thing might all just be a journalists’ thing. James Cameron makes huge movies that are what he wants to do, and they’re financed and released by studios. Indie is like, a term of praise that you use for us, fortunately, and some of you bash Jim Cameron for not being, although he kind of is.
But certainly there were people who were making movies outside of the studio system.
Joel Maybe that’s more what it is. Because when we started out, it was just the default place because no one would give us money to make a movie. We would’ve taken it if it had been offered when we were making our first movie. We would’ve gone, “Is there somebody who will pay for this in a big Hollywood studio?” We were moving toward the indie thing, but in another way we were always hoping a big studio would release the movies. And there was a point where we looked at each other, and we went, “I guess we’re kind of the mainstream guys.” You know, when we won the Oscar.
Ethan That’s true.
Joel We said, “How’d that happen?”
Ethan We are the establishment now.
Some of that is generational.
Ethan I was just talking about that, actually, with our dear friend Steven Spielberg. The three of us ——
Joel It’s true. It’s true. Because even he’s had to go: “How did I get here? Why am I the establishment guy?” — you know?
Ethan Is there a way to half-put irony quotes around the “dear friend” thing?[Laughter.]
Since you mention him: He and George Lucas recently talked about the state of the movie business and how frustrated they are with it. Do you have thoughts on it?
Ethan God, I don’t know. What do you say? I don’t know. What do you say?
A lot. Or nothing.
Ethan You know, moaning about that stuff: it might be true, and it might be a hallmark of getting old, and it might be both. You know? Isn’t that what you complain about when you get old, about how it’s harder?
It’s a recurrent theme — the crisis in film.
Joel It’s definitely harder now. On the other hand, I think you can exaggerate that, too, because the movie business in the United States, despite the sort of ups and downs of the economy, is still a very healthy business. And that healthy business is going to support — and it always has — a lot of niche moviemaking. More than you might expect it to, given the mentality. There’s still a lot of interesting stuff being made which is completely outside of the kind of trend that we’re describing, you know?
Ethan We’ve always actually been remarkably commercially successful. Not in terms of making huge amounts of money, which we rarely do, but in terms of not losing money and making modest amounts of money. We’re actually strangely consistent in that respect. We’ve been able to keep making movies because of that and also because, strangely, we’ve had studio patrons, starting from Barry Diller. Sometimes they’re establishment people who know they’re not going to make huge amounts of money, but they like your movies. They’re moviegoers, too.
Joel And mostly they’re making blockbusters, but when you get in a room with them, they go, “Go off and make your movie, and I’ll do it as long as I can’t get hurt too bad.” You know? They’re completely open to that still. They don’t want to get burned.
Ethan They don’t want to look stupid.
Joel Nobody wants to look stupid or lose lots of money. On the other hand, they’re not afraid of doing other stuff if they can trust you to keep it reasonable. So, yeah, they kind of let us wander off without any adult supervision and do what we want.
(Page 2 of 2)
Ethan Usually me, because I type faster, but sometimes Joel. We’ll just talk the scene back and forth, and occasionally, one of us will sit down and say, “Oh, wait, I’ve got something.” If it’s an idea that consists of a few lines, an exchange, one of us will type without consulting the other.
Are you comfortable throwing out each other’s bad ideas?
Ethan Oh, sure, yeah.
Joel Perfectly comfortable, very comfortable. But you know, someone asked us once how we adapt novels, and Ethan said, “Joel holds the book open by the spine, while I retype it into the computer.”
Your recent adaptations [of “True Grit” by Charles Portis and “No Country for Old Men” by Cormac McCarthy] are remarkably faithful.
Ethan Yeah, they’re really good books, man.
Joel Don’t change it if it’s not broken!
Has working together changed over the 30 years?
Joel Not really.
Have other things changed?
Joel Well, the craft of it’s changed a lot, just because of digital technology. That’s the thing that’s been the most radical. I mean, outside of that, it’s still the same as when we were making Super 8 movies, basically. This movie was not shot digitally. We shot it on film. It’s probably ——
Ethan Probably the last one.
Joel It might be the last one we ever do on film.
Ethan “True Grit” was the last film that Roger Deakins shot on film.
Joel We were one of the last people to stop cutting on film. And when we stopped, people would say, “Why?” Honestly, the answer was because we couldn’t find assistants who knew how to work on film. They didn’t exist anymore. I mean, it was — I remember being in Ken Loach’s cutting room around then, and I said — he was cutting on a Steenbeck back then — and I said, “How do you do this?” And he pointed like that [points] and there was this, like, 96-year-old guy on the rewinds.
When did you make the shift to digital editing?
Ethan “Intolerable Cruelty” was the first one we cut.
Have you tried out any digital cameras yet?
Ethan We’ve seen Roger’s tests of the Alexa, which are pretty remarkable, which is the eerie thing.
Joel I think both of us — and T Bone I would throw in here, too — are very sort of analog. I’d rather listen to vinyl than to a CD. I’d rather see a movie shot on film. I don’t think they look the same. I think you can duplicate things with digital technology, but what you end up doing is trying to recapture elements of photochemical technology that aren’t there, and they always look a little screwy.
Ethan The analog texture feels so good.
Joel There was a period of time when you could choose whether you were shooting in black and white or in color, and depending on the subject matter — and usually it’s sort of genre-driven and all the rest. It would be great if you could say, “This movie lends itself to digital shooting, this one, black and white,” without there being any kind of arty stigma put on it. It’s just another thing you can try.
You make movies that are released by studios and win Oscars, yet on some level, you are still not mainstream guys. It’s kind of a contradictory position.
Joel Yeah, I know. You know, we’ve talked about that ourselves. It’s weird.
Ethan Yeah. If you’ll pardon me, the indie thing might all just be a journalists’ thing. James Cameron makes huge movies that are what he wants to do, and they’re financed and released by studios. Indie is like, a term of praise that you use for us, fortunately, and some of you bash Jim Cameron for not being, although he kind of is.
But certainly there were people who were making movies outside of the studio system.
Joel Maybe that’s more what it is. Because when we started out, it was just the default place because no one would give us money to make a movie. We would’ve taken it if it had been offered when we were making our first movie. We would’ve gone, “Is there somebody who will pay for this in a big Hollywood studio?” We were moving toward the indie thing, but in another way we were always hoping a big studio would release the movies. And there was a point where we looked at each other, and we went, “I guess we’re kind of the mainstream guys.” You know, when we won the Oscar.
Ethan That’s true.
Joel We said, “How’d that happen?”
Ethan We are the establishment now.
Some of that is generational.
Ethan I was just talking about that, actually, with our dear friend Steven Spielberg. The three of us ——
Joel It’s true. It’s true. Because even he’s had to go: “How did I get here? Why am I the establishment guy?” — you know?
Ethan Is there a way to half-put irony quotes around the “dear friend” thing?[Laughter.]
Since you mention him: He and George Lucas recently talked about the state of the movie business and how frustrated they are with it. Do you have thoughts on it?
Ethan God, I don’t know. What do you say? I don’t know. What do you say?
A lot. Or nothing.
Ethan You know, moaning about that stuff: it might be true, and it might be a hallmark of getting old, and it might be both. You know? Isn’t that what you complain about when you get old, about how it’s harder?
It’s a recurrent theme — the crisis in film.
Joel It’s definitely harder now. On the other hand, I think you can exaggerate that, too, because the movie business in the United States, despite the sort of ups and downs of the economy, is still a very healthy business. And that healthy business is going to support — and it always has — a lot of niche moviemaking. More than you might expect it to, given the mentality. There’s still a lot of interesting stuff being made which is completely outside of the kind of trend that we’re describing, you know?
Ethan We’ve always actually been remarkably commercially successful. Not in terms of making huge amounts of money, which we rarely do, but in terms of not losing money and making modest amounts of money. We’re actually strangely consistent in that respect. We’ve been able to keep making movies because of that and also because, strangely, we’ve had studio patrons, starting from Barry Diller. Sometimes they’re establishment people who know they’re not going to make huge amounts of money, but they like your movies. They’re moviegoers, too.
Joel And mostly they’re making blockbusters, but when you get in a room with them, they go, “Go off and make your movie, and I’ll do it as long as I can’t get hurt too bad.” You know? They’re completely open to that still. They don’t want to get burned.
Ethan They don’t want to look stupid.
Joel Nobody wants to look stupid or lose lots of money. On the other hand, they’re not afraid of doing other stuff if they can trust you to keep it reasonable. So, yeah, they kind of let us wander off without any adult supervision and do what we want.
In July, Manohla Dargis and A. O. Scott, the chief film critics for The New York Times, met with Joel Coen, now 58, and Ethan Coen, 55, in Santa Monica, Calif., to discuss their work, including their latest film, “Inside Llewyn Davis” (Dec. 6) about a 1961 folk singer (played by Oscar Isaac), who’s struggling with his music, the world, the changing times and — this being the Coens — his comically flawed humanity. The brothers sat across from each other and at times seemed to share a single (very large and fast-moving) brain. These are excerpts from the conversation.
Q. Can you talk about the genesis of “Inside Llewyn Davis”?
Ethan Coen We were in the office and Joel said, “O.K., suppose Dave Van Ronk gets beat up outside of Gerde’s Folk City. That’s the beginning of a movie.”
Joel Coen It was an idea we kept coming back to. We were thinking 1961 is interesting, because it’s the scene that Dylan came into, not the one he created or transformed, because people know more about that. Dylan once said something — and I’m paraphrasing him — “Really, all I wanted is to be as big as Dave Van Ronk.” That’s how limited that scene was, in terms of the people in the broader culture.
Did you grow up listening to that music?
Ethan Yeah, sort of, through Bob Dylan, like everybody else, probably.
Joel I’m a little older than Ethan, but I have very vague early memories of hearing folk music, my mother playing it or something, when I was fairly little.
Ethan We had a fantastic record of a concert, a rock concert, of Big Bill Broonzy and Pete Seeger, which is kind of ——
Joel Yes, that was a really early record that was a concert in Chicago, where Pete played. In fact, that’s how we met T Bone [Burnett]. T Bone called us up sort of out of the blue after he saw “Raising Arizona,” because he thought it was very amusing that we played Beethoven on banjo in the score in the movie. We said to him, “Well, we really stole that from Pete Seeger,” because Pete Seeger played that. We knew it from this concert record.
Ethan Oh, the one disclaimer I should’ve made when we talked about the genesis of the movie: We did start thinking about Dave Van Ronk, and in fact read his memoir, which is kind of great, “The Mayor of Macdougal Street.” But the movie’s not about Dave Van Ronk, although Oscar, the character, has his kind of repertoire. It’s his music. It’s a fictional character we gave his music to.
How did you find Oscar Isaac?
Joel After we wrote the movie and we started casting it, we knew that there was going to be a lot of performance in the movie, and that actually when you heard a song in the movie, we really wanted to hear the whole song. And it’s also a story where we felt like there’s got to be something about the character that you only know through his performance and his music — you know, like a real musician. So we only auditioned real musicians.
Ethan [Laughs.]
Joel You know, that was not so great. It’s often possible — sometimes it’s even easy — to get somebody like that through a scene or two scenes or three scenes or whatever, and it’s great, it’s fine. But this character’s literally in every scene in the movie, so we realized we were going the wrong direction, and we just started seeing actors who could play, as opposed to musicians who could act. And there are more of those, by the way.
Ethan And we’ve been doing this like, 30 years. You’d think we know something as basic as this, that you need an actor.
Joel I know. It was a little insane. Oscar came in and he said, “Most actors, if you ask them if they play guitar, they’ll say they played guitar for 20 years, but what they really mean is they’ve owned a guitar for 20 years.” Oscar’s actually played guitar since he was little little, you know? He played, and we sent the tape to T Bone, and T Bone said, “This guy’s actually a better musician than a lot of the studio guys I work with.” So we went, “We found him.”
Can we talk a little bit about how you write? Are you locked in a room together?
Joel It’s always been the same. We don’t split it up. You know: “You write this scene. You write that.” There’s a lot of just sitting around talking ideas before we start writing anything. So there’s kind of a long period of that, and then we generally start at the beginning and just kind of start hammering the scenes out. We don’t outline stuff or any of that, although there are some movies where we kind of have a pretty good idea of the shape of it. Or we even know how it’s going to end when we start, and then others where we just have no idea whatsoever, and it goes where it goes. They don’t all ——
Ethan This one actually ——
Joel Don’t get finished. They get put aside for a while, you know.
Ethan The rule is: It goes where it goes, although in the case of this one, we kind of knew either at the beginning or near the very beginning, that it was going to circle back.
Who’s typing?
(Page 2 of 2)
Ethan Usually me, because I type faster, but sometimes Joel. We’ll just talk the scene back and forth, and occasionally, one of us will sit down and say, “Oh, wait, I’ve got something.” If it’s an idea that consists of a few lines, an exchange, one of us will type without consulting the other.
Are you comfortable throwing out each other’s bad ideas?
Ethan Oh, sure, yeah.
Joel Perfectly comfortable, very comfortable. But you know, someone asked us once how we adapt novels, and Ethan said, “Joel holds the book open by the spine, while I retype it into the computer.”
Your recent adaptations [of “True Grit” by Charles Portis and “No Country for Old Men” by Cormac McCarthy] are remarkably faithful.
Ethan Yeah, they’re really good books, man.
Joel Don’t change it if it’s not broken!
Has working together changed over the 30 years?
Joel Not really.
Have other things changed?
Joel Well, the craft of it’s changed a lot, just because of digital technology. That’s the thing that’s been the most radical. I mean, outside of that, it’s still the same as when we were making Super 8 movies, basically. This movie was not shot digitally. We shot it on film. It’s probably ——
Ethan Probably the last one.
Joel It might be the last one we ever do on film.
Ethan “True Grit” was the last film that Roger Deakins shot on film.
Joel We were one of the last people to stop cutting on film. And when we stopped, people would say, “Why?” Honestly, the answer was because we couldn’t find assistants who knew how to work on film. They didn’t exist anymore. I mean, it was — I remember being in Ken Loach’s cutting room around then, and I said — he was cutting on a Steenbeck back then — and I said, “How do you do this?” And he pointed like that [points] and there was this, like, 96-year-old guy on the rewinds.
When did you make the shift to digital editing?
Ethan “Intolerable Cruelty” was the first one we cut.
Have you tried out any digital cameras yet?
Ethan We’ve seen Roger’s tests of the Alexa, which are pretty remarkable, which is the eerie thing.
Joel I think both of us — and T Bone I would throw in here, too — are very sort of analog. I’d rather listen to vinyl than to a CD. I’d rather see a movie shot on film. I don’t think they look the same. I think you can duplicate things with digital technology, but what you end up doing is trying to recapture elements of photochemical technology that aren’t there, and they always look a little screwy.
Ethan The analog texture feels so good.
Joel There was a period of time when you could choose whether you were shooting in black and white or in color, and depending on the subject matter — and usually it’s sort of genre-driven and all the rest. It would be great if you could say, “This movie lends itself to digital shooting, this one, black and white,” without there being any kind of arty stigma put on it. It’s just another thing you can try.
You make movies that are released by studios and win Oscars, yet on some level, you are still not mainstream guys. It’s kind of a contradictory position.
Joel Yeah, I know. You know, we’ve talked about that ourselves. It’s weird.
Ethan Yeah. If you’ll pardon me, the indie thing might all just be a journalists’ thing. James Cameron makes huge movies that are what he wants to do, and they’re financed and released by studios. Indie is like, a term of praise that you use for us, fortunately, and some of you bash Jim Cameron for not being, although he kind of is.
But certainly there were people who were making movies outside of the studio system.
Joel Maybe that’s more what it is. Because when we started out, it was just the default place because no one would give us money to make a movie. We would’ve taken it if it had been offered when we were making our first movie. We would’ve gone, “Is there somebody who will pay for this in a big Hollywood studio?” We were moving toward the indie thing, but in another way we were always hoping a big studio would release the movies. And there was a point where we looked at each other, and we went, “I guess we’re kind of the mainstream guys.” You know, when we won the Oscar.
Ethan That’s true.
Joel We said, “How’d that happen?”
Ethan We are the establishment now.
Some of that is generational.
Ethan I was just talking about that, actually, with our dear friend Steven Spielberg. The three of us ——
Joel It’s true. It’s true. Because even he’s had to go: “How did I get here? Why am I the establishment guy?” — you know?
Ethan Is there a way to half-put irony quotes around the “dear friend” thing?[Laughter.]
Since you mention him: He and George Lucas recently talked about the state of the movie business and how frustrated they are with it. Do you have thoughts on it?
Ethan God, I don’t know. What do you say? I don’t know. What do you say?
A lot. Or nothing.
Ethan You know, moaning about that stuff: it might be true, and it might be a hallmark of getting old, and it might be both. You know? Isn’t that what you complain about when you get old, about how it’s harder?
It’s a recurrent theme — the crisis in film.
Joel It’s definitely harder now. On the other hand, I think you can exaggerate that, too, because the movie business in the United States, despite the sort of ups and downs of the economy, is still a very healthy business. And that healthy business is going to support — and it always has — a lot of niche moviemaking. More than you might expect it to, given the mentality. There’s still a lot of interesting stuff being made which is completely outside of the kind of trend that we’re describing, you know?
Ethan We’ve always actually been remarkably commercially successful. Not in terms of making huge amounts of money, which we rarely do, but in terms of not losing money and making modest amounts of money. We’re actually strangely consistent in that respect. We’ve been able to keep making movies because of that and also because, strangely, we’ve had studio patrons, starting from Barry Diller. Sometimes they’re establishment people who know they’re not going to make huge amounts of money, but they like your movies. They’re moviegoers, too.
Joel And mostly they’re making blockbusters, but when you get in a room with them, they go, “Go off and make your movie, and I’ll do it as long as I can’t get hurt too bad.” You know? They’re completely open to that still. They don’t want to get burned.
Ethan They don’t want to look stupid.
Joel Nobody wants to look stupid or lose lots of money. On the other hand, they’re not afraid of doing other stuff if they can trust you to keep it reasonable. So, yeah, they kind of let us wander off without any adult supervision and do what we want.
(Page 2 of 2)
Ethan Usually me, because I type faster, but sometimes Joel. We’ll just talk the scene back and forth, and occasionally, one of us will sit down and say, “Oh, wait, I’ve got something.” If it’s an idea that consists of a few lines, an exchange, one of us will type without consulting the other.
Are you comfortable throwing out each other’s bad ideas?
Ethan Oh, sure, yeah.
Joel Perfectly comfortable, very comfortable. But you know, someone asked us once how we adapt novels, and Ethan said, “Joel holds the book open by the spine, while I retype it into the computer.”
Your recent adaptations [of “True Grit” by Charles Portis and “No Country for Old Men” by Cormac McCarthy] are remarkably faithful.
Ethan Yeah, they’re really good books, man.
Joel Don’t change it if it’s not broken!
Has working together changed over the 30 years?
Joel Not really.
Have other things changed?
Joel Well, the craft of it’s changed a lot, just because of digital technology. That’s the thing that’s been the most radical. I mean, outside of that, it’s still the same as when we were making Super 8 movies, basically. This movie was not shot digitally. We shot it on film. It’s probably ——
Ethan Probably the last one.
Joel It might be the last one we ever do on film.
Ethan “True Grit” was the last film that Roger Deakins shot on film.
Joel We were one of the last people to stop cutting on film. And when we stopped, people would say, “Why?” Honestly, the answer was because we couldn’t find assistants who knew how to work on film. They didn’t exist anymore. I mean, it was — I remember being in Ken Loach’s cutting room around then, and I said — he was cutting on a Steenbeck back then — and I said, “How do you do this?” And he pointed like that [points] and there was this, like, 96-year-old guy on the rewinds.
When did you make the shift to digital editing?
Ethan “Intolerable Cruelty” was the first one we cut.
Have you tried out any digital cameras yet?
Ethan We’ve seen Roger’s tests of the Alexa, which are pretty remarkable, which is the eerie thing.
Joel I think both of us — and T Bone I would throw in here, too — are very sort of analog. I’d rather listen to vinyl than to a CD. I’d rather see a movie shot on film. I don’t think they look the same. I think you can duplicate things with digital technology, but what you end up doing is trying to recapture elements of photochemical technology that aren’t there, and they always look a little screwy.
Ethan The analog texture feels so good.
Joel There was a period of time when you could choose whether you were shooting in black and white or in color, and depending on the subject matter — and usually it’s sort of genre-driven and all the rest. It would be great if you could say, “This movie lends itself to digital shooting, this one, black and white,” without there being any kind of arty stigma put on it. It’s just another thing you can try.
You make movies that are released by studios and win Oscars, yet on some level, you are still not mainstream guys. It’s kind of a contradictory position.
Joel Yeah, I know. You know, we’ve talked about that ourselves. It’s weird.
Ethan Yeah. If you’ll pardon me, the indie thing might all just be a journalists’ thing. James Cameron makes huge movies that are what he wants to do, and they’re financed and released by studios. Indie is like, a term of praise that you use for us, fortunately, and some of you bash Jim Cameron for not being, although he kind of is.
But certainly there were people who were making movies outside of the studio system.
Joel Maybe that’s more what it is. Because when we started out, it was just the default place because no one would give us money to make a movie. We would’ve taken it if it had been offered when we were making our first movie. We would’ve gone, “Is there somebody who will pay for this in a big Hollywood studio?” We were moving toward the indie thing, but in another way we were always hoping a big studio would release the movies. And there was a point where we looked at each other, and we went, “I guess we’re kind of the mainstream guys.” You know, when we won the Oscar.
Ethan That’s true.
Joel We said, “How’d that happen?”
Ethan We are the establishment now.
Some of that is generational.
Ethan I was just talking about that, actually, with our dear friend Steven Spielberg. The three of us ——
Joel It’s true. It’s true. Because even he’s had to go: “How did I get here? Why am I the establishment guy?” — you know?
Ethan Is there a way to half-put irony quotes around the “dear friend” thing?[Laughter.]
Since you mention him: He and George Lucas recently talked about the state of the movie business and how frustrated they are with it. Do you have thoughts on it?
Ethan God, I don’t know. What do you say? I don’t know. What do you say?
A lot. Or nothing.
Ethan You know, moaning about that stuff: it might be true, and it might be a hallmark of getting old, and it might be both. You know? Isn’t that what you complain about when you get old, about how it’s harder?
It’s a recurrent theme — the crisis in film.
Joel It’s definitely harder now. On the other hand, I think you can exaggerate that, too, because the movie business in the United States, despite the sort of ups and downs of the economy, is still a very healthy business. And that healthy business is going to support — and it always has — a lot of niche moviemaking. More than you might expect it to, given the mentality. There’s still a lot of interesting stuff being made which is completely outside of the kind of trend that we’re describing, you know?
Ethan We’ve always actually been remarkably commercially successful. Not in terms of making huge amounts of money, which we rarely do, but in terms of not losing money and making modest amounts of money. We’re actually strangely consistent in that respect. We’ve been able to keep making movies because of that and also because, strangely, we’ve had studio patrons, starting from Barry Diller. Sometimes they’re establishment people who know they’re not going to make huge amounts of money, but they like your movies. They’re moviegoers, too.
Joel And mostly they’re making blockbusters, but when you get in a room with them, they go, “Go off and make your movie, and I’ll do it as long as I can’t get hurt too bad.” You know? They’re completely open to that still. They don’t want to get burned.
Ethan They don’t want to look stupid.
Joel Nobody wants to look stupid or lose lots of money. On the other hand, they’re not afraid of doing other stuff if they can trust you to keep it reasonable. So, yeah, they kind of let us wander off without any adult supervision and do what we want.
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