PrintLive From The Toronto International Film Festival: Joel and Ethan Coen
EnlargeCowboys & Indians: You guys won an Oscar for directing No Country for Old Men. But now you’re preparing to film a more traditional western — a new adaptation of True Grit, the novel by Charles Portis. What drew you to this project?
Ethan Coen: Well, it’s just a really good book. That’s the long and short of it. And, yeah, I know, there are a lot of great books. But this one is a great book that seems like there’s room to have a great movie made from it, which maybe hasn’t happened yet. [Laughs.]
Joel Coen: The John Wayne version was adapted from the same book. But we think, well, we’ll go in a different way with it.
C&I: The novel tells the story of a 14-year-old girl who employs a famed lawman, Rooster Cogburn, to track down her father’s killer. That’s pretty much the plot of the 1969 movie version. How will your adaptation be different?
Ethan: It’s partly a question of point of view. The book is told entirely in the voice of the 14-year-old girl. That sort of tips the feeling of it over a certain way. Also, I think the book is much funnier than the movie was.
Joel: I actually don’t remember the movie too well. But I do remember it as being more of a standard western, while the book is just an oddity. A very odd book.
C&I: Well, you’re known for making very odd movies — like Fargo, Raising Arizona, and O Brother, Where Art Thou? — so this may be a good fit for you. You’ve gotten a great response for your latest film, A Serious Man, which seems to be based on another book, the book of Job, actually.
Joel: [Laughs.] Well, not exactly. But I can see why you might think that.
C&I: It’s a movie about a man whose faith is tested while so many terrible things happen to him. And yet, it’s a comedy — a very dark comedy — and critics and audiences are responding very favorably to it.
Joel: It’s very gratifying when people like your movie. Because it’s a bummer when they don’t.
Ethan: But there’s a funny thing about gauging reaction — it happens so much after the fact. Like, it’s a little odd to be here and hearing what people think of [A Serious Man] because we’re right in the middle of writing something else. It’s strange when you’re sort of whipsawed back to the old thing. Like Joel says, it’s cool when they like it. But it’s sort of like praise for something that isn’t really attached to you at this point. But you think, “Well, okay, yeah, we’ll take the praise anyway.”
C&I: In A Serious Man, your protagonist questions why he must endure so much misery. Consider the flip side of that: Do you fellows ever wonder why you’ve enjoyed so much success?
Joel: Oh, yes. Absolutely. We consider ourselves very lucky. It’s like, sometimes, we do wonder ...
Ethan: How did that happen?
Joel: Right. How did that happen?
Ethan: It’s very weird. It’s almost like a mistake has been made.
C&I: Do you ever feel like, well, you’re going to be found out?
Ethan: Sure, there’s an aspect of that, too. Once we were working on something with our good friend [musician and producer] T-Bone Burnett that, between the three of us, we sort of colossally screwed up. But it turned out fine anyway. And T-Bone came up to me and said something like, “I’d rather be lucky than good any day.”
Joel: Actually, what I think he really said was, “I’d rather be lucky than smart.”
Ethan: That’s true, too. As we go through life, we’ve often paused and thought, “You know, we really stepped in it there. It’s a good thing that we’re very lucky.”
Issue: March 2010
