Alden Ehrenreich’s guide to work­ing with the Coen brothers

There are a num­ber of show-steal­ing turns in the Coen broth­ers’ lat­est extrav­a­gan­za, Hail, Cae­sar!, but it’s rel­a­tive new­com­er Alden Ehren­re­ich who comes out on top with his charm­ing and hilar­i­ous turn as Hobie Doyle, a rodeo star under­go­ing an image change. We spoke to Ehren­re­ich about how he man­aged to get the chance of work­ing with the Coens, and how he made good of this rare opportunity.

“I found out that they were mak­ing the movie. You nev­er know where this infor­ma­tion comes from, but it trick­led through from some­where to my agent. I asked if there was a role in it for me, and the offi­cial word was no. Noth­ing there I was right for. Then my agent got hold of the script and I read it and I want­ed to play the Hobie part so I asked them if I could come in and read for it. They reluc­tant­ly let me come in.”

“I read for the Coens’ cast­ing direc­tor, Ellen Chenoweth, and she thought I would be right for it. And she brought me back and had me read for the Coens. I did that a cou­ple of times. There was a day where they told me to make sure I kept my cell phone on. I was pret­ty con­vinced that the cast­ing direc­tor was going to call me to per­son­al­ly tell me that I didn’t get the part. I had that instinct. So I kept my phone on, and I actu­al­ly nev­er got a call. I thought that maybe they decid­ed just not to tell me. The next day I got a call from the Coens and they asked me whether I’d talked to my agent. I said no. They said, ​‘You don’t know then?’ I said, ​‘Don’t know what?!” and they said, ​‘That you got the part’. I was utter­ly con­vinced I had blown it.”

“The Coens are friend­ly, they’re warm and they laugh a lot when you’re doing a read­ing. When they first start­ed, I was actu­al­ly thrown by that. When they like some­thing, they laugh. It was very laid back. Which is a bit like how they are on the set of the movie: just very relaxed, warm and casual.”

“The Coens are very par­tic­u­lar about who they hire, and once they do they give you a real sense of con­fi­dence. I asked them whether I should get a dialect coach and work on my accent, and they said no, that they were hap­py with what I was doing. They give you the sense that they have faith in you and what you’re doing. The writ­ing is so com­plete, so excel­lent, so illu­mi­nat­ing as far as who these char­ac­ters are, that becomes your guide. I remem­ber read­ing an inter­view with Bill Hurt where he said, ​‘The more struc­tured and organ­ised you are, the freer you can be.’ And I think it’s true with the way the Coens work. Every­thing is so organ­ised and so tight, with­in the actu­al scenes when you’re doing the work, you feel sup­port­ed by the thor­ough­ness. They let the movie direct itself. It’s hard to describe, but there’s a sense of pro­fi­cien­cy that you can feel when you’re work­ing with peo­ple who have made that many great movies.”

“The script is so com­plete. So tight. You read it, and you just feel you’re in a dif­fer­ent weight class. The one thing that was notable about the script was that they write in a lot of the sound effects. Which is real­ly inter­est­ing. And very rare. I remem­ber there was a direc­tion, ​‘He flumps the rope down on the ground’. Then they had a bit which said, ​‘Clack, clack, clack, then cut to the shoes.’ You feel the rhythm of their movies right there on the page. They use sound real­ly specif­i­cal­ly and art­ful­ly. Of the many tools in film­mak­ing, it’s one of the ones that’s least utilised to max­i­mum effects. They real­ly know how to use sound.”

“If you’re doing an Austin Pow­ers movie, it’s a very dif­fer­ent con­ver­sa­tion than if you’re doing a film like Tetro [Ehrenreich’s 2009 fea­ture debut]. The thing with the Coens is that no mat­ter how zany and how crazy things are, it’s all root­ed in a very log­i­cal under­stand­ing of the world. One exam­ple is the scene where I’m using spaghet­ti as a las­so. They made sure that the spaghet­ti was mov­ing exact­ly how it actu­al­ly would move. Even though it was a sil­ly thing, they went all out to make it look real. And I think that’s a great metaphor for how they work: no mat­ter out-there some­thing is, it always comes back to some kind of essen­tial truth.”