Ethan Coen and Tri­cia Cooke: ​‘Let’s just embrace love and sex’

The idea for Dri­ve-Away Dolls was born in a bar – it’s been a long time com­ing since. Hus­band-and-wife duo Ethan Coen and Tri­cia Cooke realised their script togeth­er, about two les­bian best friends who embark on a road trip from Tal­la­has­see to Flori­da that sees them inad­ver­tent­ly swept up in a lurid polit­i­cal conspiracy.

LWLies: Dri­ve-Away Dolls was a long time com­ing – it’s my under­stand­ing it devel­oped out of a mutu­al appre­ci­a­tion for Russ Mey­er. What is it about his films that stuck with you? 

Ethan Coen: Well, we both real­ly do love Russ Mey­er films in spite of the fact that nei­ther of us has ever seen any. We like the idea of Russ Mey­er films. Have you seen any?

Tri­cia Cooke: Yes.

EC: What did you see?

TC: This has come up before and you asked me, and I can’t remem­ber. For me, it’s more Doris Wish­man than Russ Mey­er. Russ Mey­er is a name that gets bandied around by us because it’s the most recog­nis­able of the B‑movie names, but his are just cheap, fun movies.

EC: I’ve nev­er seen any Doris Wish­man either.

Tri­cia, what would you rec­om­mend to some­one who has nev­er watched any Doris Wish­man movies?

TC: Bad Girls Go to Hell is her clas­sic film.

EC: I haven’t seen it, but I imag­ine it’s pret­ty bad.

TC: It’s great! I just saw it again. It total­ly holds up.

EC: Okay. I’m think­ing of Faster, Pussy­cat! Kill! Kill!. That’s prob­a­bly bad. Some­times there’s just a good title. We want­ed to do a movie that was like those titles more than like those movies.

TC: Yeah, the idea orig­i­nat­ed from a friend of mine and I – we came up with it at a bar. One night we’re like, ​‘Dri­ve-Away Dykes’, what a great name for a movie. We just wrote a movie based on the title.

EC: I’m not even con­demn­ing you for that. First of all, because you say it isn’t true, you have seen those movies. But also, you know, me and Joel wrote a movie based on ​‘The Odyssey’ and we’ve nev­er read ​‘The Odyssey’.

TC: I’ve read ​‘The Odyssey’ too.

I love the title and I was very upset that it had to change. Was that pure­ly a stu­dio request?

EC: It was awful because it’s such a good title. And peo­ple should refer to it by its real street name, Dri­ve-Away Dykes and not by the stu­dio name, Dri­ve-Away Dolls.

TC: We only ever refer to it as Dri­ve-Away Dykes because it’s been that for so long. But yeah, it was more of a stu­dio, ​‘We can’t sell this’ thing.

EC: And also, to be fair to them, they kind of laughed at the title and kind of liked it. But you know, the real­i­ty is some the­atres just won’t book it with that title. They won’t put that name on the mar­quee, there are places where you can’t have that. So we can’t blame the stu­dio. But it’s terrible.

Since you men­tioned a mutu­al love of B‑movies – is this film a response to a type of cin­e­ma that you feel isn’t been made any­more?

TC: Yeah, I iden­ti­fy as queer, and y’know, when we wrote it 20 years ago, there just weren’t that many queer or les­bian genre movies. There were great films like Go Fish, But I’m a Cheer­leader, that had some humour, but most were dra­mas or com­ing-out sto­ries. Being part of a mar­gin­al­ized group you have to deal with a lot of trau­ma and dra­ma and every­thing, and I feel like that most of cin­e­ma that’s made around a queer expe­ri­ence is, you know, a lit­tle heav­ier. Noth­ing that was just like incred­i­bly light­heart­ed and kind of silly.

EC: Yeah, and when we wrote the movie 20 years ago, we couldn’t get it made because it was incon­ceiv­able. If it was a les­bian movie, it had to be an impor­tant dra­ma. It couldn’t just be les­bian and fun. Now you kind of have per­mis­sion to just do a fun movie with les­bian char­ac­ters. I’ve got­ta tell you what Kris­ten Stew­art said about the movie. She read it and said, ​“We need this stu­pid movie!”

TC: Yeah. It was about say­ing, ​“Let’s just make some­thing light and some­thing that peo­ple can laugh at or even think is a lit­tle trashy, that doesn’t take itself too seri­ous­ly.” It felt like some­thing that there should be more of. We’ve writ­ten a cou­ple of oth­er les­bian genre movies, because I feel like that’s a niche that hasn’t been filled yet.

There’s a lot of sex in the film, which is some­thing that again feels like we don’t see a lot at the cin­e­ma now, espe­cial­ly queer sex. And there’s tra­di­tion­al­ly not been a lot of sex in Coen films either…

EC: I’m going to sit here quietly.

TC: I’m very sex-pos­i­tive. And I agree, I think that there’s often a lot of embar­rass­ment around sex, there’s shame around sex, if you have too much sex, you’re con­sid­ered a slut. But I think, let’s just embrace love and sex, espe­cial­ly if it’s good humour and not super crass. Though I’m not against crass­ness. I remem­ber com­ing out, and see­ing two women kiss on screen – that was a big deal. I remem­ber being so moved by that. And it just feels like sex toys and sex shops and all of that should be celebrated.

You men­tioned that you’ve been writ­ing more of these queer scripts – do they fea­ture the same characters?

EC: I’m not quite sure what we can say. We can tell you Mar­garet is in the next one, but she’s not that character.

TC: She’s a dif­fer­ent char­ac­ter. The next movie we wrote is a detec­tive movie. It’s like a film noir….we’re not sup­posed to say that. It’s a mod­ern con­tem­po­rary detec­tive sto­ry. Kind of a throw­back to The Long Goodbye.

I love this idea. We’ve had the queer road movie. We’ve got the queer detec­tive sto­ry. We could do a quick sci-fi thing, make it 80 minutes.

TC: And the detec­tive script is short­er on page, it might be like an hour-long movie. Who knows?

EC: I don’t know if you can be queer in a space suit.

TC: Of course you can be queer in a space suit! You can be any you can be any­thing in a space suit. The space suit gives you liberty.

EC: Well, I’m learning.

I was very inter­est­ed in the tra­jec­to­ry of Jamie and Marian’s road trip which takes them from Tal­la­has­see to Flori­da, as Flori­da has quite a rep­u­ta­tion even with­in the States as a zany sort of place. Was that a guid­ing thought in the writ­ing process? 

EC: That’s a real­ly inter­est­ing ques­tion. It’s inter­est­ing because I can’t even remem­ber why it end­ed up being Florida.

TC: I think we had it in Flori­da because it seemed like a nat­ur­al place if they were going down south, and explor­ing dif­fer­ent cul­tures and dif­fer­ent types of queer­ness. I think we had been to Tal­la­has­see right around the time we wrote it. And Flori­da… it feels like it’s now much more con­ser­v­a­tive than it was. It’s always been this crazy dias­po­ra of peo­ple and cul­tures and queer­ness and con­ser­v­a­tive­ness, like Key West and Mia­mi are both very queer. There wasn’t a polit­i­cal inten­tion when we were writ­ing it, but now with peo­ple like Rubio and DeSan­tis, there are so many ene­mies to the queer com­mu­ni­ty down there, it kind of worked in our favour. I always think about the Bugs Bun­ny car­toon where he’s just saw­ing off Flori­da [laughs]. But they’re good peo­ple down there.

Tri­cia, hav­ing worked in edit­ing for a long time, how did the expe­ri­ence dif­fer when you were edit­ing some­thing you’d co-writ­ten? Were you able to think about edit­ing while you were writing?

TC: Hav­ing a back­ground in edit­ing is prob­a­bly my great­est strength while writ­ing, because I approach the process like, ​‘Okay, what’s going to be dynam­ic to cut to? What’s going to be inter­est­ing to look at? What’s going to move the sto­ry along in a way?’ So I didn’t have any prob­lems in writ­ing as an edi­tor, but there were times in the cut­ting room when I felt like maybe some­one else should be look­ing at this. We did get oth­er edi­tor friends to come in and give us notes, because I some­times wished I had a dif­fer­ent mind – like if I didn’t know the sto­ry so well, I could be more objective.

EC: It should be said, Trish is in every way except name the co-direc­tor of the movie. Writ­ing, direct­ing and cut­ting a movie togeth­er is some­thing I’ve been doing for­ev­er, as I’ve been mak­ing movies with Joel. You don’t even dis­tin­guish the writ­ing and direct­ing and edit­ing, you’re visu­al­is­ing the movie in the same way. It’s all mak­ing the movie and those title dis­tinc­tions are a lit­tle artificial.

I real­ly enjoyed Bill Camp pop­ping up as Curly, who runs the dri­ve-away. He’s some­one who feels like he should have already been in a Coens film, because he’s got the face for it. He takes a bit of a beat­ing in the film. What I real­ly need to know is if Curly’s okay.

TC: You know, it’s fun­ny, we thought, if we’re going to make this a tril­o­gy, we should put Curly in every one of the movies.

EC: I don’t know what to tell you, Han­nah, if you want him to be okay, yes, he’s okay.

TC: He’s total­ly okay. We def­i­nite­ly want­ed him to live at the end of the movie.

EC: We kept telling him he’s the main char­ac­ter in the movie. He’s the cen­tre of the movie. It’s all about Curly.

Eighty min­utes is an unusu­al run­time in this day and age – was this length espe­cial­ly a throw­back to the B‑movie runtime?

TC: Yeah, we cer­tain­ly didn’t think it was going to be that short. It was over a hun­dred-page script, you know, and all of a sud­den, we’re like, ​‘Damn, this is only 75 min­utes.’ But we fig­ured, there’s so many oth­er movies out there right now that are three and a half hours long, that maybe an 80-minute movie isn’t so bad.

EC: I haven’t seen the new Scors­ese movie yet because it’s three-and-a-half hours. I’m sure if I saw it, I’d like it, but it’s hard to see for me. Our movie, it might not be good, but at least it’s short. You can put that on the poster.