Joel Coen: How we made The Tragedy of Macbeth | Little White Lies

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Joel Coen: How we made The Tragedy of Macbeth

14 Jan 2022

Words by Adam Woodward

A man in a suit with a blue face and glasses sits at a desk, gesturing towards a yellow rocket icon in the sky against a purple background.
A man in a suit with a blue face and glasses sits at a desk, gesturing towards a yellow rocket icon in the sky against a purple background.
The direc­tor and his team relay the secrets of breath­ing new life into one of the most hal­lowed texts in all of history.

For his first solo mis­sion away from his broth­er and cre­ative part­ner in crime, Ethan, Joel Coen has decid­ed to offer up his ver­sion of the most scared text in the his­to­ry of dra­ma: Shakespeare’s Mac­beth’. This expres­sion­ist mono­chrome fever dream has Den­zel Wash­ing­ton as the Thane of Caw­dor and Frances McDor­mand as his vio­lent­ly manip­u­la­tive oth­er half. Here, Coen and a clutch of below-the-line col­lab­o­ra­tors explain how they were able to pump new blood into this canon­i­cal tale.

Joel Coen, Writer/​Director: I’m not a Shake­speare guy. I’ve seen lots of Shake­speare over the years. I’ve seen lots of pro­duc­tions of Mac­beth’. I’ve read a lot of Shake­speare, but it’s not real­ly my back­ground. One of the most inter­est­ing things about The Tragedy of Mac­beth was the idea of tak­ing a very deep dive into a par­tic­u­lar work. I spent a lot of time with friends of mine who do know a lot about Shake­speare, ask­ing them about the pro­duc­tion his­to­ry of the play and all the pro­duc­tions that were done on film. I was inter­est­ed to see in what ways the play had been edit­ed, because the ambi­tion of this par­tic­u­lar project was real­ly to give it a rhythm and a pace that was very, very relent­less. You can real­ly get into the weeds on all of this stuff.”

Ste­fan Dechant, Pro­duc­tion Design­er: From the begin­ning we talked about want­i­ng the imagery to be very abstract. We dis­cussed what Ger­man Expres­sion­ism had meant for film­mak­ing, and how it influ­enced peo­ple like Charles Laughton when he was mak­ing The Night of the Hunter. We looked at Carl Drey­er and FW Mur­nau, and we also looked at Hiroshi Sugimoto’s pho­tographs of archi­tec­ture, and Casa Luis Bar­ragán in Mex­i­co, which is just two slab walls and a square tow­er. Joel was imme­di­ate­ly say­ing I think that could be Inver­ness’. That then led us onto a con­ver­sa­tion about a 20th cen­tu­ry the­atre design­er named Edward Gor­don Craig, who cre­at­ed these very abstract, geo­met­ric designs. That was just our first conversation.”

JC: I saw the Orson Welles ver­sion and I think it’s a very inter­est­ing movie but it was a very stress­ful movie for him. He was try­ing to prove that he could make the movie on sched­ule and bud­get, cause he had this rep­u­ta­tion, and so there are things in it that are fast and slop­py. I think it’s one of the most bizarre exer­cis­es in cos­tume design I’ve ever seen; he does some very weird things in terms of com­bin­ing and edit­ing and invent­ing new char­ac­ters. So in terms of influ­ences or inspi­ra­tions for this film, there’s a lit­tle James Tur­rell in there – although not real­ly con­scious­ly – and some Sug­i­mo­to. We looked at a lot of Drey­er, and Murnau’s Sun­rise; not so much the Ger­man­ic stuff, more the exte­ri­ors, the fields and the swamp.”

Bruno Del­bon­nel, Cin­e­matog­ra­ph­er: Drey­er was the main influ­ence, for me at least. It’s about the sim­plic­i­ty of the set. What is so amaz­ing about The Pas­sion of Joan of Arc is the way he frames every­thing. Drey­er sim­pli­fies every­thing to show how pow­er­ful the Eng­lish Church was against Joan of Arc. She has lost, basi­cal­ly. She has lost the bat­tle against the Church. And the close-ups are extra­or­di­nary. That pushed us towards the Acad­e­my ratio, espe­cial­ly with the very pow­er­ful cast we had. The first close-up we did on Den­zel Wash­ing­ton was just like, Wow, that’s power!’”

There are a lot of romantic relationships in Shakespeare, but Macbeth is the only good marriage. Okay, they happen to be plotting a murder, but its a good marriage. Joel Coen

JC: A moti­va­tion for mak­ing this film was imag­in­ing the play with old­er pro­tag­o­nists than you usu­al­ly see. Also, there are a lot of roman­tic rela­tion­ships in Shake­speare plays, but Mac­beth’ is the only good mar­riage. Okay, they hap­pen to be plot­ting a mur­der, but it’s a good mar­riage. Putting it in that con­text was inter­est­ing, and that’s real­ly why I want­ed to work with Fran and Den­zel. I just hadn’t seen it quite talked about in that way before. It was a reflex­ive inter­est, too, because if I was going to do it with Fran, and Fran was inter­est­ed in doing it, it was going to be about all the characters.

She is old, just like I’m old, and because I’m old and she’s old and she want­ed to do it, it then became about that. Time, immor­tal­i­ty, those are themes that appear in oth­er movies that I’ve done with Ethan in the past, but they’re also a huge part of Mac­beth’. Shake­speare uses the word time’ maybe 40 or 50 times. It’s the obses­sion of the play. So I was inter­est­ed in that aspect of the cen­tral rela­tion­ships, and the pulp noir aspects of the story.”

Mary Zophres, Cos­tume Design­er: I’ve done one oth­er black-and-white film before [The Man Who Wasn’t There] and learned quite a lot from that. The most impor­tant thing is tex­ture: how cer­tain mate­ri­als react dif­fer­ent­ly in black-and-white as opposed to colour. Anoth­er thing I learned was that using lots of dif­fer­ent medi­um tones can cre­ate depth in a good way. If you have a crowd of peo­ple and you use dif­fer­ent shades, it adds more dimen­sion. Before we made a sin­gle gar­ment, we realised that it would be bet­ter if every­thing was sort of easy on the eye. In oth­er words, I wasn’t going to use a magen­ta or a pur­ple on the thanes or some of the sol­diers. Once we came up with a set of rules for what the char­ac­ters were going to wear, that became the tem­plate for the rest of the movie.”

BD: We shot in colour, which was then con­vert­ed to black-and-white, but all the sets were black-and-white. I asked for the set to be paint­ed a cer­tain type of grey, and the same with the cos­tumes – the wigs and every­thing – so that I could bal­ance the skin tones of the actors against the set and cos­tume designs. The sets have almost no tex­ture, so the idea was to give more pres­ence to the actors through their cos­tumes. We worked out the block­ing and the fram­ing of every scene two months before we start­ed build­ing the sets. So for a very sim­ple scene like when Lady Mac­beth burns the let­ter and then goes onto the bal­cony and lets it go, we knew how we were going to block it, the exact move­ment and per­spec­tive we want­ed, so we designed that room and the bal­cony around that.”

SD: After our first meet­ing, I said to Joel that the best way to design this movie is dig­i­tal­ly, using 3D mod­els. That allowed us to move very fast. We were able to lay out all the sets and start think­ing about how they would be lit. Very ear­ly on we start­ed get­ting into these sets from a dig­i­tal point of view, and we start­ed apply­ing shad­ows and grad­ing the walls so they would fade into dark­ness. The cas­tle was designed to be a caul­dron of madness.”

MZ: Joel want­ed the movie to look old, but we nev­er had a spe­cif­ic time peri­od in mind. We also decid­ed it should have an organ­ic feel to it. That’s how we end­ed up land­ing on leather being the mate­r­i­al of the armour. Then it was a case of try­ing to give it more depth. So we came up with this idea of lat­tice work – we used a warp and weft tech­nique, almost like how they would have made cloth in medieval times. The under armour for Mac­beth and the oth­er sol­diers is made out of a very tex­tured linen cot­ton, which we quilt­ed in ver­ti­cal chan­nels and tuft­ed in a dia­mond shape. The idea of geo­met­ric shapes became impor­tant very ear­ly on.”

Three people standing on a beach in black and white.

JC: The movies that I made with Ethan, it was impos­si­ble for us not to be very spe­cif­ic about the loca­tion and the land­scape. The ambi­tion of Mac­beth was a lit­tle bit the oppo­site of that: It’s not 12th-cen­tu­ry Scot­land but some gener­ic past where these things could hap­pen. It wasn’t about hav­ing any real fideli­ty or defin­ing the time peri­od or the loca­tion in a con­crete way. That was a strange exer­cise for me because it was so dif­fer­ent from the way I usu­al­ly think. But in the con­text of the play it made sense and it made it less dif­fi­cult. We were try­ing to make a play as a movie, as opposed to a movie movie. In the­atre, every­thing is abstract. If you have a room and there’s a piece of fur­ni­ture on a stage, it can be any­thing so long as it rep­re­sents how the room is sup­posed to be furnished.”

SD: To go back to The Night of the Hunter, look at the scene where Robert Mitchum is stand­ing out by the light post and the kids are in their bed­room – the graph­ic of the moun­tains behind them is so sim­ple. It makes no pre­tence about being arti­fice. That’s where we want­ed to get to with this movie, to have no pre­tence about the arti­fice of it. For me it was about reduc­ing the imagery to its sim­plest form, to the point of near-com­plete abstraction.”

BD: We also talked a lot about haikus, where three phras­es describe the whole world. We took every­thing right back to basics. What is a room? A room is four walls. How many win­dows does it have? One? No win­dows? A cor­ri­dor is a cor­ri­dor – it’s just that. When it came to block­ing the actors, we thought a lot about cre­at­ing rhythm with light. For exam­ple, when Mac­beth deliv­ers his Is this a dag­ger which I see before me?” solil­o­quy, the rhythm of the light and shad­ow sup­ports his move­ment and his words. It’s like music, in a sense.”

MZ: I’ve worked with Fran before so I knew what worked on her. There were some process­es of elim­i­na­tion but we came up with this shape that we thought would work on her. We did some­thing sim­i­lar with Den­zel, cre­at­ing an invert­ed tri­an­gle shape to give him broad shoul­ders and a nipped waist. For the shape of Fran’s cape, Elsa Schi­a­par­el­li was some­one I looked at. We want­ed some­thing that felt time­less and looked good in silhouette.”

JC: Edit­ing the orig­i­nal text was an inter­est­ing process. I want­ed the lan­guage to be there, I didn’t wan­na dumb the play down, but in all of Shake­speare there’s this beau­ti­ful poet­ry and then there’s a lot of embroi­dery in the poet­ry. Some­times the embroi­dery is the most beau­ti­ful thing, but mod­ern audi­ences who aren’t used to lis­ten­ing to Shake­speare can get lost try­ing to deci­pher archa­ic parts of the lan­guage. So that’s pret­ty much what went out. I want­ed to make the movie not just for peo­ple who knew the play well, but for peo­ple who’d nev­er seen a Shake­speare play. Period.”

The Tragedy of Mac­beth is now avail­able to stream on Apple TV+. Read the LWLies Rec­om­mends review.

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