The Coen broth­ers: It Goes Where It Goes

Nards to the Oscars. Remem­ber: Inside Llewyn Davis is still an incred­i­ble film, with or with­out some revolt­ing com­mer­cial hat-tip. The Coen broth­ers are still two of the great­est liv­ing film­mak­ers, their back cat­a­logue an embar­rass­ment of tra­gi-com­ic rich­es. Their lat­est movie sees Oscar Isaac as a can­tan­ker­ous trou­ba­dour wan­der­ing the sleet-lined streets of ear­ly ​’60s New York in search of com­mer­cial accep­tance. In this inter­view, LWLies dis­cussed the broth­ers writ­ing process, the mean­ing of ​‘mak­ing it’, whether they chan­nel their own per­son­al­i­ties into their char­ac­ters and their thoughts on The God­fa­ther III.

LWLies: [Points to rain and driz­zle out­side win­dow] It’s nice weath­er for the film.

Joel: Yeah, per­fect. We’ve been sayin’ that all day.

Ethan: Appro­pri­ate for the movie, and it’s weath­er you expect when you come to London.

Joel: Are you from London?

Yeah, yeah. North Lon­don. It’s always like this.

Ethan: There’s a Flann O’Brien nov­el… which one is it?.. they talk about, ​‘a leg­end has been passed on down the gen­er­a­tions and once in the dis­tance, this warm orange thing appeared in the sky. Peo­ple still talk about it’.

This movie was inspired by the Dave Van Ronk book, ​‘The May­or of Mac­Dou­gal Street’. When you read these things, are you always look­ing for movies in them?

Ethan: Not at all. You lead your life, you do what you do… Just no. Some peo­ple do that.

Joel: Yeah, some peo­ple do. They cruise for it.

Ethan: They keep a jour­nal. We’re not jour­nal keepers.

Joel: No, we just read and lis­ten and do what­ev­er we do and then every now and then, some­thing hap­pens. It’s that old ​‘ding, ding, ding, ding!’ thing. And it’s rare that you find an entire film, it’s more an inter­est­ing part or facet of a sto­ry. That’s all.

Has that ​‘ding, ding, ding, ding!’ thing become more of a reg­u­lar occur­rence as your careers have pro­gressed and you’ve made more movies?

Joel: I don’t think you hear it often at all. Every now and then it hap­pens, pret­ty much at the same inter­val. I remem­ber when we were doing Bar­ton Fink, we both read this book. It was a non fic­tion book, a his­to­ry of Hol­ly­wood in the ​’40s that was from a very inter­est­ing and spe­cif­ic point of view.

Ethan: It was main­ly about Ger­man expats in Hol­ly­wood, and it was called ​‘City of Nets’ by Otto Freidrich.

Joel: For some rea­son, that one set the alarms off. We agreed that there were things – details – about this peri­od which were inter­est­ing and would’ve maybe made an inter­est­ing set­ting for a sto­ry. And I think that’s how ​‘The May­or of Mac­Dou­gal Street’ fits into this. It’s a lit­tle bit dif­fer­ent as we’d had this idea in the back of our heads about mak­ing a movie set at that point and con­cern­ing the life of a folk singer for some time. And then lat­er we read Van Ronk’s book. That catal­ysed it for us.

We under­stand you don’t write a plot out­line before you attack a script. Did Llewyn Davis ever go in any strange direc­tions when you were piec­ing the sto­ry together?

Ethan: Not real­ly. In spite of the fact that we don’t out­line and don’t gen­er­al­ly know what’s going to hap­pen lat­er in the sto­ry when we’re still ear­ly on in the sto­ry, in the case of this one, we recog­nised ear­ly on that we want­ed to have the begin­ning come back and be the end. Even before we had any idea of what was going to hap­pen in the mid­dle. Then… it goes where it goes… It just goes where it goes. We don’t wor­ry about it. We don’t even wor­ry that it might not come togeth­er at the end.

Joel: Which some­times hap­pens! There are lit­tle things that you chase up and down which even­tu­al­ly don’t end up in the script. We tend to feel our way through a film.

Even some­thing that feels like its been intri­cate­ly plot­ted, such as Miller’s Crossing?

Ethan: It is some­thing we wrote in that way, and actu­al­ly I think that’s how most peo­ple who write those kind of things work. Ray­mond Chan­dler would just try and fig­ure it out as he went along. He would make insane­ly com­pli­cat­ed sit­u­a­tions for him­self and then work his way out of them. I think that’s not too unusual.

Joel: Chart­ing it all out ahead of time is, in a way, hard­er. Some­times you’ve got to just peg your­self in a cor­ner and then think, ​‘well this is what it is, now how the hell do I get out of it?’

Is this how screen­writ­ing is gen­er­al­ly approached?

Ethan: Is this how it’s done?!

Joel: Would this method be rec­om­mend­ed?! Prob­a­bly not.

Robert McK­ee would be weep­ing if he saw you work.

Joel: Exact­ly.

Ethan: It’s fun­ny because we talk about that. We talk about how we should ask Robert McK­ee for advice.

Joel: Some­times we get stuck…

Ethan: … and we just want to call him up and ask, ​‘Mr Mck­ee, are we doing it wrong?’ No, but when we write a movie, we don’t wor­ry about doing it wrong. Peo­ple fol­low­ing that tem­plat­ed route, they do an out­line and they make index cards. I’ve read that. They put index cards up on the wall.

Joel: We’ve read about peo­ple doing that. I even think Cop­po­la does that. He made lots of index cards when he was work­ing on The God­fa­ther III.

Ethan: Well there’s the argu­ment against index cards!

Joel: That’s true. I won­der what he did on [God­fa­ther] II though? That was pret­ty good… He was prob­a­bly telling every­one, ​‘but I used them on Part II!’
Would you ever con­sid­er try­ing the McKee/​index cards method of writ­ing? For fun.

Joel: Maybe just as an experiment.

Ethan: See what happens.

Joel: It’d prob­a­bly take us for­ev­er. We’d be sat there years lat­er, fill­ing out index cards.

Ethan: Where does this one go again?

Joel: Or, you fin­ish the screen­play and find a card that slipped under the table! Oh fuck, I was sup­posed to put this in! The DVD mak­ing-of would be great.

Ethan: Just us mak­ing index cards. For sev­en hours.

Did you decide to make Llewyn an ass­hole ear­ly on in the process?

Joel: Yes. I don’t know whether we talked about him in the sense of an ass­hole per se, but ear­ly on, it was clear to us we were talk­ing about a char­ac­ter who wasn’t entire­ly sym­pa­thet­ic. We want­ed him to be sym­pa­thet­ic, but we want­ed there to be things about him that were dif­fi­cult. We want­ed to make it clear that he was also dif­fi­cult to him­self, that in cer­tain ways he was his own worst enemy.

Ethan: There’s a way to relate it to what you were say­ing, the whole thing. We start­ed with the idea of a folk singer get­ting beat­en up round the back of Gerde’s Folk City, or what­ev­er. And it was clear to us that we didn’t know who was beat­ing him up or why, but we kind of sensed that…

Joel: …he wasn’t entire­ly blameless.

Ethan: It was not mis­tak­en iden­ti­ty or any­thing like that. He had fucked up somehow.

Peo­ple don’t get beat­en up for being nice.

Joel: Exact­ly.

Ethan: The extent to which is brings it on him­self is an inter­est­ing ques­tion, but one that you want to raise.

Joel: In that respect, we were think­ing about him in that way.

The film is ambigu­ous as to whether he makes it as an artist or not. Do you think his char­ac­ter is what leads him to not being a suc­cess with­in the time­line of the film?

Ethan: Again, that’s the ques­tion you wan­na raise, and not defin­i­tive­ly answer.

Joel: You must recog­nise the fact that those equa­tions are always com­pli­cat­ed. Ques­tions that weigh on that and could con­tribute to it, and make them pal­pa­ble in the story.

Ethan: I think we also have to ques­tion what con­sti­tutes ​‘mak­ing it’. Clear­ly, unam­bigu­ous­ly, he’s not going to make it on the terms that the oth­er char­ac­ter we see at the end of the movie does make it. Why is that beyond his for­mu­la­tion of the idea of mak­ing it?

Troy Nel­son makes it. Do nice guys make it?

Ethan: Oh no! Who believes that? Some­time rag­ing ass­holes make it. It’s just anoth­er way to rub salt in Llewyn’s ass, as it were. That this nice guy seems to be more suc­cess­ful than he, Llewyn, is.

Joel: There’s also anoth­er aspect to the whole thing which is inter­est­ing. It goes back to the nature of folk music, it goes back to those ques­tions you were ask­ing about the nature of suc­cess. You’re right, Troy is the nice guy in the movie, but Llewyn also talks about him about him as being a lit­tle bit insipid. But there’s also some­thing sweet. The song itself is a beau­ti­ful song, but has that sweet and bor­der­ing-on-the-insipid aspect to it too. It con­tains all of those things. You can see why the artist would be suc­cess­ful. It’s not entire­ly one thing or the oth­er. It’s also inter­est­ing that Llewyn would have a some­what ambiva­lent rela­tion­ship to his own art and his own place with­in the music indus­try. They are all things that are part of the same question.

Do you think Llewyn is a rep­re­sen­ta­tion of your­selves as artists? Do you think you are misunderstood?

Ethan: No, not really.

Do you ever project your­selves into your characters?

Ethan: Not con­scious­ly. We make the stuff up so obvi­ous­ly to some degree you invest some­thing of your­self in it. But it’s not what we’re think­ing about. We’d be the last peo­ple to ask about that. In terms of how we oper­ate, our char­ac­ters find every­thing dif­fi­cult. Everything’s dif­fi­cult. It’s all dif­fi­cult. We don’t find that. We just don’t. We find that we haven’t had to con­tend with the world con­spir­ing against us to the extent that it seems to con­spire against some­one like Llewyn. We don’t relate to that.

Joel: But y’know, here’s the tricky thing: in a cer­tain way, we have expe­ri­ence and prac­tice in a cer­tain thing, and that thing is mak­ing movies. The char­ac­ter is also mak­ing some­thing. He has to deal with all of those same ques­tions that any­one in that busi­ness, that art­form of what­ev­er you want to call it, has to deal with. In that respect, we’re sym­pa­thet­ic to, or at least we feel we have some direct rela­tion­ship to the expe­ri­ences that he has. Right, it’s the old cliché that you can only write about the stuff you know about. You also want to tell sto­ries that peo­ple who don’t have any expe­ri­ence of that can relate to. Suc­cess, whether it’s an artis­tic thing, is some­thing every­one thinks about and knows about. There are peo­ple who are good at what they do who are not suc­cess­ful, and that’s what the film is kind of about. You don’t have to be hip to the par­tic­u­lars of the business.