Coen brothers
and Ethan Coen, together known as the Coen brothers, are an American filmmaking duo. Their films span many genres and styles, which they frequently subvert or parody. Among their most acclaimed works are Blood Simple, Raising Arizona, Miller's Crossing, Barton Fink, Fargo, The Big Lebowski, O Brother, Where Art Thou?, No Country for Old Men, A Serious Man, True Grit, and Inside Llewyn Davis.
The brothers generally write, direct and produce their films jointly, although due to DGA regulations, Joel received sole directing credit while Ethan received sole production credit until The Ladykillers, from which point on they would be credited together as directors and producers; they also shared editing credits under the alias Roderick Jaynes. The duo started directing separately in the 2020s, beginning with Joel's The Tragedy of Macbeth and Ethan's Jerry Lee Lewis: Trouble in Mind and Drive-Away Dolls. They have been nominated for 13 Academy Awards together, plus one individual nomination for each, sharing wins for Best Original Screenplay for Fargo, and Best Picture, Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay for No Country for Old Men. Barton Fink won the Palme d'Or at the 1991 Cannes Film Festival.
The Coens have written films for other directors, including Sam Raimi's Crimewave, Angelina Jolie's World War II biopic Unbroken and Steven Spielberg's Cold War drama Bridge of Spies. They produced Terry Zwigoff's Bad Santa and John Turturro's Romance and Cigarettes. Ethan is also a writer of short stories, theater and poetry.
No Country for Old Men, A Serious Man and Inside Llewyn Davis were included on the BBC's 2016 poll of the greatest films since 2000. In 1998, the American Film Institute ranked Fargo among the 100 greatest American movies. They are known for their distinctive stylistic trademarks including genre hybridity. Richard Corliss wrote of the Coens: "Dexterously flipping and reheating old movie genres like so many pancakes, they serve them up fresh, not with syrup but with a coating of comic arsenic."
Life and career
Early years and education
Joel Daniel Coen and Ethan Jesse Coen were born and raised in St. Louis Park, Minnesota, a suburb of Minneapolis. Their mother, Rena, was an art historian at St. Cloud State University, and their father, Edward Coen, was a professor of economics at the University of Minnesota. The brothers have an older sister, Deborah, who is a psychiatrist in Israel.Both sides of the Coen family were Eastern European Ashkenazi Jews. Their paternal grandfather, Victor Coen, was a barrister in the Inns of Court in London before retiring to Hove with their grandmother. Edward Coen was an American citizen born in the United States, but grew up in Croydon, London and studied at the London School of Economics. Afterwards he moved to the United States, where he met the Coens' mother, and served in the United States Army during World War II.
The Coens developed an early interest in cinema through television. They grew up watching Italian films aired on a Minneapolis station, the Tarzan films, and comedies.
In the mid-1960s, Joel saved money from mowing lawns to buy a Vivitar Super 8 camera. Together, the brothers remade movies they saw on television, with their neighborhood friend Mark Zimering as the star. Cornel Wilde's The Naked Prey became their Zeimers in Zambezi, which featured Ethan as a native with a spear. Lassie Come Home was reinterpreted as their Ed... A Dog, with Ethan playing the mother role in his sister's tutu. They also made original films like Henry Kissinger, Man on the Go, Lumberjacks of the North and The Banana Film.
Joel and Ethan graduated from St. Louis Park High School in 1973 and 1976, respectively, and from Bard College at Simon's Rock in Great Barrington, Massachusetts.
After Simon's Rock, Joel spent four years in the undergraduate film program at New York University, where he made a 30-minute thesis film, Soundings. In 1979, he briefly enrolled in the graduate film program at the University of Texas at Austin, following a woman he had married who was in the graduate linguistics program. The marriage soon ended in divorce and Joel left UT Austin after nine months.
Ethan went on to Princeton University and earned an undergraduate degree in philosophy in 1979. His senior thesis was a 41-page essay, "Two Views of Wittgenstein's Later Philosophy", which was supervised by Raymond Geuss.
1980s
After graduating from New York University, Joel worked as a production assistant on a variety of industrial films and music videos. He developed a talent for film editing and met Sam Raimi while assisting Edna Ruth Paul in editing Raimi's first feature film, The Evil Dead.The duo made their debut with Blood Simple. Set in Texas, it tells the tale of a bar owner who hires a detective to kill his wife and her lover. It contains elements that point to their future direction: distinctive homages to genre movies, plot twists layered over a simple story, snappy dialogue and dark humor. Janet Maslin wrote: "The camera work by Barry Sonnenfeld is especially dazzling. So is the fact that Mr. Coen, unlike many people who have directed great-looking film noir efforts, knows better than to let handsomeness become the film's entire raison d'être. In addition to its stylishness, Blood Simple has the kind of purposefulness and coherence that show Mr. Coen to be headed for bigger, even better, things." Joel's direction was recognized at the Sundance and Independent Spirit awards. It was the first film shot by Sonnenfeld, who collaborated with the Coens on their two subsequent films and went on to be a director. It marked the first of many collaborations between the Coens and composer Carter Burwell. It was also the screen debut of McDormand, who went on to feature in many of the Coens' films.
Their next project was Crimewave, written by the Coens and Raimi. Joel and Raimi also made cameos in Spies Like Us.
The brothers wanted to follow their debut with something fast-paced and funny. Raising Arizona follows an unlikely married couple: ex-convict H.I. and police officer Ed, who long for a baby but are unable to conceive. When furniture tycoon Nathan Arizona appears on television with his newly born quintuplets and jokes that they "are more than we can handle", H.I. steals one of the quintuplets to bring up as their own. The film featured McDormand, William Forsythe, Sam McMurray, Randall "Tex" Cobb and marked the first of many collaborations between the Coens and John Goodman. Pauline Kael noted its "cornpone-surreal quality" and wrote that the Coens "are going with their strengths. They're making a contraption, and they're good at it because they know how to make the camera behave mechanically, which is just right here—it mirrors the mechanics of farce... The Sunsets look marvellously ultra-vivid; the paint doesn't seem to be dry—it's like opening day at a miniature-golf course."
1990s
Miller's Crossing is a gangster film inspired by Dashiell Hammett's Red Harvest and The Glass Key. It stars Gabriel Byrne as Irish mobster Tom Reagan and features Albert Finney, Marcia Gay Harden, Steve Buscemi, Jon Polito and John Turturro. The film was released almost simultaneously with Goodfellas and was not a commercial success, but received positive reviews. Christopher Orr calls it "a distillation of all the tropes and themes and moods of the classic gangster film." It was the Coens' first collaboration with production designer Dennis Gassner.While puzzling over the plot of Miller's Crossing, the brothers wrote Barton Fink in a matter of weeks. Set in 1941, it follows a New York playwright, the eponymous Fink, who moves to Los Angeles to write a B-picture for a venal movie mogul. Fink is modeled on playwright Clifford Odets, and the character W.P. Mayhew is based on William Faulkner. Barton Fink was a critical success, earning Oscar nominations and winning Best Director, Best Actor and Palme d'Or at the 1991 Cannes Film Festival. It was their first film with cinematographer Roger Deakins, a key collaborator for the next 25 years.
The Hudsucker Proxy is an homage to the screwball comedies of Frank Capra and Howard Hawks. Co-written with Raimi, the film follows a mailroom clerk who is promoted to president of the Hudsucker Corporation by a cynical director in a scheme to devalue the company's stock; a fast-talking newspaperwoman tries to scoop the story. Critics praised the production design but criticized the tone. It was a box office bomb.
The brothers bounced back with the "homespun murder story" Fargo, set in their home state of Minnesota. In it, car salesman Jerry Lundegaard, who has serious financial problems, has his wife kidnapped so that his wealthy father-in-law will pay the ransom, which he plans to split with the kidnappers. Complications ensue, and local cop Marge Gunderson starts to investigate. Produced on a small budget of $7 million, Fargo was a critical and commercial success, winning Oscars for Best Original Screenplay for the Coens and Best Actress for McDormand and the New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Picture. Maslin wrote that "Perversely, the frozen north even brings out some uncharacteristic warmth in these coolly cerebral film makers, although anyone seeking the milk of human kindness would be well advised to look elsewhere.... Fargo has been hauntingly photographed by Roger Deakins with great, expressive use of white-outs that sometimes make the characters appear to be moving through a dream. Roads disappear, swallowed up in a snowy void, making Fargo look eerily remote. As the title suggests, there is a steady sense of distance and uncharted territory." Roger Ebert wrote that "To watch it is to experience steadily mounting delight, as you realize the filmmakers have taken enormous risks, gotten away with them, and have made a movie that is completely original, and as familiar as an old shoe – or a rubber-soled hunting boot from Land's End, more likely."
The Big Lebowski is a crime comedy about Jeff "The Dude" Lebowski, a Los Angeles slacker who is involved in a kidnapping case after being mistaken for a millionaire of the same name It features Philip Seymour Hoffman as Lebowski's flunky, Goodman and Buscemi as The Dude's bowling buddies and Julianne Moore as his "special lady friend". It was influenced by Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep and Robert Altman's The Long Goodbye. It has become a cult classic. An annual festival, Lebowski Fest, began in 2002, and many adhere to the philosophy of "Dudeism". Andrew Sarris wrote that the Coens had made a "cubist collage of an old genre with a new frankness. The result is a lot of laughs and a feeling of awe toward the craftsmanship involved. I doubt that there’ll be anything else like it the rest of this year." It was the first collaboration between the Coens and T Bone Burnett, credited as "Music Archivist".
Ethan co-wrote the comedy film The Naked Man, which was directed by the Coens' storyboard artist J. Todd Anderson. The same year, Ethan published Gates of Eden, a collection of short stories.