Why haven’t the Coen Brothers worked together for seven years?
“He borrowed the lawnmower, brought it back and never cleaned the blades. This is bullsh*t!” jokes Ethan Coen. Joel and Ethan Coen’s last movie together was the Netflix multi-story feature, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, which for the latter was an epic project to shoot up there with the scope of True Grit and No Country for Old Men.
Actually, life is what happens when two brothers are making their own projects, separately. Actually, Ethan Coen nearly retired from the craft while Joel Coen continued on making movies like The Tragedy of Macbeth starring Denzel Washington. However, Ethan was then pulled back into filmmaking by his spouse and longtime Coen editor Tricia Cooke with the documentary Jerry Lee Lewis: Trouble in Mind. They tried to make the caper they co-penned, Drive Away Dolls (Ethan prefers the original title Drive Away Dikes), over 20 years ago with Gas Food Lodging filmmaker Allison Anders. Ultimately, husband and wife took on the production themselves.
Honey Don’t! their second movie with Focus Features, reteams the duo with Drive Away Dolls‘ star Margaret Qualley. The comedy, which closed the Cannes Film Festival, hits theaters this Friday. Qualley plays lesbian private eye Honey O’Donahue, a small-town private investigator, who delves into a series of strange deaths tied to a mysterious church led by Chris Evans’ sex crazed preacher.
“There aren’t enough lesbian genre movies,” says Cooke, who looked at Honey Don’t! as a way to “switch the gender norms” in the detective movie and have the lead be a “classic femme fatale, kind of sultry, very seductive detective. We wanted to do a butch femme thing playing around with the gender norms of classic detective stories.”
Cooke and Ethan Coen have a third collaboration in the works which they’re penning: the ten-year reunion of a women’s crew team.
Coen teases that the project is about “the wilderness of life, roll down the river, which is life — ya, get it?”
“…meets horror film” adds Cooke.
We also talk with the duo about their writing shorthand, the state of moviegoing and their approach to testing movies.
And don’t worry, the Coen Brothers will assemble once again behind the camera.
Says Ethan, “We’ve written one to do together. I’m sure we’ll do. We got to kind of get on the same schedule page again.”
Our conversation can be heard here:
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