Return of the brothers grim

Stony-faced hitman: Javier Bardem as Anton Chigurh (right) is an unstoppable killer whose weapon of choice is a compressed-air cylinder

Nick Roddick|Evening Standard

10 April 2012

They may look and dress like college students, but the Coen brothers have been making films together - and wisecracking their way through interviews - for almost 25 years. Joel, born in 1954, is the older, taller one but it's the faster-talking Ethan, at 50, three years younger, who behaves like the eldest.

Sometimes he produces and Joel directs, sometimes it's the other way round. For their latest film, No Country for Old Men, due out in the UK in January, they share the directing credit - and will no doubt share the accolades as the awards season heats up.

Since opening in the US in November, it has already hoovered up critical prizes and nominations - including five for the all-important Golden Globes. Oscar nods are sure to follow, if not for the Coens then for Javier Bardem, who gives the performance of his career as a stony-faced hitman with a curious haircut.

It's a film that shows the Coens at the top of their considerable game - certainly their best since Fargo in 1996, although admittedly the recent ones have varied between disappointing (The Man Who Wasn't There) and dud (The Ladykillers). No Country recalls Coen classics like Raising Arizona (1987), Miller's Crossing (1990), The Big Lebowski (1998) and O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000).

Based on the novel by Cormac McCarthy, author of Pulitzer Prize-winner The Road (now being filmed by the Brighton-based Australian director John Hillcoat), No Country for Old Men is a tale of robbery, pursuit and revenge set in west Texas in 1980. The story features a sheriff (Tommy Lee Jones), a Vietnam vet called Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) and an unstoppable killer with the geographically unplaceable name of Anton Chigurh (Bardem).

It all starts with a pick-up truck, a bunch of dead men, two-million dollars and a lot of heroin. Llewelyn finds all of this in the desert. He leaves the heroin, takes the money and spends the rest of the film being followed by Chigurh, who has been hired to get it back. Chigurh dispatches everything and everyone in his path without pausing for breath. His favourite weapon is a compressed-air cylinder, but anything will do.

If you read the film's production notes, you will find the Coens describing it as an action movie, but they're not so sure about that bit any more. "We were probably on crack when we said that," Joel tells me.

Unmistakably set on Planet Coen - and shot by their usual cinematographer, the Brit Roger Deakins, as a stunning mix of bleached-out desert day and garish neon set against inky night - No Country is as bleak as any film the brothers have made.

"There is a good deal of humour in the book, although you wouldn't call it a humorous novel, exactly," says Joel. "It's certainly very dark - and that was our defining characteristic." Too dark for some: since my meeting with the brothers, veteran US critic Jonathan Rosenbaum has laid into No Country for being "so bleak I wonder if it must provide a reassuring explanation for our defeatism and apathy in the face of atrocity". Sure, it's violent, very violent, but using it to explain Abu Ghraib - as Rosenbaum implies later on - is a bit much.

The key, says Joel, lies in the title. "Tommy Lee Jones's character complains about values declining. There's a scene where the old man he visits points out to him that, yes, the world seems like a terrible place and everything is going to hell, but it's always been a terrible place and that feeling that everything is going to hell nowadays is a hallmark of ageing. It's not necessarily a real characteristic for the world."

Ethan is more defensive. No Country for Old Men may be violent, he says, but it's nothing to do with trends in US cinema. "One doesn't want to be made responsible for other American movies. The story of the novel is about a character confronting or trying to come to terms with a violent, unforgiving world. I don't see that as being specifically a US problem.

"This was a novel whose actual story structure was interesting to us in the abstract," he adds. "It's a pulpy kind of novel in a certain way but it subverts the expectations of those formulas and becomes something completely different."

The brothers - once dubbed the "two-headed director" - often finish one another's answers, share private jokes and generally behave like single-egg twins. They're not interchangeable, though. You can tell when Joel doesn't agree with something Ethan says because he sticks out his bottom lip. If it's the other way round, Ethan snorts dismissively. But no, they don't fight. "That question is always perplexing to us and we get it a lot," says Joel. "Why do they ask it? People never ask: 'When you talk to the director of photography, or the actors, do you disagree?'"

"There is no non-Siamese artist in the movie business," chips in Ethan, briskly. "We collaborate with each other and lots of others. Unless you're an English teacher making movies by yourself in your basement, you're a Siamese artist."

In truth, after a quarter of a century of making films together, the Coens are tired of questions about collaboration. "It's not something we think about," claims Joel. "To amuse yourself you could ask: what would it be like to direct a movie hopping on one foot? I mean, why would you?"

One thing they have done, though, is create a fictional character called Roderick Jaynes, their regular editor who, according to the official studio biography, "began his career minding the tea-cart at Shepperton Studios in the 1930s". Don't bother looking for him on the IMDb, though - he's a shared pseudonym enabling the Coens to edit their own films without seeming to be the control freaks they undoubtedly are beneath all that laconic humour.

On the question of where that humour comes from, Joel suggests a bewildering ethnic mix. "We've been asked if we were influenced by Jewish humour because we're Jewish and we grew up with Jews," he drawls. "But we could just as easily have been influenced by Scandinavians, because we grew up with more Scandinavians than Jews."

To put it more prosaically, they grew up in Minnesota, went to school together, then split to go to college, Joel to the film programme at NYU, Ethan to Princeton, where he wrote his thesis on Wittgenstein. When not working, they don't necessarily spend all their time together. Joel has been married to Frances McDormand (who won an Oscar for her performance in Fargo) since 1984; the couple have two children, one adopted. Ethan married film editor Tricia Cook in 1993.

The brothers are torn about where exactly they will go from here. By the time they arrived in Cannes to promote No Country for Old Men earlier this year, they already had two new original scripts ready to shoot. However, their most cherished project, based on James Dickey's novel To the White Sea, set in Japan during the Second World War, remains stalled.

As they say in Hollywood, the numbers don't add up - suggesting that the Coens may be good for awards but don't carry the box-office clout for a big-budget period piece.

So, after 20 years of working almost exclusively from their own scripts, are they now drawn to adapting novels? Might they even do a literary classic? Ethan looks at Joel, stares at the ceiling and snorts quietly.

"Neither of us has read Martin Chuzzlewit," says Joel, "so we thought it could be interesting to do an adaptation of it without having read it. And then it would be advertised on the poster as 'from the mind of Charles Dickens'. We'd have guys in top hats," he says, eyes shining. "Hugh Grant would have to be in it ..."

Of all the great films that will never be made, it sounds like one of the best.

No Country for Old Men is released on 18 January.

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Return of the brothers grim

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