You make enough movies about people chasing things – bandits, money, a kidnapped baby – and eventually someone comes after you. In Joel Coen’s case, William Shakespeare was his pursuer.
As Coen put it recently, “Shakespeare is inevitable.” He smiled resignedly and added, “For better or worse.”
In a film career spanning nearly 40 years, Coen has chronicled a spectrum of articulate criminals and enlightened dudes in stories mixed with varying amounts of brutality and absurdity. He has directed 18 feature films and co-wrote several others with his brother, Ethan.
Having built up a filmography marked by unexpected twists and turns, Joel Coen himself has taken what seems to take a surprising pivot from that body of work. His latest film, “The Tragedy of Macbeth”, is a shadowy and phantasmagoric rendition of Shakespeare’s play presented in black and white.
The film, which was released in theaters in December and on Apple TV+ earlier this month, stars Denzel Washington as the murderous nobleman with the title and Frances McDormand as his scheming wife, Lady Macbeth. It has already received numerous acclaim after the season and is considered a strong contender for Academy Award nominations; AO Scott reviewed the film for DailyExpertNews, calling it a “squeaky, razor-sharp screen adaptation.”
Coen is a devoted theatergoer and avid reader, but not one with special knowledge of or affinity with Shakespeare. “I started it as an amateur,” he said. “I’m still an amateur.”
But if you take a closer look at ‘Macbeth’, there are aspects of the piece that make it an appropriate and perhaps unavoidable subject for Coen. “It’s a murder story,” he said. “In a way, it’s even a horror story.”
This bleak story was perhaps an ideal escape for the director, at an unknown moment when Ethan had decided to take a break from the film. Just as Joel was seeking new approaches to his cinematic craft as a solo director, his inspiration came from a foundational text of English literature.
“It was a conscious choice to do something I hadn’t done,” says Coen. “It was an opportunity to get out of the wheelhouse where I had been before. It’s something that demanded that I do that.”
Coen, 67, spoke in a video interview from California earlier this month. His attitude suggested a mixture of Harold Ramis and Larry David; he could be fatherly and witty, but also defensive and averse to self-mythologizing.
Some sort of interplay between high and low, serious and ridiculous, mean and honest seems to be ubiquitous in the filmography of the Coen brothers, which won them four Oscars, but Joel is not necessarily inclined to consider the continuous lines in their work.
He acknowledged that he and Ethan had made some quirky movies over the years, but said that “it was a mistake to think that any of it is planned.”
He added, “There’s never really been any design or architecture for what we’ve done.”
But even that absence of strategy was turned upside down after their 2018 Western anthology, “The Ballad of Buster Scruggs,” when Ethan decided to focus on other endeavors.
Joel said their partnership was flexible enough to accommodate these kinds of disruptions.
“It’s not like when we first got together, we planned to work together for 40 years,” he said. “It just happened that way. When we said, ‘Let’s do some other stuff for a while,’ it’s not like there’s a plan for how long and what that would mean.”
Joel said making a movie without Ethan was like “putting one eye out”, but added that there is “probably something healthy in it to take a break”.
At the very least, it gave Joel room to contemplate alien terrain like ‘Macbeth’. This had been on his mind since at least 2016, when McDormand, his wife and frequent collaborator, asked him if he would direct a production of the play, which she had played for Berkeley Repertory Theater.
Directing “Macbeth” for the stage didn’t appeal to Coen — “I don’t think I’d know what to do,” he said — but as a film, he saw the potential to make him “withdraw from many of the ways on which I had previously worked.”
“I wanted to go as far as I could from realism and more towards a theatrical presentation,” he said. “I tried to strip things away and bring things back to a theatrical essence, but still make it cinema.”
On a visual level, that meant leaning on the ambiguities of Shakespeare’s play, avoiding images that would give too much specificity about where or when things take place.
“There’s nothing certain about this film, nothing certain about where it takes place,” said Bruno Delbonnel, the film’s cinematographer, who also worked with the Coens on “Buster Scruggs” and “Inside Llewyn Davis.”
“We were creating this world where you never know if you’re looking up or down,” Delbonnel said. “You never know if it’s day or night.”
That also meant digging to find an essential Coen-ness in “Macbeth”. Carter Burwell, who has composed the scores for almost all Coens films since their 1984 debut, Blood Simple, said their films are consistently concerned with “the pathos of people desperately trying to give meaning to this life, this meaningless universe. ”
The stories they’ve told — including “The Tragedy of Macbeth” — put the viewer “in a position to see everything that’s going on and how the poor characters are helpless,” Burwell said. “The characters think they’re smart, they think they’re on top of it. And we can see that they are basically just waving helplessly.”
Unlike, say, the brothers’ 2010 version of “True Grit”—when he deliberately didn’t watch the 1969 version—Joel Coen immersed himself in influences on “Macbeth”: he considered Orson Welles’ cinematic adaptations. and Roman Polanski, as well as Akira Kurosawa’s “Throne of Blood,” which transposes the drama to feudal Japan. He watched films by Carl Dreyer, Masaki Kobayashi and FW Murnau and read about Edward Gordon Craig, the early 20th century stage designer.
And when he narrowed “Macbeth” down to less than two hours, Coen didn’t hesitate to unsheath his sword, citing Welles’ 1948 version as a sort of gold standard.
“That’s a crazy movie,” Coen said. Welles had no problem rearranging, cutting and inventing with Shakespeare. It was a kind of liberation. You look at it and go, well, okay, He is doing it.”
McDormand, who has won three Oscars for her performances and a fourth as producer of “Nomadland,” joined “Macbeth” as a lead actor and producer for obvious reasons. ‘I’ve always worked with relatives,’ says Coen.
He had few words to say about the departure of Scott Rudin, who had produced Coen films like “No Country for Old Men” and “True Grit,” who left this project and several others after a series of news media reports of his abusive behavior. . “It’s a very different discussion,” Coen said. “I don’t know what else to say.”
Coen and Delbonnel spent several months designing the aesthetics of their “Macbeth” and planning the shooting for the Los Angeles shooting. Delbonnel said Coen brought him in much earlier and more extensively than in films Joel had directed with Ethan.
But in a fundamental way, Delbonnel said, Joel was no different than in previous films: “Sometimes he asks you a question and says, ‘What do you think if we do that?'” Delbonnel said. “But then there comes a moment when he decides: OK, let’s do that. And he knows exactly where it’s going.”
Not that there was much hesitation in casting Washington, a two-time Academy Award winner, as the title character. Washington said he was just as excited for the part, having never worked with Coen before, but considered himself a fan of their “dangerous” films.
“You’ll laugh or you’ll see someone get their head shot off, possibly at the same time,” Washington said. “‘O brother, where are you?’ is one of my favorite movies. I don’t even know why. It’s just so weird.”
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Washington found Coen’s eccentricities endearing and noted that the director would continue to insist on one aspect of his diction.
“He used to talk to me about my Rs,” Washington said. “‘Make sure you hit the hard R’s.’ He was obsessed with R’s I’m like, okay, arre are you sure? He loved it. “You have to hit the Rs.” What about the T’s or the L’s?”
Washington also said he appreciated Coen’s directive, which began with rehearsals in early 2020, that there would be “no stick-up-the-butt Shakespearean acting” in the film.
As the actor explained his take on this philosophy, “You can say a sentence and pick your nose at the same time. It’s okay if your nose bothers you. If there’s a booger in it, pick it up, to cry out loud.”
Newcomers like Moses Ingram, the ‘Queen’s Gambit’ star who made her feature film debut in ‘The Tragedy of Macbeth,’ said she felt just as welcome on set as the veteran protagonists and that Coen was patient and compassionate.
Ingram, who plays Lady Macduff, said that sometimes after a recording I “run to the monitor and panicked at what I saw.” She continued: “He took me aside and said, ‘There comes a point in your career when you’ve done this enough, when you can look at the monitor and see what you need to fix. This is your first feature, so wait for it, feel it and learn from it.”
Coen said in his quirky way that he had no problem being gentle or strict with his actors, depending on the circumstances. “I would never read a line to an actor, but I would talk about reading a line,” he explained. “I’ve never had a problem going there.”
Greater concern arose well into mainstream photography, when the pandemic first struck and production was halted for several months.
“I was actually pretty sure we wouldn’t be able to finish the movie,” Coen said. “I thought, this is going to be something weird where three quarters of the film was shot and it never got finished.”
With its completion, Coen now finds himself with a second movie reaching most of his viewers on a streaming service (after “Buster Scruggs,” which was released on Netflix).
While he sees the movie industry on the move and hopes cinema will continue to exist, Coen wasn’t overly concerned that streaming would weaken “The Tragedy of Macbeth” or the cinema itself. “I have no complaints about it, and I’m not a fan of either direction,” he said.
“There are no filmmakers who want to see their work on ever-shrinking platforms,” he said. “You worked too hard to make things, you sweated out all the details, and the difference between just watching something on your computer and being in a theater with 400 people is obvious.”
However, Coen said streaming services were “great because they bring the movie to all kinds of people who might not normally have tried it.”
The major platforms, he said, “are aware that this can’t just be some company where you dump 40 new titles onto your service every other day, and you want one of them to cause a ripple in people’s consciousness.”
Streaming also introduced him to his work as ‘The Beatles: Get Back’, Peter Jackson’s massive rock documentary on Disney+, which Coen called ‘a real mind blower’ and added, ‘It’s like nothing I’ve ever seen. ‘
Whenever possible, he tries to see films in theaters or cinemas. But if you find yourself tempted by the convenience of home viewing, rest assured, Joel Coen does too.
“I watch as much as I can and would like to see more things, and see them in the theater longer,” he said. “But I’m also as guilty as the next person to go, oh, I’ll turn on the streaming service and see it there.”