The Coen Brothers are what we have called Joel and Ethan since 1984’s Blood Simple hit the screens. They’ve delighted audiences for nearly four decades with gems including Raising Arizona, Barton Fink, The Hudsucker Proxy, Fargo, The Big Lebowski, O Brother, Where Art Thou?, No Country for Old Men, Burn After Reading, A Serious Man, True Grit, Inside Llewyn Davis, the list goes on. However, Ethan Coen decided to get off the ride and embark on a new adventure in theater. Joel Coen’s The Tragedy of Macbeth will be the first solo project for the writer/director. Joel Coen, per the Los Angeles Times explains, “I knew I’d be directing the next one by myself,” he says. “If I was working with Ethan, I wouldn’t have done Macbeth, it would not be interesting to him.”
The project started to take shape when actress Frances McDormand, wife to Joel, was “planning to do a production of ‘Macbeth’ on stage and asked if I would direct. I said I wouldn’t do it on stage but if you want to think about it as a movie we can do something interesting,” Coen explains. After McDormand’s performance, the idea stayed with him. “It’s a function of the way my brain works,” he explains. “If I can think about it in cinematic terms, then I can get my head around it.” The story was solidly in his wheelhouse. It “was really a murder story, about a couple plotting a murder, I felt like I was on comfortable ground.”‘
Who did he have in mind for the titular character? Coen had wanted to work with Denzel Washington his entire career. “We’d had a lunch a number of years ago, we talked in a general way about working together if the right thing came along, that kind of conversation. When this came up he seemed like an obvious choice. We met once, and it was ‘let’s do it.’”
This summer, Ethan Coen spoke about his early experiences as a child and his reaction to seeing plays, and admitted he was mostly bored by the experience. But as time went by, he saw an appeal to the realness of theater that you don’t experience on a film set. “I feel totally comfortable with movies. My brother and I have been making movies since we were kids,” he said of Joel Coen. “But working on movies is such a piecemeal, technical thing. This is the exact opposite of that; this is a fluid, fragile thing where everything affects the next thing. What’s terrifying about that is it can all go to hell in an instant. You make a wrong decision in rehearsals, and it’s just not like making a movie, where you can always retrieve errors and slap stuff together and make sense of it in a different way. This, my God, it’s really different.”
He then pointed to the stage. “That’s interesting,” he tells NME with a smile. “Yeah, I’m interested in that. People think it’s about, like, self-expression or something, and it’s not about that. You do it because it’s involving and stimulating and you like the process of doing it. And damn, there’s something fantastic about it when it works.”
Parallels abound with the brothers’ new interests, one taking Shakespeare to the silver screen, while the other takes his writing to the stage. While fans of the brothers’ immense and groundbreaking body of work might have worries that the two will not be partnering again, there seems to be some room to meet in the middle of the two’s passions. With their talents, they could also launch a new era for themselves and the audience.
