No Country For Old Men

[MacGuffin]

Traversing 'No Country's' tricky terrain
The Coen brothers' film is attracting acclaim and viewers, many of whom are saying 'Huh?' after its less-than-killer ending.
By Glenn Kenny, Los Angeles Times

**SPOILERS**

"YOU know how this is gonna turn out, don't you?"

"No."

"I think you do."

So goes an exchange, almost an hour and a half into "No Country for Old Men," between murderous tracker Anton Chigurh and affable Llewelyn Moss, his prey. They're the two main characters -- at least until the film's final half-hour.

What goes on in that last quarter makes the picture -- which is well on its way to becoming the top-grossing film from moviemaking brothers Joel and Ethan Coen -- one of the most controversial thrillers to hit movie theaters in some time. Not, perhaps, since the "what-is-that-astronaut-doing-in-a-Louis-XIV-bedroom" finale of Stanley Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey" has a movie's ending so provoked and polarized viewers.

Still, "No Country" continues to gain in box-office sales (it's grossed roughly $45 million) and awards (it would appear to be a shoo-in for a score of Oscar nominations). However, one potential hurdle in that respect is convincing whichever skeptical parties still out there that the ending is a plus, not a minus.

To address what makes the ending "challenging" will involve getting into it a bit, so readers who haven't seen the film yet might want to set the paper down. The picture was adapted scrupulously -- although the Coens do some compressing and add one particularly provocative bit of cinematic sleight-of-hand -- from the 2005 Cormac McCarthy novel of the same name.

The story's villain, Chigurh (indelibly portrayed by Javier Bardem), is a mysterious, merciless killer tracking down a couple of million dollars in drug-deal money. He's a wraith with an odd haircut, an odd way of killing (it involves a variant of a cattle gun) and an odd way of determining his victims (it frequently requires a coin toss).

Moss (an extremely appealing Josh Brolin) is a likable latter-day cowboy who stumbles upon the satchel containing that money and ill-advisedly engages the formidable Chigurh in a game of cat-and-mouse. The rules of genre moviemaking would seem to dictate that this story end with a showdown between the assassin and the good-guy underdog.

But the Coens' film, like the novel from which the film's adapted, follows the rules only so far; the showdown never happens. Instead, the story's emphasis shifts, concentrating on Sheriff Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones, in a magisterial turn), who's been trailing Moss and Chigurh from a distance. It's Bell's voice that is first heard at the movie's opening, talking about a crime he can't begin to "reckon."

Bell is a good man and a good cop, but he eventually decides to withdraw from the frightening chaos wrought by the Chigurhs and Mosses of the world, and the movie's very last scene depicts Bell, now retired, recounting a haunting dream to his wife (Tess Harper).

Because "No Country" contains some action/suspense sequences that honor not just the best of Hitchcock but the best of latter-day violent blockbusters (Chigurh's seeming indomitability sometimes brings to mind the first "Terminator" film), this contemplative and seemingly abrupt wrap-up inspires certain action-movie mavens to scratch their heads and shout obscenities at the screen -- and on the Internet, where so many movie conversations now take place. ("It's because there's no music," "No Country" producer Scott Rudin notes. "The norm in scenes like this is to provide some sort of emotional cue with the music.")

The message boards about the film on Yahoo are teeming with subject lines such as "The critics are on crack!" and observations such as "Yeah a lot of people get killed but the acting is terrible."

But, truth to tell, even more putatively thoughtful viewers have been thrown off by the road less traveled "No Country" takes. In the Nov. 26, 2007, issue of the New Yorker, writer-director Nora Ephron contributed a humorous piece in which a couple ponder, among other things, the fate of Brolin's Moss. Where he ends up, as it happens, is not unambiguous at all; it's just revealed in a way that's totally counter to audience expectations.

Ephron's piece, along with a good deal of other online speculation about the movie's ending -- including a couple of posts by this writer at the Premiere.com website -- is being collected at the movie's own official web- site, www.nocountryforoldmen-themovie.com, under the heading "Notes on the Ending."

"One of the things my partners and I decided early on it was to not try and dance around it," Rudin says. "To say, yes, there is this ending, it's this extraordinary thing, we love it, it requires work on the part of the audience, it's challenging, it's complicated, it's ambiguous. And that decision was a big part of how we tried to make it work for audiences."

The more one examines the differing parts of "No Country" -- starting from its title, which is from the Yeats poem "Sailing to Byzantium" -- the more its seemingly off-kilter ending makes sense, revealing itself as the only possible ending for the picture.

Not only that, but the more it relates to other Coen brothers' movies and to sources the Coens have cited as influences such as the Dashiell Hammett novel "The Glass Key" -- an uncredited inspiration for the Coens' "Miller's Crossing" -- which also ends with the recounting of a dream.

Mere moments before his own date with destiny, Moss tells a young lady who's chatting him up that he's just got an eye out "for what's coming." After Moss has met his fate, and Ed Tom Bell is grappling with a case that he could not, or would not, close, a trusted relative tells him: "You can't stop what's comin'. It ain't all waitin' on you. That's vanity."

The dream Bell recounts in the film's denouement is a place where safety and warmth are assured; that world, this movie understands, is not the one we're living in today. The actual nature of the killer Chigurh is . . . open to question. As is much else.

[Sleepless]

I don't understand why there's so much debate about the ending. Yeah, it's ambiguous. That's part of make it such a great ending. It's completely different to all the violence that has gone on throughout the rest of the film. The main problem, IMO is that Bell is not enough of a presence earlier in the film, when he clearly should have been.

[JG]

in what ways should he have been more active in the story? just in more scenes?

[Sleepless]

IIn the novel, Tommy Lee Jones character is at the heart of the story. His commentary and experience guides everything. The mishap of misplaced money and a subsequent chase for it (while still prominent in the novel) doesn't take on such a large percentage of the story time as it does in the film. The only times we see Tommy Lee Jones is in small spurts where his character interaction provides better anecdotes than anything else. The Coen Brothers embrace the chance to take a killing spree and make it an elaborate noir spectacle. The composition and filmmaking has thriller written all over it. It marginalizes all chances for characterization.

The final 20 minutes feel like the novel. Jones' character takes prominence and it has a tone that feels like the novel, but it isn't satisfying. It feels tacked on like the film knows it has to make meaning out of all the ridiculousness of the rest of the story. The film could have made choices to make the film feel more realistic to life circumstances, but it just gravitated to the large number of deaths in the novel and exploited it. I'm not saying the film should have been a true dedication to the novel. Considering the novel was far from perfect, it shouldn't have. Its just of all the things the film chose to ditch and throw away, it didn't need to throw away the best parts.

[MacGuffin]

Josh Brolin On 'No Country' Ending: 'It Was Supposed To Piss You Off'
Source: MTV

"No Country For Old Men" might very well be a masterpiece. But, if so, it's certainly the most divisive modern classic in memory, with audiences bitterly conflicted over an ending which leaves much to the imagination.

Good, says "No Country" star Josh Brolin. That not only speaks to the movie's enduring quality, he said, but, if you were looking for a bloodbath, frankly serves you right.

"I love that people are talking about this movie. I love that people leave the movie saying, 'I hate the ending. I was so pissed.' Good, it was supposed to piss you off," the 39-year-old star told MTV News. "You completely lend yourself to [my] character and then you're completely raped of this character. I don't find it manipulative at all. I find it to be a great homage to that kind of violence."

Beware. Thar be spoilers in these waters.

After being chased by Javier Bardem's Anton Chigurh the entire movie, Brolin meets his violent end off-screen. Soon after, his wife is brutally murdered off-screen as well. After all that build-up, all that destruction, the film ends, not with an orgasmic culmination of violence, but with a quiet monologue from Sheriff Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones).

If you were expecting something different, Brolin argues, that "says more about you than the movie."

"You wanted to see his death, why? Because you're used to it. Aren't you so pleased to see a different take on the same cat and mouse game?" he asked. "I would think that you are happy and it seems that you are happy because you're pissed off and you have something to talk about all day."

[MacGuffin]

Men of `No Country' discuss hit film
By JAKE COYLE, AP Entertainment Writer

The men of "No Country for Old Men" are having a smoke.

Tommy Lee Jones, Javier Bardem and Josh Brolin each light up while, all dressed in dark suits, they gather in a back room at Manhattan restaurant Cipriani's for the National Board of Review Awards.

While Jones fiddles with the matches, Brolin rolls his eyes and alludes to Jones' Ivy League education: "Harvard," he says in disbelief.

The NBR Awards, which named the film the year's best picture, are just one of many to honor the Coen brothers' movie, adapted from Cormac McCarthy's novel. On Tuesday, "No Country" was nominated for eight Oscars, including best picture and best supporting actor for Bardem. Jones was also nominated for best actor for his performance in "In the Valley of Elah."

"No Country" has grossed more than any previous Coen film, an unlikely financial success for a violent, somber allegory of a movie.

Each character is symbolic. Bardem's Anton Chigurh is a prophet of destruction with the hair of Prince Valiant. Brolin's Llewlyn Moss is greed; he attempts to take a found suitcase of money for himself. And Jones' Sheriff Ed Tom Bell is justice; a wise, old man trying to make sense of a new violence.

Similarly, in person, they appear archetypes of masculinity. Among the trio, Brolin is the wry jokester; Bardem is the affable, sensitive one; and Jones is the dour, sarcastic elder statesman.

**SPOILERS**
___

AP: Though Joel Coen has said this is a film about three men, you're never seen together on screen. In fact, any two of you hardly appear together.

JONES: Not once.

BROLIN: Or once, but without any dialogue.

JONES: But we're a terrific ensemble, as you can see. (all laugh)

AP: Did you have that sense that you were an ensemble when making it, even if you didn't have dialogue together?

JONES: Albuquerque is a really hard place to work. It's very noisy. There are crows there, planes, trucks, people working on their cars. It's just a noisy place to shoot. It's a little quieter in West Texas. That's about all we dealt with, is trying to do the best we could and work around the noise of Albuquerque and the topographical features of West Texas. I suppose that made us an ensemble, but it's not as if we walked around a drawing room exchanging witticisms.

AP: It's ironic that it was noisy while making it, considering the film is exceptionally quiet, with barely any music at all. When did you know that there would essentially be no music?

BROLIN: Not until we saw it. We had no idea.

JONES: There was no music? (all laugh)

BROLIN: There's a bit. There's ambiance. And it's kind of good; I don't know of any movie that's done that — kind of accentuated the ambiance of the wind, the footsteps, the rustling. So it kind of has a natural soundtrack, but a soundtrack nonetheless.

AP: Is that nerve-racking to hear that there isn't music? Maybe you're more naked on screen that way?

BROLIN: Well, we didn't know beforehand. I think if we had been told that there was going to be nothing on the screen but your breathing, at a certain point we probably would have imploded.

BARDEM: I was really hoping for them to cover my whole voice, my terrible English, with some tension, some music. But they didn't.

BROLIN: Heavy metal or something.

AP: It's been interesting to see how ongoing the discussion is about this film. Critics and moviegoers seem to still be turning over the ending, the hair, the meaning of Chigurh.

JONES: That's good. It's a good thing if it causes conversations.

BROLIN: I know that some of these critics have seen the movie more than once, and from what I've heard, up to four times. ... It's not your typical structure of film. You rape the audience of a protagonist, and suddenly they go, `We don't like that.' But of course you don't like that because you're not supposed to like that.

AP: Javier, your character is the instigator of these questions. How do you prepare for a character like this, who's less a normal person and more an embodiment of violence?

BARDEM: The only difference that I had in approaching the character is not really worrying about the backstory of the character: where he's coming from, if his mommy fed him well when he was 10. It was about how to bring this iconic and symbolic idea of what violence represents into human fear — which was a difficult task because it's very easy to get lost in the machine, in the Terminator side of it.

AP: Many have also been unsure of how to react to the ending (a scene in which Jones' character gives a long soliloquy). How did you approach that scene?

JONES: I worked at it every day, several times a day, because it was poetic and you wanted to get the rhythms right and try to embody in the performance all that it might imply as a work of literature and hopefully cinema. And worked at it real hard. Are you asking me what it meant?

AP: No.

JONES: Good. (all laugh) Because it means what it means. It says what it says. It's pretty straightforward.

AP: Is it something that you believe? Once we're no longer saying "sir" and "ma'am" is all lost?

JONES: No, not all is lost. What I think is the book and the movie, in general, is a contemplation of morality. And the character of Ed Tom feels somewhat overwhelmed by a new character of evil and says so to his wiser and older uncle, and his uncle tells him that that's vanity, that evil doesn't change and that you, Ed Tom, do not live in the center of the universe. You can't be overwhelmed. It's the same old deal. Then he tells the story about these Indians who ride up to another uncle's house maybe a hundred years ago, kill him on his front porch. And when he recounts the story, if you look at it on the face of it, it seems like a recounting of a scene from a grade-B Western, but somehow you get the feeling that if you were there on that day, you would have seen real evil. And it would have impressed you; it would have been real. And I think that's important to this movie's outlook. No matter how overwhelmed you might feel, it's not about you. ... And like all considerations of Cormac, the questions are far more important than the answers. The question that arises there is that wonderful dream of riding ahead and reuniting with your father in the warm fire place in the cold, in the dark, hostile country. And if it is a dream, does the dream have any efficacy at all? If you wake up from a dream, what have you woken up from? Have you woken up from reality? So these get to be pretty sophisticated questions and I really appreciate the Coen brothers' careful reading of Cormac's moral thinking. Finally we're left with the really good questions, which are better than any simple answers. Did that make any sense?

BARDEM & BROLIN: Mm-hmm. (applauding)

[polkablues]

You rape the audience of a protagonist, and suddenly they go, `We don't like that.' But of course you don't like that because you're not supposed to like that.

That's a very good way of putting it.  Next time someone I know bitches about the third act, this is what I'll tell them.

[MacGuffin]

Okay, we have some official details for you on Buena Vista's No Country for Old Men. As we reported yesterday, look for the DVD and Blu-ray to hit stores on 3/11. The DVD (SRP $29.99) will include 3 behind-the-scenes documentaries (Working with the Coens: Reflections of Cast and Crew, The Making of No Country for Old Men and Diary of a Country Sheriff). The Blu-ray Disc (SRP $34.99) will include the same extras as the DVD.

[modage]

cover art: http://www.dvdactive.com/news/releases/no-country-for-old-men.html

its not horrible but it makes me fear for Blood (miramax/parvantage).  i hope paul still has some control over this.

[picolas]

why are they putting the names in random order so they don't line up with the actor's heads? they aren't even alphabetical. are they trying to trick people into believing tommy-lee isn't an old man?

wouldn't paul have that kind of cover control in his contract? otherwise i don't know how he was able to get away with something like pdl, which i'm sure the money-wanters would've tried to make look like a sandler-com.

[idk]

This is good.... there are spoilers

I want this guy's jacket.

[MacGuffin]

Q&A: Double Oscar Nominee Deakins

Veteran cinematographer Roger Deakins is competing against himself at the Academy Awards this year, with nominations for "No Country for Old Men" and "The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford."

These are his sixth and seventh Oscar nominations he's never won. And in his typically self-effacing, dry British manner, he says he truly doesn't believe he's going to win this year, either.

Deakins, 58, is probably best known as the longtime director of photography for the Coen brothers. He's shot all nine of their movies since 1991's "Barton Fink," creating the signature imagery for films including "Fargo," "The Big Lebowski," "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" and their latest, "No Country."

He grew up in Devon, England, and began as a still photographer before going to film school and making documentaries. Besides his work with the Coens, he's shot "A Beautiful Mind," "House of Sand and Fog" and "Jarhead," to name a few, and received Oscar nominations for "The Shawshank Redemption" and "Kundun."

(Multiple nominations for one person in the same Oscar category are not unheard of: Steven Soderbergh, for example, got best-director nods for 2000's "Traffic" and "Erin Brockovich." This is the first time a cinematographer has been up against himself since Robert Surtees, with the 1971 films "The Last Picture Show" and "Summer of '42.")

Later this year, Deakins has Sam Mendes' "Revolutionary Road," starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet, and he's currently shooting "Doubt" with Meryl Streep, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Amy Adams.

AP: What was your reaction to the two nominations?

Deakins: It was a real surprise. I thought "No Country" had a chance but, you know, "Jesse James" didn't really get much of a release. When the nominations came out, the most pleased I was, was for Casey (Affleck, for supporting actor in "Jesse James") and ... Tommy Lee Jones (for best actor in "In the Valley of Elah," which Deakins also shot). And I thought he'd been so overlooked.

AP: With the writers strike going on, what's it like for you to think there may not be any Oscars?

Deakins: It's a hard one 'cause, I mean, they've got a point. It just seems absurd to me that we can't all come together and talk about it like adults. But on the other hand, most of it is a business, isn't it? And people have to work out their contracts. So it's quite understandable, what's going on. It's just a pity.

AP: How did you hook up with Joel and Ethan Coen?

Deakins: I'd done a few pictures by then. I think they'd seen, like, "Sid and Nancy" on the one hand and seen "1984" on the other. It was just, I kind of guess, the range of what I do I suppose that attracted them. I was a bit nervous when I met them 'cause I thought, well, two of them, how do they work together? But we hit it off. We met in London, actually, in Notting Hill. And they're well, you know what they're like they're really sort of low-key and matter-of-fact and totally unpretentious and we hit it off straight away, really.

AP: What is it about your working relationship that's been a good fit?

Deakins: Maybe it's that we've got a similar sense of humor or something. They've got this very sort of dry, laconic, almost English sense of humor. We see the world quite similarly, I suppose.

AP: Can you pick a favorite movie you've done with them?

Deakins: I like them for different reasons because most of them are very, very different. I would probably have to say "The Man Who Wasn't There." I love that movie there's something about it that is, I think, it kind of works as a piece more than any of the other films we've done.

AP: That's one of my favorites of theirs and I think it's underappreciated. But again, that's a tough sell because it's in black and white.

Deakins: Yeah, tough sell, absolutely. But that's the thing with them I've had such opportunities to work on films like that with different kind of looks, different kind of feels.

AP: You've been a still photographer for a long time, but how challenging was it to shoot a whole film in black and white?

Deakins: Technically, there were a few challenges just to get the sort of purity of the black and white, but in terms of lighting and feel, I think I kind of light in black and white anyway, really I light for light and shade, I don't light for color so much. I find a lot of the time that color is sort of a distraction and it's easy on the eye. It's easy to make something attractive by putting in pretty colors but it's not necessarily right for the content of the piece.

AP: Do you still shoot photographs?

Deakins: When I get some time off. I love it it's my favorite thing to do. That and fishing.

AP: Do you ever do both at the same time?

Deakins: Well, I take my camera out. I've got a little boat in south Devon. I go out fishing and I take the camera with me sometimes. ... I'm trying to do a series about the English seaside in the southwest and I spend most of my time wandering around with my camera in the odd seaside resort, trying to find photographs. I like observing people, I suppose.

AP: Would you want to direct a feature of your own someday?

Deakins: I kind of looked into it a few years ago and it's like, everybody in Hollywood has got a script. I've got a script. It's set in Africa in World War I that's not going to go down very well, is it? It's a comedy, but it's also about colonialism. I enjoyed writing it it was a few years ago, now, and I sort of took it 'round to a few people. But I love what I do so why would I change that? I love being on the set, I love the contact.

AP: Do you ever get so drawn into what's happening that you forget ...

Deakins: To turn on the camera?

AP: No, just get lost in what you're doing and forget that you're at work.

Deakins: Well you do. You get totally drawn into the characters and the piece and that's what's amazing. That's why I love it. ... There are scenes in "No Country" when we were shooting them like in Ellis' cabin in the end just watching that through the lens, you get a tingle up the spine.

[MacGuffin]

Coen brothers' road less traveled leads this time to 'No Country for Old Men'
By Michael Ordoña, Los Angeles Times

AS "No Country for Old Men" star Josh Brolin said in accepting the Screen Actors Guild Award for ensemble cast, "The Coen brothers are freaky little people, you know, and we did a freaky little movie."

Indeed, sitting down with the notoriously press-shy, iconoclastic auteurs in a suite at the Four Seasons in Beverly Hills with the only light coming from the rapidly dimming, overcast sky, is a little bit freaky. 
 
Joel, the older and taller Coen, a cross between Tim Burton and Frank Zappa, wears inscrutable sunglasses in the unlighted room and barely moves. He does most of the talking, and that in a measured baritone, although the two often complete or enhance each other's thoughts. Ethan, the slighter Coen, paces nervously and smiles sardonically throughout. The conversation is dotted with clarifications of questions, denials delivered with a smile and long pauses, cones of silence.

When told that, in an earlier interview, "No Country" costar Javier Bardem described them as characteristically American filmmakers ("They do these very deeply American movies; there is always a deep America within their movies," the Spanish actor said), Joel shrugs off the notion that their work might shape international filmgoers' impressions of this country.

"Our movies are too outside of the mainstream," he says. "This is the biggest-grossing movie we've ever had. And even at that, it doesn't approach the kind of business and influence, in terms of people's perception of American culture, that big, Hollywood studio movies do."

Whatever the influence of their films is, says Ethan, "it would be very marginal."

Since their 1984 debut with the nouveau noir "Blood Simple," which grossed an underwhelming $2.2 million domestically on its initial release, the impact of the brothers' work would certainly be considered "marginal" if box-office figures were the only standard. Until "No Country's" $55 million take, their releases had averaged just over $19 million domestically and considerably less abroad, although surprisingly, their coolly received 2003 screwball outing with George Clooney and Catherine Zeta-Jones, "Intolerable Cruelty," picked up $35 million at home -- and $85 million internationally.

But if critical acclaim and awards are more indicative of directors' legacies, the Coens would unquestionably rank among the top American filmmakers of the last 25 years, with forests of laurels for their quirky visions, including multiple wins for direction at Cannes and a Palme d'Or for 1991's "Barton Fink."

Dark, complex works such as "Blood Simple," "Miller's Crossing" and "Fargo" gave birth to an entire subgenre of violent, low-budget crime movies with clever dialogue, creative camera moves and morally unsettled universes. Their earliest works, viewed today, seem to make more cinematic sense than they did at the time -- because they have been more influential and timeless than the behemoths then dominating the box office ("Three Men and a Baby") and Oscars of the time ("Chariots of Fire," etc.). They didn't receive an Oscar nomination, however, until 1996's "Fargo," for which they took home the screenwriting prize and Frances McDormand (Mrs. Joel Coen) won for her lead performance.

But even now, the brothers reject their status as leaders of American cinema:

"We ain't leadin' anything, buddy," says Ethan with that wry grin.

Odds stacked against it

TO most decision-makers in those "big, Hollywood studios," "No Country" must have sounded like a spectacularly losing proposition. It's a dark, brutal tale, in part about what Joel calls "how aging changes your perception of the world," and what Bardem had once called "this huge wave of violence that the world has been taken by." It's based on a book by Cormac McCarthy, a Pulitzer-Prize winner whose only previous film adaptation, "All the Pretty Horses," tanked despite an A-list cast.

"For Cormac McCarthy, it's a much pulpier novel than he usually writes," says Joel, 53, of the quirks in "No Country" that hooked him and his brother. "It's a crime story but it doesn't unfold in a conventional way."

He seems to dig in, even removing his shades, as he gets into the geography of the novel, both figurative and literal: "In certain ways, it can't be told without an emphasis on the landscape it takes place in. It's important to understanding the story, to the telling of the story, making it specific in the right ways as far as the characters are concerned. I think [McCarthy] once described it as natural history, which is sort of interesting . . . "

"He's a natural historian," interjects Ethan, 50.

"That is, he's interested in the natural history of that region," Joel says, "and the people who inhabit it are in a sense the flora and fauna and you have to understand them in the context of the region -- even though what I think the story's about in many ways is universal and not limited to that. So that was interesting," he says, adding, "and we knew that area a little bit, which was part of what drew us to the story."

"No Country" is not only the first of the brothers' efforts to cross the $50-million mark domestically; it's cleaning up on the awards circuit, especially for the Coens' writing and direction and Bardem's chilling turn as the cold-eyed, alarmingly coiffed hit man. Wins at the SAG and DGA awards and at the Golden Globes (for Bardem and the screenplay) make the film a front-runner in all three categories at the Oscars.

"It's very strange," says Ethan of the film's success. "You never know."

"I have to say that there were other people who saw early versions and predicted it," says Joel, corroborated by Ethan. "So the reasons may be transparent to some people but they're certainly not to us. We don't understand it."

This, from filmmakers who tried for some time to adapt James Dickey's World War II novel, "To the White Sea," into what they described to Time magazine as "this expensive movie about the firebombing of Tokyo in which there's no dialogue," and which would have starred Brad Pitt.

They're often called "The Two-Headed Director" because they work together so closely, although until 2004's "The Ladykillers" they were compelled by DGA rules to list only one brother (Joel) as director until they acquired a waiver permitting the dual credit. It took them only 20 years and 11 films to apply for it. They don't talk about how they work on set but by all accounts it is a pleasant experience. Clooney, who just completed the upcoming "Burn After Reading," his third film with the directors, says there is lots of laughter as filming progresses. "You can hear them . . . it'll actually screw takes up," the actor says.

Built from the actors up

IF anyone needs further evidence that the brothers Coen continue to think outside the box (office), consider how they arrived at "Burn After Reading."

"We wrote down a bunch of actors we wanted to work with," says Ethan: " 'What kind of story would these people be in?' "

They wrote parts for Clooney, Pitt, McDormand and John Malkovich, all of whom are in the film along with Tilda Swinton. But those roles aren't exactly star turns.

"All the characters in 'Burn After Reading' are numskulls," says Joel, "which Malkovich had no problem with; Clooney has never had a problem with . . . " Both laugh. "Brad was initially taken aback. He's very funny in the movie. He grew to love it as much as George does. Each character is dumber than the next. But they're all lovable.

"The original idea was sort of a spy story and does still have the residue of that, in that Malkovich's character is an analyst at the CIA who is fired in the first scene and starts writing a memoir. His story intersects with Fran and Brad, who are, respectively, the assistant manager and trainer at a gym in suburban Washington. So it's about the CIA and physical fitness."

And what of the long-rumored but as-yet only mythical "Hail Caesar"? They allow it would star Clooney as a matinee idol making a biblical epic, then go on to poke at their supposed leading man.

" 'Hail Caesar' is a movie that George Clooney keeps announcing to the press every couple of years, and it doesn't even exist as a script; it's only an idea," says Joel. "We kind of teased George with the opportunity to play another numskull. He was totally up for it. Part of the 'Numskull Trilogy' with George [with 'O Brother, Where Art Thou?' and 'Intolerable Cruelty'].

"After we finished shooting 'Burn After Reading,' I think on the last day, George said, 'OK, that's it, I've played my last idiot.' So we said, 'I guess you won't be working with us again.' " They laugh for a while.

Putting the dimwits in the drawer for now, the Coens' next actual project, union unrest allowing, is expected to be "A Serious Man."

"That's about a Jewish community in the Midwest in 1967, which is sort of reflective of the place we grew up in," says Joel. ". . . That's a hard movie to kind of synopsize."

They laugh again, raising suspicion, and Joel pronounces, "It's a 'domestic drama.' "

The thought of what a Coen brothers domestic drama would look like might intrigue or worry fans, considering their history of bold genre-bending with mixed results. But that they continue to make pretty much whatever they want, wordless World War II epics notwithstanding, is heartening. They're buoyed by the current creative environment, in which unconventional movies they admire, such as "Margot at the Wedding," "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly" and "There Will Be Blood," receive significant support.

"Any time you see great stuff, it's heartening," says Joel. "It makes me feel much better about the state of the industry and the possibilities that exist out there both for seeing more stuff like that from other people, and being able to do interesting work yourself. I actually think it's an indication of how healthy the business is."

"In a totally selfish way," adds Ethan, "forgetting about them, that there's an audience for that -- that Julian [Schnabel] gets money for a blinking movie about a blinking guy's locked-in syndrome, that's kind of great, you know?"

"Because it can be very depressing," says Joel, "when you start to feel like the only things that get made are sequels to action pictures which have established a huge potential for box office, or adaptations of comic books or things like that. Not to say that some of those aren't really interesting, great movies too, but that's the stock-in-trade of Hollywood. And it's good that, despite that, the business is bigger than that."

[tpfkabi]

just the other day i realized that Josh Brolin was older brother, Brand, in The Goonies.

[brockly]

just the other day i realized that Josh Brolin was older brother, Brand, in The Goonies.

  that's fucking crazy man