The door is closed and the knob holds a sign that reads "Shhhhhhhh."
Outside, standing in the hotel hallway, the PR lady is being very quiet. Inside, somebody is barking out a big, long, loud laugh. The PR lady opens the door and tiptoes in.
"Tom, you have a break now," she says.
"I have a break?" Tom Hanks asks. "I have a break!" he yells as he walks out the door. "Who knew I had a break? I have a break!" His eyes are wide and he's bellowing as he bounds down the hall. "I don't even smoke, but I think I'll get a pack of cigarettes to smoke on my break."
Then he disappears around the corner.
Irritable bowel syndrome as a plot device
VOICE-OVER: That's Tom Hanks, folks. He's a big-time movie star, winner of two Academy Awards. He's here at the Ritz-Carlton in Washington to promote his new movie, "The Ladykillers," opening Friday. But he sure is acting strange, isn't he?
I think it might have something to do with those crazy Coen brothers. They wrote and directed "The Ladykillers," and they're in the room Hanks just left. They're a couple of, well, oddballs. You can tell that from their movies. They made "Fargo," "Raising Arizona," "The Big Lebowski," "Barton Fink" and "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" among others.
The Coen brothers make weird movies — movies that are very bloody and very funny, frequently at the same time. Remember that scene in "Fargo" where the guy kills his pal and stuffs him into the wood chipper and the blood sprays across the snow? Why, I laughed so hard I nearly...but maybe I have a sick sense of humor.
Who am I? I'm the Voice-Over Narrator. The Coen brothers love voice-over narrators. "The Big Lebowski" was narrated by a cowboy, although it wasn't about cowboys. Actually, I'm not sure what "The Big Lebowski" was about, except bowling and a hippie who's trying to replace a rug a thug peed on. Then suddenly, the hippie's having a dream and you see Saddam Hussein renting out bowling shoes. And then...well, never mind. It's time to go into that hotel room, where a nerd from the newspaper is interviewing the Coens, who are a couple of squirrelly-looking guys in jeans and ratty shirts. The PR lady has allotted the nerd only 45 minutes, so we better hurry.
"Is this the first movie ever made that has irritable bowel syndrome as a plot device?" the reporter asks.
"I don't know of any others," says Joel Coen. "But we're expecting many more."
"We talked about having something in the end credits directing interested viewers to a Web site — of which there must be one — on irritable bowel syndrome," says Ethan Coen.
They both laugh. Joel, 49, is tall and dark-haired. He talks a lot, but he barely moves. Ethan, 46, is shorter with lighter hair and he's constantly moving, fidgeting with a corkscrew, popping up to pour more coffee.
"Do you think this movie will help raise money for Bob Jones University?" the reporter asks.
"I hope so," Joel says. "They should be paying us for all the free publicity."
"Will they take it well?" Ethan wonders.
"Why not?" Joel says. "We call them 'the finest Bible college in the land.' They've gotta be pleased."
Gambling on a remake
VOICE-OVER: Lemme just butt in here, folks, and fill you in on what we missed. "The Ladykillers" is a remake of a 1955 British comedy about thieves who rent a room from an old lady in London while they try to pull off a heist. The Coen brothers moved it to Mississippi, where the thieves want to rob a riverboat casino. And they rent a room from a black church lady who loves Bob Jones University. Tom Hanks is a pompous professor who's the ringleader of a gang of thieves that includes a guy with irritable bowel syndrome, which acts up at precisely the wrong time, causing...well...I don't want to spoil the fun. Anyway, let's get back to the interview 'cause Joel Coen is explaining how this whole thing came to pass.
"We were hired by the studio — Disney — to write a remake or an updating or whatever you call it for a friend of ours, Barry Sonnenfeld, who was going to direct it," says Joel, slouched on the couch idly scratching his right ear. "And for various reasons, he didn't end up directing it. So the studio asked us to direct it. In a fundamental way it was — "
" — an assignment," Ethan says. "It was an interesting exercise, doing an adaptation and updating another movie...In the original, the lady character is very genteel but very dotty, an eccentric old lady. We thought it would be more interesting if the character was a rock-of-faith Southern Baptist go-to-church, knowing-right-from-wrong kind of person."
And the Mississippi setting "related to the riverboat casinos," Joel says.
"They're, like, wretched places!" Ethan says, laughing. "They're really great 'cause it's gambling but without all the pretense of Las Vegas."
"It's, like, penny slots," Joel says. "We thought it would be amusing if we could have it be a heist of, like, $40,000 — the opposite of 'Ocean's Eleven,' where it's like half a billion."
"At some point we realized, 'Hey, we're doing the anti-'Ocean's Eleven,' " Ethan says. He bounds out of his chair to pour more coffee but pours hot water by mistake. "It's the whole kind of loser thing."
The Coens' large frontal lobes
VOICE-OVER: Okay, Okay, enough of that. Nothing is more boring than writers sitting around yakking about creativity. We've got Tom Hanks — a big-time movie star — in the house. He's in another hotel room. Let's see if he's calmed down.
"Ah, what a lovely hotel!" Hanks says, gazing out the window at the gas station across the street. "What a lovely view! What a lovely Exxon station!"
Hanks seems to be in a very good mood. "What do you want to know?" he asks, smiling.
How did you get involved with the Coen brothers?
"I have a crack team of showbiz experts and they say, 'Who do you want to work with?' And I say, 'What are the Coen brothers up to?' And it turned out to be this. I read the screenplay and I said I was interested."
He's wearing jeans and a black zippered sweat shirt with a white T-shirt peeking out of the top. Which happens to be exactly what Joel Coen is wearing.
"I had never met them," he continues. "I had only seen their films. I think they make fascinating and surprising movies. Sometimes I'm a little confused by them. I mean, how long can a person stand in a burning hotel like Barton Fink does?" He laughs. "But 'Blood Simple' I really liked. 'Raising Arizona' I really liked a lot. 'Fargo' I think is a classic motion picture. I've seen it dozens of times. They're always doing something that's completely off the beaten path and sometimes it works grandly. But you don't get a sense that they care too much — they make these movies to entertain themselves."
Joel is billed as the director, but Hanks says that's misleading.
"They are both involved in everything," he says. "In the course of doing a scene, if you have a suggestion, you can go to either one of them. They have some kind of gestalt. Maybe they communicate telepathically with those big frontal lobes of theirs."
The Coens work fast, Hanks says, because they have every shot planned out.
"Other directors will come in and say, 'How are we going to do this? What would you guys do here?' And you'll spend three hours just figuring it out. But they've already worked out schematically the composition of the shots and the timing of the scenes. I think they've already made the movie in their heads."
Illustrious beginnings
VOICE-OVER: Hey, practice makes perfect, and the Coen brothers have been making movies since they were kids back in suburban Minneapolis. The sons of two college professors — Dad taught economics, Mom taught art history — the brothers bought a Vivitar Super-8 movie camera with money they made mowing lawns in the mid-'60s and started making movies. Apparently, they were a tad, you know, weird even then because the movies had titles like "My Pits Smell Sublime" and "Would That I Could Circumambulate." And they made some remakes.
"We remade a movie called 'Advise and Consent' — a potboiler about Washington and politics — when we were, like, 12," says Joel. "It dealt with adult themes."
"What kind of adult themes?" asks the reporter.
"Adultery," says Joel, "and a senator who was — "
"It was only years later," says Ethan, "that we realized — "
" — it had a homosexual relationship," says Joel. "We didn't really understand the whole concept. We just knew it was something forbidden that had to do with sex."
"We hadn't seen the movie when we remade it," says Ethan, laughing.
"We heard about it from a friend," says Joel.
The writing process
VOICE-OVER: Joel went to NYU film school and Ethan went to Princeton to study philosophy. In the early '80s, Joel worked as an editor on cheesy splatter films and married actress Frances McDormand, who has appeared in several of their movies. Ethan married Tricia Cooke, a film editor who also works on their movies.
In 1984, using money raised from friends and relatives, they made "'Blood Simple," a dark comedy about adultery and murder. It has an amazing scene where the adulterous wife — played by McDormand — sees the bad guy's hand on the windowsill and stabs it with a hunting knife, pinning it down, and the guy starts shooting at her, firing from the light into the dark room she's in, so each bullet hole emits a ray of light, which looked really cool.
Critics raved about "Blood Simple" and so the brothers got to make more movies, and they all have weird, off-the-wall scenes you'd never see in anybody else's films. Like the scene in last year's "Intolerable Cruelty" where the cuckolded husband is pointing a gun at his wife's lover when the wife whacks him on the head with a huge trophy and he falls to the floor, moaning, "Hey, that's my Daytime Television Lifetime Achievement Award!" Or the scene in...hold it! That newspaper nerd is actually asking an intelligent question.
"I think what your fans really want to know," the reporter says, "is how the heck do you guys come up with this stuff?"
"You just sit in a room and talk the movie back and forth," Ethan says, "and you just try to come up with something that's interesting and maybe surprising but doesn't seem arbitrary — and, I don't know, makes us laugh. Saying anything beyond that is, like — "
" — glorifying it," Joel says. "Or creating a mystique which it doesn't really deserve."
"Like we'll say, 'All right, a guy knocks on a door and the door opens and it's John Goodman,' " says Ethan.
"We frequently write for particular actors we know," says Joel. "So, we'll say, 'What if we make John Turturro a Hispanic pedophile?' It's that kind of speculation."
"In 'O Brother, Where Art Thou?,' '' says Ethan, "we thought of the time-honored thing of three dopes chained together, escaping from a chain gang. And then after a while it became clear that what we were really doing is — "
"Hey, this is really 'The Odyssey,' " says Joel.
"We go, 'Oops, it is?' " Ethan says, laughing.
"So it becomes more of 'The Odyssey' and less of the three dopes," says Joel.
"Although it's still a three-dopes movie," says Ethan.
"There are a lot of false starts," says Joel. "We may write 30 or 40 pages and then not quite know where to go with it and put it aside, sometimes for months...With 'Fargo,' I remember there was a line we were stuck on. It's when Steve Buscemi brings the hooker home. And that's where the script stayed for over a year."
"We got stuck there, and three years later, we thought, 'Okay, the Indian comes in and beats him up.' " Ethan says. "And we just started again. I don't know why."
Nerds with attitude
VOICE-OVER: Oops! There they go again, folks — writers yapping about the creative process. Fortunately, we have another Hollywood star in the house, ladies and gentlemen — Mr. Marlon Wayans! He plays one of the thieves in "The Ladykillers," and he's only too happy to tell us how he got that part.
"I begged and I pleaded and I hit the casting couch and I did both of them. And they said, 'Okay, Marlon, you can be in our movie,' " Wayans says, grinning. "I'm just kidding. I auditioned and so did everybody black in Hollywood. If you was black, you was goin' up for this role. And I won it."
Wayans is wearing a floppy hat with the bill jutting off to the right, like it's headed in a different direction than he is.
"I watched all their movies," he continues. "I seen how all the characters in their movies are pretty big, pretty over-the-top — grounded but over-the-top. Even their death scenes are funny, flashy — like cartoons, like Bugs Bunny."
On the set, he says, the Coens were easygoing. "They're real laid-back, like somebody gave them the biggest joint. You know, like somebody pulled two guys from Woodstock and said, 'Hey, you wanna do a film?' "
Wayans makes movies with his own brothers, so he understands cinematic brother teams. "Brothers share a sense of humor," he says. "You have the same references and the same point of reference, but you see it in two different ways."
Of course the Coen brothers differ from the Wayans brothers, he says. "We were, like, bullies in school. We picked on people with humor. They're like the nerds that got tired of being picked on and went home and wrote some jokes — like the Columbine nerds, but with jokes."
The snow-globe strategy
VOICE-OVER: Hey, folks, it's time to travel back to the days of yesteryear, way back in — oh, maybe 1997 — and the Coen brothers are going into a pitch meeting with a big-time Hollywood producer. Jeez, you'd think they'd dress up a little, but they're wearing those ratty jeans. The producer's sitting behind a desk as big as an aircraft carrier and smoking a cigar as big as a redwood.
"Okay, boys," he says, "gimme your pitch."
"Well, the movie's called 'The Big Lebowski,' " Joel says. "It's about a hippie who gets beat up by thugs, who pee on his rug, and he goes off trying to get his rug replaced."
"You're kidding," says the producer.
"It's also about bowling," Ethan says. "John Turturro plays a Hispanic pederast named Jesus who's a very good bowler."
"I'll pass," the producer says. "You got another pitch?"
"Yeah," Joel says. "The movie's called 'The Man Who Wasn't There' and it's about a barber who wants to go into the dry-cleaning business."
"Get out of here," the producer says.
"No, really," Ethan says. "And we're gonna shoot it in black-and-white. With a voice-over narration."
"Get out of here," the producer yells. He presses a secret button in his desk and the Coens are ejected from their chairs. They crash through the ceiling and soar into the sky, where they fly around, gazing down on Hollywood's back lots, where one crew is filming "Porky's XIV and another is shooting the movie version of "Leave It to Beaver."
Well, of course, this didn't really happen, folks. It's just a dream sequence. The Coen brothers love dream sequences almost as much as they love voice-over narration. Actually, the truth of the matter is, the Coens don't do pitch meetings.
"Our movies generally don't lend themselves very well to pitches," Joel says. "Basically, we write the scripts and then we cast them and then we take that to a financial entity, whether it's a studio or whatever."
"We've generally been pretty lucky," Ethan says. "By virtue of the fact that they've all been relatively cheap to make."
"Do they make money?" the reporter asks.
"Not all of them," says Joel. "But most of them have made enough money that we're able to keep on doing our thing. The movies are made at a modest enough price that nobody's gonna get badly hurt no matter what happens."
"O Brother," released in 2000 and starring George Clooney, was the Coens' most successful movie, costing $26 million to make and grossing $45 million at the box office. Last year's "Intolerable Cruelty," a screwball romantic comedy with Clooney and Catherine Zeta-Jones, lost money — it cost $60 million and grossed $35 million. "Fargo" — a 1996 movie with a budget estimated at $7 million and no superstars — grossed $24 million. It also won two Oscars — Best Actress for McDormand and Best Screenplay for the brothers.
"Fargo did very well in video," Ethan says.
"The video was due to the snow globe," says Joel.
He's referring to the free knickknack that came with the video — a snow globe depicting the pregnant police chief played by McDormand and that now-famous wood chipper.
"Don't get a big head," Joel tells his brother. "The snow globe sold that movie."
They both laugh.
"At the beginning of 'Fargo,' it says on-screen that the movie was based on a true story," the reporter says. "What part is true?"
"None of it," Joel says.
"The fact that it is a story is true," Ethan adds, laughing.
"We thought it would be interesting to say that at the beginning of a movie," says Joel.
"Then it would be a true-story movie," says Ethan.
The reporter looks crestfallen. "I thought the wood chipper thing was true," he says.
"That did happen," Joel says. "A guy killed his wife in Connecticut and put her through a wood chipper."
The wood chipper scene caused much debate on the set, Joel recalls. "There was a lot of discussion over whether there should be a sock on the foot in the wood chipper."
"We talked about the three options — bare foot, sock and shoe," Ethan says, laughing.
"It was a whole Talmudic thing about what would be funny," Joel says. "Is the shoe funny? Or is the shoe too much? Is the sock better? Or the bare foot? It got very rabbinical and Talmudic." They went with the sock.
Dancing bears
VOICE-OVER: See, I told you that wood chipper scene was funny! But I never knew it was Talmudic, whatever that means.
Uh-oh. Here comes the PR lady, ending the interview. The nerd's 45 minutes have expired. Gee, time sure flies when you're having fun. The reporter looks stunned because he didn't get through all his questions. He even forgot to ask the Coens his big English-major question: What is the overarching theme of your films?
Well, I suppose we'll never know the answer. We'll just have to guess. Me, I'd say that if these movies have any theme, it's something like this: Humans are like the dancing bears in the circus — kinda dumb but kinda funny in a goofy way. But you better not stand between them and whatever they want, because they'll rip your head off.
But what do I know? I'm not an English major. I'm just the guy they hired to do the voice-over.
The reporter stands up and reaches for his tape recorder. "I hope this worked," he says.
"If it doesn't work, just make it up," Ethan says, smiling slyly. "Just say it's 'Based on a True Interview.' "
