By general consensus, Joel and Ethan Coen are two of the finest living American filmmakers. Any duo that could write and direct Fargo, The Big Lebowski, and No Country for Old Men belongs in the top tier. But as anyone who saw their abbreviated Oscar speeches will tell you, these guys have crafted public personas so willfully aloof, evasive, and monosyllabic, they make Andy Warhol look like Mick Jagger.
It’s TIFF ’08, and the Coens are seated at a press conference at the Park Hyatt hotel with Brad Pitt, Tilda Swinton, and John Malkovich to promote their latest effort, Burn After Reading: a broad, quirky comedy in the style of Raising Arizona. Poised before one hundred journalists, the Coen brothers look singularly unmoved.
A reporter comments, “This is a comic film, but there’s also a very dark undertone. I walked away from it with a very pessimistic feeling about human nature because it portrays people as so empty, vacuous, and self-serving. Is there really a dark undertone to this movie?”
There’s a brief moment of reflection before Joel says, “It sounds like it.” Then another long pause before Ethan adds, “I dunno…Yeah, uh, well…(mumbling)…I’m not sure it’s an undertone. Yeah, they’re pretty terrible.”
In Burn After Reading, Chad (Brad Pitt) is an idiotic gym worker who finds a CD containing the memoir of Osborne Cox (John Malkovich), a bitter ex-government agent whose book includes what he describes as “explosive” revelations about the CIA. The fact that the book’s few revelations are innocuous drivel does not occur to Chad, who, along with his lonely and insecure co-worker Linda (Frances McDormand), blackmails Cox. Much mugging ensues as the conspiracy grows to include Tilda Swinton as Cox’s emotionally sterile wife, and George Clooney, with whom she is having an affair. “A lot of our characters are just dolts and knuckleheads,” says Ethan, and in Burn After Reading, these knuckleheads make much ado about very, very little.
Another reporter asks the Coens if their film was inspired at all by the current political climate. Joel’s unedited response is simple: “Uh…well, y’know…I dunno. Yeah. I guess, yeah, we sorta wanted to do a spy movie, but it didn’t exactly turn out that way. I don’t really think it is a spy movie. Um…but that was sort of one of the original ideas. Y’know, uh…like most of our stuff, it’s not really sort of meant to be a comment on Washington as it is meant to be sort of a…it’s really about these particular characters. Uh…I’m sorry, I’ve lost the thread of your question.”
Luckily, actors Pitt, Swinton, and Malkovich are consummate professionals at press conferences, and have nothing but praise for the brothers. Pitt begins: “I’ve been knocking on the Coens’ door for years.” Swinton adds, “It’s so easy. Really short days, lots of laughing—uniquely, in my experience, laughing throughout the takes.” Malkovich: “They run a very calm set, and a fun set, and partially because they’re both very good and a little bit because there are two of them, nothing gets out of the infield. So, things are seen, things are noted, things are remarked upon. A lot of times you can go days and days wondering if the director saw that take, or any other take, and do they have any kind of feeling about it whatsoever?”
The Coens do tell an amusing story about the indescribable sex toy that Clooney’s character unveils three quarters into the movie. One of the inspirations, Joel says, was an actual machine in New York City’s Museum of Sex. “We actually at one point said to George, ‘We’ll show you the machine,’ and George said, ‘That’s all I need: to be seen coming out of the Museum of Sex with you guys.’”
About the musical score by Carter Burwell, Joel says, “We wanted something big and bombastic, but absolutely meaningless.” Adds Ethan, “Since all the characters thought they were in a spy movie, we thought the composer should be similarly deluded.”
Near the end of the press conference, a journalist asks the Coens if they believe their work should speak for itself. Ethan’s response: “Yeah, y’know, you make the movie because you find something about the story compelling. Yeah, you do think it should speak for itself. Or…you don’t have anything to say beyond that, because you don’t think about it in other terms; terms in which journalists think about it. But then, here you are, sitting in front of a bunch of journalists and, y’know, kind of legitimately they ask you to say something that isn’t just self-evident from the movie, and y’know, you’re stumped. And sometimes they think you’re being coy and elusive, but the fact is you don’t have anything else to say.”
