Product Description

Joel and Ethan Coen (b. 1954, 1957) started their careers in obscurity on a shoestring budget cajoled from family and friends in Minneapolis. Working entirely outside the studio system, the Coen brothers scored an unlikely first success in 1984 with their postmodern noir film Blood Simple. Two decades and nearly a dozen movies later, the Coens are now among the best-known writer/directors in Hollywood, turning out major studio releases featuring such stars as George Clooney, Catherine Zeta-Jones, and Tom Hanks.

The Coens' films all share a distinctive, quirky ambience that critics have come to identify as "that Coen brothers feeling." Tricky moving camera work, frequent use of the voiceover, homages to directors and cinematic genres, a fascination with unexpected and off-kilter violence, and omnipresent black humor are all defining elements of the Coens' cinematic world.

From such highly stylized movies as Barton Fink and The Man Who Wasn't There to more mainstream but dark comedies such as Raising Arizona, Intolerable Cruelty, and O Brother, Where Art Thou?, the Coens are equally at home with existential despair and comic exuberance and are known for scripts packed with an obvious love for language. This collection of their most important interviews spans twenty years and is the most comprehensive published on the brothers.

William Rodney Allen teaches at Louisiana School for Math, Science, and the Arts. He is the author of Walker Percy: A Southern Wayfarer and the editor of Conversations with Kurt Vonnegut, both published by University Press of Mississippi.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #299865 in Books
• Published on: 2006-08-18
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 208 pages

From Booklist
The Conversations with Filmmakers series continues with collections focused on subjects noted for their disdain for being interviewed. Few major filmmakers put as little of themselves on screen as do Joel and Ethan Coen, who've made a career mostly out of aping established movie genres, beginning with film noir in Blood Simple and continuing with gangster epic (Miller's Crossing), screwball comedy (The Hudsucker Proxy), and more noir (The Man Who Wasn't There). Every genre they filter through a darkly ironic worldview and film with striking visual panache. As entertaining as such pastiches are, perhaps their least categorizable films (Fargo; The Big Lebowski; O Brother, Where Art Thou?) are the most interesting. They're notoriously difficult, though apparently more disinterested than discomfited, interview subjects and, when an interviewer appeals to their inner film geek, respond with endearing enthusiasm. Many of these 28 pieces appeared in film journals, others in popular magazines and on NPR and the Web site Jeeem's CinePad.

Gordon Flagg
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

From the Publisher
These interviews with the writer/directors of Barton Fink, Raising Arizona, Fargo, and O Brother, Where Art Thou?

--- Feature interviews with the team behind some of the most unique, dark, and quirky comedies in American cinema

--- Include interviews from a wide range of sources, including interviews from French and British periodicals

--- Expand the Conversations with Filmmakers Series

From the Inside Flap
Collected interviews with the quirky and distinctive writer/director team of such films as Raising Arizona, Intolerable Cruelty, and Barton Fink