The two “bad Hollywood movies” the Coen brothers said “never should have been made”
Every aspiring director who dreams of making it in Hollywood spends most of their childhood either watching as many movies as possible, shooting their own crude films with whatever equipment they can get their hands on, or a combination of both. That’s the way the Coen brothers learned the basics, which exposed them to a pair of pictures that became formative for odd reasons.
Of course, this being the industry’s marquee off-kilter auteurs, odd is perfectly on-brand. Joel and Ethan grew up watching what they surmised as some of the worst movies any child could watch, but it nonetheless emboldened them to pick up a camera at a young age and see if they could do better.
When they were mastering the ins and outs of shoestring production in their backyard, nobody was making movies like the Coens. That’s still true today, with the siblings responsible for some of the most unique, engaging, distinctive, and instantly recognisable features of the last 40 years, to such an extent that ‘Coenesque’ has long since entered the filmic lexicon.
As two sprogs parked in front of the TV, though, they were a million miles away from earning their stripes as modern greats. This was decades before they’d scratched, clawed, and scraped together the cash to finance their feature-length debut, Blood Simple, and they revealed their inauspicious origins as filmmakers to Hal Hinson in 1985.
“We remade a lot of bad Hollywood movies that we’d seen on television,” Joel explained. “The two that were most successful were remakes of The Naked Prey and Advise & Consent, movies that never should have been made in the first place.” Cornel Wilde’s Academy Award-winning 1965 adventure and Otto Preminger’s Palme d’Or-nominated political drama are hardly awful, but they weren’t up the Coens’ street.
In typical fashion, despite labelling them as bad movies that shouldn’t have been made, Joel confessed that his knowledge of Advise & Consent wasn’t as in-depth as you’d expect from someone who remade it with his brother. “At the time we made it, we hadn’t seen the original film or read the book,” he said. “We just heard the story from a friend of ours and thought it was good, so we remade it without going back to any of the source material.”
That’s nothing if not an unusual way to go about shooting a new version of an existing film, but they did at least put more effort in with their Naked Prey redux, which they called Zeimers in Zambia. “We had very weird special effects in that film,” Joel revealed. “We actually had a parachute drop, a shot of an aeroplane going overhead, then a miniature, then cut to a closeup of the guy against a white sheet hitting the ground.”
Some of the finest filmmakers in town have started off the same way, with Steven Spielberg and Christopher Nolan just two future Oscar winners who cobbled together low-budget offerings with their friends and family, but the Coens might have been the only ones who attempted a remake without bothering to watch the thing they were remaking first.
