“Don’t do that again”: the fatal mistake of improvising in front of the Coen brothers
Filmmaking is supposed to be a collaborative effort, and in an ideal world, ideas are freely tossed around, deliberated, and incorporated if they’re better than what’s on the page. As far as the Coen brothers are concerned, though, what’s on the page is law.
While it’s hard to argue against the siblings’ aversion to improvisation, since they’re two-time Academy Award-winning screenwriters with seven nominations in total, and they’re widely regarded and constantly celebrated as two of the most inventive and accomplished scribes in modern cinema.
When the scripts are usually pulled right out of the top drawer, what need is there to improvise anyway? For the most part, the Coens have frowned upon anyone who dares go off-book and try to add flourishes to their character or performance that aren’t there on the page, but there are exceptions to the rule.
As a unit, the Coens have helmed 18 pictures, and you can count on one hand the number of times an improvised line has made it into the final cut. In fact, you can count it on one finger, with Sam McMurray dining out on the fact that he ad-libbed a Raising Arizona line that Joel and Ethan didn’t leave on the cutting room floor.
Still, they told him never to do anything like that again, a situation that William H Macy can sympathise with. The character man was free to interpret Fargo‘s Jerry Lundegaard however he saw fit, so long as he didn’t try anything that wasn’t either written in the script or suggested to him by the directors.
To indicate the specificity they were after, Macy recalls one nugget of directorial advice that he was instructed to adhere to: “The note I got consistently from Ethan was, ‘You have to stomp your feet when you walk in the house, it’s Minneapolis,'” but he was knocked down a peg when he tried something in a take that hadn’t been pre-approved.
In the opening scene, where Jerry meets Peter Stormare’s Gaear Grimsrud and Steve Buscemi’s Carl Showalter to orchestrate the kidnapping of his wife, Macy had an idea. “They should be a little bit afraid of me,” he mused. “They should know that I’m the boss. I call the shots. And Jerry’s such a loser.”
To get that point across, he “walked in like Clint Eastwood, and Ethan just howled.” While the auteurs thought it was a funny bit, it was also a funny bit that they hadn’t envisioned for the character, which meant there was absolutely no chance in hell that he’d be doing it for a second time.
“He said, ‘That’s so funny: don’t do that again,'” Macy recalled, and that was the end of the conversation. Many filmmakers have no issues with their cast improvising if it’ll benefit, enhance, or elevate a certain scene, but when it comes to a Coen brothers flick, Joel and Ethan always know best, or at least that’s how they’ve operated for the last four decades.
