The only filmmaker Billy Bob Thornton believes matches the Coen brothers’ style: “Very similar”
In Hollywood, there are certain filmmakers every actor worth their salt wants to work with. For instance, ask most A-listers to namecheck their list of ideal future collaborators, and the Coen brothers will likely be near the top. After all, Joel and Ethan are two of the finest auteurs from the last 40 years of cinema, and they’ve worked with a who’s who of Hollywood greats.
As anyone who has been on one of their sets knows, though, the Coen brothers are genuinely singular talents, and there is almost no one else in the industry who can do what they do. Billy Bob Thornton knows of one filmmaker who comes closest to matching their style, though — and if anyone is going to know, it’s Billy Bob.
Thornton’s history with the Coen brothers goes back more than 20 years. His first Coen film was 2001’s film noir throwback The Man Who Wasn’t There, where he played the lead role of a hairdresser caught up in a murderous scheme. He then had a second go-around with the brothers in 2003’s Intolerable Cruelty, playing an oil millionaire named Howard D Doyle, who turns out to be a soap opera actor taking part in a legal scheme. Both parts were 100% pure, unfiltered Coen while also being completely different from each other.
This history with the Coens must have been in the back of his mind when an opportunity arose more than a decade later for Thornton to step back into their world, though. Well, in a manner of speaking. You see, when he was offered the role of the mysterious hitman Lorne Malvo in FX’s Fargo television series, Thornton could have been forgiven for thinking no other writer/director could replicate the distinctive tone that the brothers brought to that 1996 crime classic. To his amazement, though, he admitted to IndieWire, “If someone had told me [the Coens] wrote it, I would have believed it.”
Thornton read the script with mounting incredulity as he realised that the director, screenwriter, and novelist Noah Hawley had done the impossible. “It was so well written that Noah had walked this fine line of channelling the Coen brothers – the spirit and the tone of their movie – and yet making it a new animal,” Thornton marvelled. “So, I thought, well, you know what, this guy has done it. He really has pulled this off…I didn’t feel like it was a rip-off, you know?”
To Thornton’s delight, Hawley had managed to craft his own interpretation of the Coens’ wonderfully off-kilter, rhythmical dialogue, complete with bizarre turns of phrase that would sound preposterous in any other writer/director’s work. Therefore, he felt perfectly comfortable treating Hawley as he would have the Coens themselves.
“Their scripts are very tightly written, and if you don’t say those words the way they’re written, it doesn’t come across as well,” Thornton explained. “I mean, I’ve been largely an improvisational actor for most of my career, except when I’ve worked with the Coen brothers, and now that I’m working with Noah, I rarely change anything. I respect him as a writer so much that I defer to him.”
Thornton even revealed that Hawley’s set functioned not unlike a Coen set, which was helpful for the cast, which hadn’t worked with the brothers before in attuning to the Fargo wavelength. For him, though? It was like riding a bike. “Having known the Coen brothers for so long and having worked with them, I can plug into that pretty easily,” he mused. “I didn’t need a lot of explanation about what we were up to there…But the set was very similar in some ways.”
Amusingly, Thornton wasn’t the only one who believed Hawley had dialled himself in perfectly to the Coens oeuvre. The Landman star knew the brothers had read the pilot script and given it their blessing, but when he finally spoke to Ethan after the show’s production was underway, he found out just how highly they thought of it.
“Ethan, when asked about the pilot, he said, ‘Yeah, it’s good,'” chuckled Thornton. “And for Ethan, saying ‘Yeah, it’s good,’ is like him saying, ‘This is fucking amazing.’ They’re not really forthcoming with their emotions sometimes, so to get a ‘That’s good’ from Ethan?! That’s a four-star review.”
