“Nothing appealed to us”: the movie the Coen brothers loved “desecrating” on purpose
While it doesn’t really apply to the journeymen or directors-for-hire who don’t have much personal attachment or emotional investment in the movies they make, auteurs like the Coen brothers should realistically have at least some kind of deeper connection to everything they write and direct.
For the most part, they have, with Joel and Ethan wasting little time in establishing themselves as two of modern cinema’s most unique and prominent voices, earning the distinction of having their names join Spielbergian, Tarantinoesque, and Lynchian in the cinematic lexicon when smaller-scale, offbeat stories started being described as Coenesque.
However, when their hearts aren’t really in it, you can tell. Their shared filmography stacks up against anyone else to have emerged in the last 40 years, but when you look at something like Intolerable Cruelty, which Ron Howard and Jonathan Demme both dropped out of directing, they didn’t need to tell anyone that it wasn’t exactly a dream project.
The early 2000s were a generally strange time for the siblings, largely because they made back-to-back pictures that were their least Coen-esque by far. Intolerable Cruelty was a glitzy, glamorous caper that felt outside of their wheelhouse, and they followed it up with The Ladykillers, their weakest joint effort as a filmmaking duo.
In a case of history repeating itself, their former cinematographer-turned-director, Barry Sonnenfeld, had originally planned to helm the remake of the classic 1955 Ealing comedy, but when he abandoned ship, Joel and Ethan decided that there was no justifiable reason why they shouldn’t step in and take the reins on a film they’d already written.
And yet, they openly admitted that they had little interest in Alec Guinness’ original, informing The Independent that “desecrating” a classic had a unique sense of appeal. “In terms of rewriting it, nothing appealed to us; that’s why we changed it!” he said. “It was an exercise in making it as different as possible.”
“The challenge was simply, when we were originally given the job, to figure out what was going to be the fundamental thing that would make it interesting to us,” he explained. “That was the idea of changing the character that Katie Johnson played in the original from an English landlady to a Southern Black Baptist church lady.”
Essentially, the Coens weren’t huge fans of The Ladykillers, they only directed the movie because Sonnenfeld had dropped out, and they took great pleasure in deviating from the source material, which hardly paints the picture of Joel and Ethan being immensely invested in what they were doing. They didn’t phone it in because they’re too professional to even consider such a thing, but at no point was anyone under the impression that they were watching something on a similar plane to their finest work.
Unsurprisingly, while it was a modest hit that recouped its production budget twice over at the box office, the do-over was, is, and probably always will be, whether they ever get around to that long-mooted reunion or not, the worst movie bearing both of their names.
