The one movie the Coen brothers refused to talk about: “It’s ancient history for us”
Much like David Lynch, the Coen brothers have never been interested in exploring, dissecting, or spelling out what their movies are supposed to mean, although they’re a little more mischievous about it.
Whereas Lynch was famously aghast whenever somebody asked him what something meant, the Coens developed a habit of talking nonsense, which helped them gain a reputation for being a couple of weirdos, even if Josh Brolin was at pains to explain that really wasn’t the case.
Joel and Ethan will talk about a film when they’re contractually obliged to promote it, albeit without going into specific details, but when it comes to a picture bearing their names that they’d consigned to the history books and actively didn’t give a shit about in any way, shape, or form, all bets are off.
The first time the siblings were credited on a picture they didn’t direct themselves came when they co-wrote the screenplay for Sam Raimi’s 1985 bust, Crimewave. It would be almost two decades before it happened again, but that doesn’t tell the full story of a project that spent years in development hell.
In the late 1990s, producer Mike Lobell acquired the rights to remake Michael Caine’s 1966 caper, Gambit. He tasked Aaron Sorkin to rewrite the movie, but he dropped out. The Coen brothers, who were looking to keep themselves busy, accepted the assignment, and that was as far as it went for over a decade.
Alexander Payne was briefly attached to direct, Robert Altman considered it before deciding against it, Mike Nichols turned it down, Bo Welch was canned after The Cat in the Hat debacle, Richard LaGravenese flirted with it, Doug Liman was in talks for a hot minute, before Michael Hoffman eventually got it made.
By the time Gambit V2.0 was released in 2012, almost 15 years had passed since the Coens wrote the script. And yet, because their names were still on it, and they were in between True Grit and Inside Llewyn Davis, they were constantly fielding questions about it, with Ethan waving it away by saying, “It’s ancient history for us.”
“Gambit was just a writing job,” he’d previously explained. “It seems like the movie is going to get made, but not by us; it never was to have been.” And yet, because it had survived development hell and hadn’t been rewritten by anyone else to an extent significant enough that they could take the credit for it, the film arrived in cinemas with the Coens listed as its only scribes.
Debuting during that weirdly brief period where Caine’s classics were in a constant state of being remade, Hoffman’s Gambit quickly joined the likes of Get Carter, The Italian Job, Alfie, and Sleuth on the cultural scrapheap. It flopped at the box office and got battered by critics, and the Coens must have breathed a sigh of relief that they’d stop being asked about a movie they simply did not care about in the slightest.
