“In a totally selfish way”: how one movie made the Coen brothers feel safer about the future of cinema
It doesn’t matter who you are or what you’ve achieved: the way the industry is heading, it’s getting harder and harder for any director to get their movie made if it isn’t an all-aged crowd-pleaser, but one film did at least let the Coen brothers sleep a little easier at night.
That sentiment increasingly applies to the industry’s upper echelons, too: in 99% of cases, a film that earns upwards of $1.5 billion at the box office is guaranteed a sequel, but due to the exorbitant costs involved, nobody knows if James Cameron’s Avatar will extend beyond a trilogy.
Martin Scorsese made The Irishman with Netflix and Killers of the Flower Moon and What Happens at Night with Apple, and it may not be a coincidence that Steven Spielberg’s first feature in four years, Disclosure Day, is a return to the big-budget sci-fi/fantasy arena responsible for most of his biggest hits.
Obviously, the Coens operate on a much smaller scale than that, both together and after they went their separate ways, and Hollywood’s over-reliance on franchises, sequels, and recognisable brands has been a bone of contention among auteurs on the lower end of the scale for a long time, and it’s only getting worse.
No Country for Old Men was the pair’s finest hour in an awards season sense, winning four Academy Awards, including ‘Best Picture’ and ‘Best Director’, but shortly after its premiere, Joel and Ethan were in a downbeat mood about the current complexion of the cinematic landscape, and with good reason.
“It can be very depressing,” Joel conceded. “When you start to feel like the only things that get made are sequels to action pictures which have established a huge potential for box office, or adaptations of comic books or things like that. Not to say that some of those aren’t really interesting, great movies, too, but that’s the stock-in-trade of Hollywood.”
On a positive note, they saw a knight in shining armour riding to the rescue, and his name was Julian Schnabel. “In a totally selfish way,” Ethan interjected. “Forgetting about them, that there’s an audience for that, that Julian gets money for a blinking movie about a blinking guy’s locked-in syndrome, that’s kind of great, you know?”
That would be The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Schnabel’s biopic of Jean-Dominique Bauby, with Mathieu Amalric in the lead role. Not the easiest sell to investors, but it was made, received almost universal acclaim, earned four Oscar nominations, and reaffirmed the Coens’ belief that cinema wasn’t dead after all, and it wasn’t even an unqualified hit at the box office.
The downside is that it wasn’t really applicable to their issues with Hollywood: after all, despite Schnabel being American, it was a French story told by a French cast in the French language that was shot in France, with producers Kathleen Kennedy and Frank Marshall the only major Stateside players behind the scenes, other than the director. Still, a silver lining is a silver lining, and the Coens were happy to take it.
