The only actor allowed to improvise in a Coen brothers movie: “Never do that again”
When the Coen brothers sit down and write a script, they do so with the intention that when they’re on set, their actors will recite every line as written without any deviations. For the most part, that’s how it worked, although there usually tend to be exceptions.
Brad Pitt’s performance in Burn After Reading might feel like some of it was off-the-cuff, but he admitted that nobody in the ensemble cast even considered improvising, saying that “we didn’t see any reason to wander off course,” with their frequent collaborator, George Clooney, happy to play a string of idiots for Joel and Ethan without ever questioning so much as a single line.
Obviously, it helps that the siblings are two of the sharpest screenwriting minds in the business, so nobody who works for them sees the need to take matters into their own hands and see if they can come up with a soundbite, quote, or gesture that wasn’t on the page. Sometimes, they even get annoyed when an actor tries to upend the status quo.
Jonah Hill, who made his name in the riff-heavy likes of Superbad, The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Knocked Up, and Forgetting Sarah Marshall, tried to keep up his usual schtick on Hail, Caesar! by adding his own flourishes to his dialogue, only for Ethan Coen to inform him that he was “gonna die and pass away because you didn’t say it how I wrote it.”
Needless to say, they have no time for performers who want to go into business for themselves, which put them in an awkward position when Sam McMurray did just that in Raising Arizona. The film’s editor, Michael Miller, relayed to Business Insider that they wouldn’t even listen to the studio, telling 20th Century Fox that “this is the script we wrote, and we’re not going to take notes”.
However, Murray, who played Glen, clearly didn’t get the memo. Or he did, he just didn’t care. “They were very particular about the script,” he said. “In one scene, I take a handful of pistachios or whatever and throw them at a kid. I improvised that when we were rehearsing, and the crew laughed out loud.”
It worked for the crew, so he figured he’d commit the cardinal sin of a Coen brothers picture and do it when the cameras were rolling. Much to their chagrin, they thought it worked. “Joel came over, and I was told, ‘We’re going to keep it. But never do that again,'” he recalled. “I like to brag that I have the only improvised line in the movie.”
In most cases, they’d just use another take, one where the actors did what was asked of them and spoke their lines verbatim. Unfortunately, McMurray’s improv had placed them in a sticky wicket. They knew it worked within the context of the scene, and even enhanced it, so they made a point of gently informing him that even though it would more than likely end up in the final cut, he shouldn’t dare try anything similar for the rest of the shoot.
