The Coen brothers are aware that remaking The Ladykillers is likely to be a touch controversial in Britain. “There are people we have spoken to, particularly in England,” says Joel, the elder sibling, the one with darker hair and the air of a blood hound who has just woken after a long nap, “who seem horrified that we’ve remade it.”
A pause here is filled by Ethan, at 46 the younger by some three years, giggling in anticipation of what’s to follow — they do seem to have a spooky knack of knowing exactly what the other is about to say.
“We understand why they’re horrified,” Joel continues. “But we quite liked that in a perverse and childish way. It’s kind of funny.”
The Coens are known for dipping in and out of cinematic genres and giving them their own offbeat twist: Raising Arizona (1987) was a screwball comedy; Miller’s Crossing (1990) was a homage to the gangster movies of the 1930s; The Hudsucker Proxy (1994) harked back to Frank Capra’s feel-good films; and The Big Lebowski (1998) was a wonderfully skewed take on private eye movies such as The Big Sleep.
But The Ladykillers is their first remake (and possibly the last, given the film’s lukewarm reception in America). The original is hard to fault. Katie Johnson won a Bafta for her portrayal of Mrs Wilberforce, the landlady who rents a room to Professor Marcus (Alec Guinness), who then invites his band of thugs round to plan a heist under the guise of rehearsing as musicians. When the old lady discovers what they’re up to, they reluctantly decide to bump her off — which is easier said than done.
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“Alec Guinness is fantastic,” says Joel, who loved watching Ealing comedies as a kid growing up in Minn- eapolis. “Although Peter Sellers is curiously absent from the movie. He’s usually indelible, and it must be one of his earliest films. But Katie Johnson is just great.”
So why remake a perfect movie? In their defence, they deliberately kept no more than the bare bones of the story and relocated the film to the American Deep South, with Tom Hanks (looking disarmingly like Colonel Sanders) as Professor G.H. Dorr, a verbose charlatan who rents a room from the formidable Mrs Munson (Irma P. Hall).
“Our idea was to make the movie more of a contemplation or a comedy about death than the original,” says Joel. “In our mind that implied the more Gothic setting of the South. The idea of decay and Dorr’s obsession with Edgar Allan Poe and all of those things aren’t in the original but seemed appropriate for the transportation of the plot.”
In a Coen brothers film you expect very black humour and wonderfully surreal moments — Julianne Moore swinging naked from the ceiling in The Big Lebowski, or the Ku Klux Klan formation dancing in O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000). There are several in this film (a scene featuring a bulldog and a gas mask springs to mind), but many Coen brothers fans have complained that The Ladykillers, like their George Clooney and Catherine Zeta-Jones comedy Intolerable Cruelty (2003), is less surreal and original than their previous movies.
“Both films came to us as writing jobs that we weren’t going to direct,” Joel admits. “We wrote them for other people originally. With Intolerable Cruelty we wrote it for a studio, and various names were lined up to direct it. Then George Clooney read it and asked us to direct it. So we did. We wrote The Ladykillers for Barry Sonnenfeld to direct, but for various reasons we ended up doing it. The next one we do will probably be from our own story, approaching it much more in the way we have approached our previous work.”
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As to accusations that they have been deliberately courting star names, Ethan says: “Whether it’s Billy Bob Thornton, George Clooney or John Turturro, if they have the ability to be the centre of a film then we are interested in them. We don’t care if they are stars or not. The reason we wanted to work with Tom wasn’t because he’s a big star. Frankly, it wasn’t the kind of film where we needed a big star to get it financed. We wanted to work with him because he’s a great actor.”
The brothers like to surround themselves with familiar faces — Frances McDormand, who starred in Blood Simple 20 years ago, was also in Fargo (1996), and rightly won an Oscar for her performance as Marge, the heavily pregnant sheriff on the trail of two killers. But then she did marry Joel in between the two films. “Yeah, that kind of helps,” he grins.
Ethan is married to the film editor Tricia Cooke, who has also worked on several Coen brothers productions; then there’s Roger Deakins, the director of photography, who has been part of the team for 13 years; and Dennis Gassner, the designer, for 15 years.
“It’s like Robert Mitchum,” Joel laughs. “When he was asked why he was still married to the same woman after 50 years, he said ‘lack of imagination’. You just find collaborators that you are comfortable with and have a productive relationship with. We’ve always worked with the same people, actors, the creative people, technicians, over and over again.”
Which is a bit like the relationship they have with the cinema-going public, and the reason that passions run high when they are suspected of diluting their individual style. At the end of the day, a Coen brothers movie is always a Coen brothers movie. Even when it’s also an Ealing comedy.
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The Ladykillers is on general release from Friday
Pick of the Coens
Blood Simple (1984)
Raising Arizona (1987)
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Miller’s Crossing (1990)
Barton Fink (1991)
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Fargo (1996)
The Big Lebowski (1998)
O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000)