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Special Event at Lincoln Center: Joel & Ethan Coen in conversation with Noah Baumbach
This Friday, June 10th, I attended an opening night special event at the newly opened Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center at Lincoln Center. Between the three directors, the conversation was very informal and a true pleasure for any fan of their films. Although the discussion was centered around the Coens’ films, we were also given glimpses into the work of Noah Baumbach as well.
As they began discussing what they’d be discussing, Noah gave credit to Joel and Ethan about their idea to do the opening scenes of their films. They were struggling with a topic and showing the opening scenes required the least amount of work. It was clear that this was going to be a very casual conversation. The lights dimmed and the opening scenes of Blood Simple and No Country for Old Men were shown. Each opening has a voiceover and with a long monologue.
When the lights came up, Joel said, “One of the things you realize after making movies for 25 years is the horrifying sort of realization of how much you repeat yourself.” The audience erupts in uneasy laughter. Noah commented that voiceover is cheating and Ethan later defended their use of voiceover, “I’m just thinking, maybe it’s not cheating, because you suggested that it is, that maybe we have to go on about things that aren’t related to the main story because they’re not actually doing narrative work, it’s not cheating.”
Next, Noah talked about looping sound, saying that, “They tell you you need to loop a lot of stuff where you replace the dialogue and then I learned as I made movies that I liked the crappy sound better….or what stuff to me had emotion, because it was recorded on the day and so I try not to loop anything anymore.”
Questions were taken and a guy asked about a press conference for Miller’s Crossing at the New York Film Festival. Apparently, the guy remembers one of the Coens saying they had an unpleasant experience with the playback on Barton Fink. The Coens did not remember their answer at all.
Ethan: That’s funny, I don’t remember playback being especially vexed in the USO scene. O’ Brother Where Art Thou had a lot of music in it, which was a mix of everything from live performance, I mean on camera performance and a lot of playback and it’s funny we said that because it wasn’t a discussion.
Noah: Sometimes you just make stuff up when you’re in interviews…
Audience laughs
Noah: then it gets reported back to you…
Joel: I actually don’t remember saying that or why we may have said it. There are certain cumbersome aspects of production that you get used to. But, you know, we used quite a bit of playback on O’ Brother.
Noah: And you’re working on a movie now that has quite a bit of music in it.
Joel: Yeah, but I don’t know that it will have any playback.
Ethan: Yeah, it will be mostly live, I think.
Joel: We’re working on a movie now that has music in it but it’s pretty much all, you know, performed live, single instrument so it’s hard to tell.
Next was the opening for Margot at the Wedding in which the Coens seemed especially interested in. Right before showing the opening, the topic switched and Joel commented, “When we made A Serious Man, for months were were calling it The Squid and the Whale 2.” Again, the audience chuckles. It was obvious that both Joel and Ethan were big fans of Noah. After the clip, Joel and Ethan go on at length about how they enjoyed the closeness of the opening scene of Margot at the Wedding. Noah commented about how he likes to start movies, “Put you right in the middle of something and have to figure it out as you go, and figure out where they’re going, and why they’re going, and in some ways the whole movie you’re trying to figure it out that way.
Other openings also shown were The Big Lebowski and Greenberg, which sparked a conversation about L.A. Noah comments that these movies were nicely paired because The Big Lebowski starts out with desert and goes to urban, where Greenberg starts our urban and goes to a more suburban setting.
Noah also mentioned that in Greenberg, he purposely added more credits to the beginning so he could play more of the song, “Jet Airliner” by The Steve Miller Band. He also “cribbed the Midnight Cowboy lettering.” They shot a lot of the opening scene not as a set, but the actress actually shopping at the farmer’s market and picking up dry-cleaning. Joel said about shooting in L.A., “It can be difficult to get your L.A.-ness.” Noah then said that it can be difficult to film in L.A. because it’s “making a city out of what you do use functionally.”
Noah also talked about how an interviewer once asked him about a line at the beginning where she is driving and is asking to be “let in” in traffic. That it was a metaphor for the whole movie. Noah had no knowledge of that correlation and was impressed that someone would think he did it on purpose.
That sort of idea was underscored by another question from the audience from a professor of film. He asked the filmmakers about the use of camera movement. How when panning from left to right was a positive expression, and right to left gives a sense of unease. None of the filmmakers were familiar with this at all and I felt a vindication about my own experiences with film class. Not everything is meant to mean something. Sometimes things just turn out that way.
The Coens talked about how with their film, Burn After Reading, they did their best to go against what they were normally drawn to do. When a decision was to be made, they asked themselves, “What would Tony Scott do?”
Near the end, the opening scenes were shown for A Serious Man and Squid and the Whale. Questions were again taken from the audience and the Coen’s new project was again brought up when talking about casting: Joel said:
“In adaptations that we’ve done, even if we have ended up using the same actors, they have, generally speaking, been written because the characters are presented to you in an adaptation. So they’re written without regard to who’s necessarily going to play them, from our point of view. But in stories that we’re coming up with ourselves it’s frequently the case that we write for specific people although I have to say, the thing we’re doing now, we’re not writing specifically for any of the parts which is unusual for us.”
Noah says he prefers to work with the same people, but does not write for anyone specific. He likes working with the same crew and will be working with Ben Stiller on an upcoming project to be determined.
It was a very entertaining evening and I hope to attend more events like these in the future. It’s always so eye-opening to hear filmmakers talk about their work. Their passion and natural affinity captivates me.
Make sure to check out other events at Lincoln Center with their free weekend of events!
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