The Coen Brothers by Ian Nathan

Author:Ian Nathan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MBI
Published: 2018-05-22T04:00:00+00:00

Joel and Ethan on set in Mississippi, where the temperatures would get up to 120 degrees. The cowboy hats weren’t affectations, they were necessities. Despite the heat, the locality was infuriatingly lush and green, so they ended up digitally bleaching out the colours of the film.

Escaping from the chain gang, the dubious trio of heroes go on the lam. In a line — Pete (John Turturro), Delmar (Tim Blake Nelson) and Everett (George Clooney) — they are a deliberate mirror for The Three Stooges.

Still, this was an imaginary South, where ‘the grandiosity is obviously a joke,’5 maintained Ethan.

The scope of the film wasn’t going to come cheap, and a medley of Disney, Universal and French financiers StudioCanal, steered again by Working Title, came up with the $26 million budget. Filmed over the summer of 1999 in stifling 100˚Fahrenheit temperatures, they traversed the flat delta country of Canton, Mississippi, and Florence, South Carolina – which, contrary to the brothers’ expectations, turned out to be as lush and green as Ireland. The Coens hadn’t wanted sepia so much as the mythical veil of a sun-faded postcard, a world parched of colour. O Brother Where Art Thou? would make history in being the first film to be digitally scanned in full, allowing Roger Deakins to manipulate the colours artificially, creating the ochre hue of an old daguerreotype.

They used Homeric names…

Of course, the hero, and self-elected leader of this unholy trinity of absconded prisoners, is Ulysses Everett McGill, ‘Ulysses’ being the Latin equivalent of ‘Odysseus’. The Coens concluded this loquacious nitwit had to be played by George Clooney. They’d seen him in the thriller Out of Sight and noticed something classical about Clooney’s looks, an old Hollywood handsome like George Raft or Cary Grant. ‘You can kind of imagine the character imagining himself that way,’6 said Joel. There was also something witty and self-mocking in Clooney’s personality; the awareness that celebrity is a laughing matter.

So early in 1999, Joel and Ethan flew out to Phoenix, Arizona, where the 38-year-old from Lexington, Kentucky, was completing Three Kings. There they handed the TV star crowned film star their new script. By chance, Clooney was a major Coenhead who could quote liberally from any of their films. ‘They told me they had written it with me in mind and asked if I’d do it,’ he recalled. ‘I said yes without even reading the first page.’7

From this day forth, Clooney would be mercilessly mocked by the Coens, with Everett the first in a quartet of vain, verbose and deeply unaware American idiots. For his own part, Clooney was simply amazed that in the four months between reading the script and shooting the film, not a word had changed.

The self-deluded Everett considers himself a rationalist, but he will be pursued by Satan, assaulted by religion, and trapped in the prescribed adventures of a classical mariner. Imprisoned for practising law without a licence, he represents that regular Coen conflict between order and fate. But mostly he’s an utter windbag in love with the sound of his own voice.

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