There are days, says their assistant, Margaret Hayes, as she makes coffee in the kitchen of their Manhattan apartment, when she arrives and finds both Coens stretched out, silently staring at the ceiling.
The brothers, who together make some of the most distinctive films around, will be waiting for their next idea and can stay prostrate like this for
hours."Then one of them will get up and start typing," says Hayes, "and they'll be off again."
If the pair were called Powell and Pressburger, no one would find this working process at all odd. Because they are Coen and Coen, however, people are spooked. Partly the Coens' "strangeness" is an epithet transferred from their films, which are nothing if not weird.
But there is independent evidence. Barry Sonnenfeld, one of their cinematographers, has said: "They are like an ecosystem. They just support each other in a total bubble."
Hardened interviewers take fright at the way they finish each other's sentences. "Well, the reason for that," says Joel, who is the darker, hairier, older brother, "is that most interviews happen at junkets where you talk to 15 interviewers a day for five days and the questions are all pretty much the same. It would be almost impossible not to know what the other is going to say. But journalists have a habit of drawing out some wider significance: We finish each other's sentences; we're joined at the hip."
So what are the differences in their characters?
"There aren't any," they say together.
Are they married? "Yes, but not to each other," says 36-year-old Ethan, whose wife is Tricia Cooke, a film editor. (Thirty-nine-year-old Joel is married to actress Fran McDormand.)
The pair of them are lolling opposite me on their armchairs, but for a moment I can see only an impregnable wall of irony. I wonder if outsiders get frustrated with them. Gabriel Byrne, who played the Irish gangster in their film "Miller's Crossing," complained that it "wasn't a fun set to be on at
all." "Did he really say that?" says Joel. "Well, I don't think you'll find that to be a particularly widely held perception. Actually, Gabriel had a thankless task in that he was in practically every shot and was a foil for the other characters."
"Also, he got hit a lot," Ethan points out. "Yeah, I suppose you cannot really blame him for saying that. He got up at five in the morning, went into makeup for an hour, then spent 12 hours being hit."
The Coen brothers were brought up in a suburb of Minneapolis, where, they say, there was a Rosenbloom on every corner ("which is why they call it the City of Flowers"). Their parents were university teachers and expected them to enter some profession or other.
One day, however, Joel was given a movie camera. The pair set forth into Minnesota's snowy forests and made a Super-8 epic called "Lumberjacks of the North." Joel went on to take a film course at New York University. Ethan went to Princeton, studied philosophy and then joined his brother in New York, where he was editing horror films.
"There came a point," Joel says, "when we thought, `Why not write something for ourselves and try and get the finance?' "
The result, in 1984, was "Blood Simple," a film noir in the tradition of James M. Cain's novels and a sustained exercise in dramatic irony, in which the audience - but none of the characters - understood what was happening. It cost $750,000 to make and took almost a tenth of that at one New York theater in its first week, going on to earn back the investment many times over.
It was followed by "Raising Arizona," a screwball comedy built on the dangerous premise of baby-kidnapping, as sunny as "Blood Simple" was dark. Their reputation was clinched by the films which followed, "Miller's Crossing" and "Barton Fink."
The fast way to fuse a conversation with the Coen brothers is to ask what their movies are "about." So many people posed the question in relation to "Blood Simple" that they took to explaining that Cain's work dealt with the "three great themes of 20th-century literature: opera, the Greek diner business and insurance."
If that didn't satisfy, they would mention their collaborator Sam Raimi's three laws of cinethematics: "The innocent must suffer. The guilty must be punished. You must taste blood to be a man."
These answers didn't stop further inquiry when "Barton Fink" was released in 1991. This is the story of Barton, a self-obsessed 1930s playwright who believes he gives voice to "the common man." When he gets lured to Hollywood, he confronts the aforementioned common man in the homicidal form of John Goodman. Because Barton, played by John Turturro, is Jewish and because his family is slaughtered at the end, many assumed the film was a self-hating essay on "The Jew as Outsider."
On their wall, between a stag's head and a portrait of Johnny Carson, the Coens display an award in "respect and recognition from the Brazilian Jewish Community" - but that seems to be the extent of their current relationship with their family's faith.
"Yeah," says Ethan, "that's really a stretch."
"You ask what a movie is, like, `about,' " says Ethan. "It has to be a natural question because it comes up all the time. But you wouldn't ask that about `Die Hard.' "
"The Hudsucker Proxy," which has just opened in Britain, looks very much like a homage to the films of Frank Capra and Preston Sturges.
"In a weird kind of way," Joel says, " `Hudsucker' is almost an exception to the other movies we've made. It was almost calculated to prove what people thought about our previous movies, but actually I don't think was ever the case. `Hudsucker' truly is a comment on the genres it draws from. It is very self-conscious. I really don't think that's so with, say, `Miller's Crossing.' "
And this may be the reason "Hudsucker" bombed in America. The Coens' smart cynicism places intriguing stresses on most moods, but it snaps sentimentality on contact. Films of Capra's, such as "It's A Wonderful Life," may have been facilely optimistic but they were made from the heart. This looks artificial, like a movie on Prozac.
"That's a pretty good description," Ethan agrees. "But I'd say it has its own facile optimism, too."
Are they optimists?
"We were," says Ethan soulfully, "before we saw the grosses for `Hudsucker.' "