During the Sundance Film Festival this past January, no movie was more highly anticipated than the Coen Brothers' "The Hudsucker Proxy."
It was 10 years earlier that the Coens burst upon the cinematic scene with "Blood Simple," the festival's Grand Prize winner in 1984. And to have them return with a big-budget Hollywood picture as a world premiere was considered the main event of this year's 10-day festival. (After several weeks of playing in the big urban markets, "The Hudsucker Proxy" finally opened in local theaters Friday.)But Joel and Ethan Coen themselves, who have since turned out a pair of critically acclaimed films, "Barton Fink" and "Miller's Crossing," and one genuine box-office smash, "Raising Arizona," seemed no different.
Joel, who wears his hair long, directs their movies, and Ethan, whose hair is shorter and quite curly, produces them. They co-write their scripts.
At least, that's what the credits say.
"Well, the credits suggest a distinction that is kind of there," said Ethan. "But they sort of exaggerate it. I mean, Joel does more in terms of on-the-set talking to the actors, and I do more of what a producer traditionally does. But it's generally a pretty liberal atmosphere. There's no real carving up of duties."
Joel adds, "After five movies, you pretty well get to know what he's thinking - and after a lifetime together. So, the credits are something we did for the first movie, and we've kept using it."
Sitting in their hotel room in Deer Valley on the festival's final weekend, they were relaxed and easygoing, and as unassuming as they had been 10 years before.
"Well, it's affected Ethan," Joel says. Ethan laughs as he replies, "I've turned into a phony, but aside from that . . . ."
"It's hard to say how we would have been different if this hadn't happened," says Joel. "It hasn't changed hugely," Ethan says, continuing the thought. "In fact, it's remarkable to the extent that it hasn't changed."
This kind of tennis-playing dialogue is pretty much how the conversation went, with the Coen brothers finishing each other's sentences and cracking deadpan jokes, waiting for a reaction.
That they don't take themselves too seriously became clear when they were asked about the critics' labels of their movies - as "eccentric" or "offbeat" or "bizarre." "I don't think they're eccentric," says Joel, with a sly smile.
Though they are movie buffs, Ethan says, "We weren't fanatics about it. But we were typical suburban kids who saw a lot of late-night television."
But they admit that their influences, especially in "The Hudsucker Proxy," are the films of such revered social commentators as Frank Capra, Howard Hawks and Preston Sturges. Then Joel says of those old classics, "Mostly, I saw those when I got a little older. When I was growing up, I was watching Bob Hope movies . . . ."
"Yeah," says Ethan, laughing, "real formative things like Doris Day and Lex Barker." Joel adds, " `Boeing Boeing." He then deadpans, "That's a great movie, `Boeing Boeing,' by the way. That's probably the formative movie." But his sly grin gives him away. He isn't really suggesting Jerry Lewis and Tony Curtis are more important than Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn.
The Coens' interest in film began when they were kids, making 8mm home movies. But they never thought about making movies as a profession.
"We did make 8mm movies when we were kids," said Ethan. "But we were goofing around and there wasn't anything serious behind it, no ambitions."
"I went to film school," said Joel, "and then I started working as an editor on low-budget horror films. And we wrote a script that we felt we could put together the same way as some of these horror films we were working on, and that was `Blood Simple.'
"The film school thing was in the late, late '70s. I didn't have any sort of real serious thoughts about a career in film. It was just something I was interested in at the time."
"At the time Joel started working as an editor," Ethan continued, "I had just gotten out of school. We wrote scripts together, but it was because the opportunity just sort of presented itself. So, it was the lack of anything better to do more than any sort of ambition."
"Blood Simple" was a slick-looking film made on a low budget, which Ethan explains this way: "The only way you can really pull anything like that off is basically by not paying anybody. So, you take people who are willing to work for no money."
Joel says, "We got spoiled on `Blood Simple,' having sort of found the financing for it ourselves and being able to make the movie exactly how we wanted to. We just sort of proceeded on the assumption that we could continue to do that. And we were lucky enough to find a situation where we could.
"We were lucky enough to hook up with the right people who would give us the financing and leave us alone."
The screenplay for "The Hudsucker Proxy" had been sitting in a drawer for several years when the brothers decided it would be their followup film to "Barton Fink." It was originally written by the Coens and writer/director/actor Sam Raimi ("Darkman") right after "Blood Simple." But Ethan acknowledges that they knew the film "would be far too expensive to make right away," primarily because of their desire to use a series of wild, high-tech, art deco sets.
And when the time was right, they got lucky again. An unlikely source of financing stepped in, producer Joel Silver, whose big-budget action pictures, like the "Die Hard," "Lethal Weapon" and "48HRS." films, have earned an estimated $2 billion worldwide.
Silver, who was also at the Sundance festival, acknowledged that he never thought he would be financing an eccentric big-budget independent comedy by the Coen Brothers. But he said he had always admired their work and felt "Hudsucker" was the most "accessible" script they'd written.
Whether "Hudsucker" will provide the Coens with their second hit or be yet another cult favorite remains to be seen. But Silver is confident that on a worldwide basis, regardless of how the film does at U.S. box offices, it will make money.
Of course, no Utah journalist could let the Coens go without asking about that last line of dialogue in "Raising Arizona," which has Nicolas Cage dreaming of a paradise for families and ending the thought with, "I don't know - maybe it was Utah."
"You know," said Ethan, "It was nothing more than the fact that it (Utah) was a neighbor of Arizona."
"It was a Western state that sounded right," said Joel.
Then, with a smile, Ethan diplomatically adds, "Though for the purposes of your newspaper - it's because we love Utah so much."