A Serious Man

Interview with the Coen Brothers - 'A Serious Man'

Why do you like to torture your characters?
Joel: As Ethan was just saying earlier today, it’s better story fodder when something bad happens as opposed to something good. Something bad leads to something else. Take the movie like Christmas in July. You win a sweepstake and something bad happens. That’s a better story dynamic. We enjoy it.
Ethan: There’s usually comedy when something bad happens to someone else! Someone’s unhappiness is humorous.


Why set it 1967?
Ethan: Generally, that era was important to us because that’s when we were kids and the same age as the kid in the movie. As to why 1967, specifically, I’m not sure what dictated that, maybe it was the Jefferson Airplane song – the album Surrealistic Pillow was the spring 1967. I’m not sure if that dictated it, but it helped. Also very early on we thought about making reference to the Six Day War, which was June of that year, although we abandoned that.


Did you ever consider placing it in a contemporary setting?
Joel: No, it was always a period piece in our minds. To be honest, I don’t know that we could get our minds and imaginations around this story in a contemporary context, because we are so far removed from that, while the other story we lived. To want to do a movie about a Jewish community in the Midwest, and we have to have lived in one.
Ethan: Had it even been a year later, in 1968 or 1969, the whole look would have been different. That look was what we were after. A year later or earlier it’d have been too different.
Joel: The period aspect of the movie helped to abstract it in a way, like with the folk tale that opens the movie.


As it’s drawn from your own childhoods, why did you focus on Larry, the adult, rather than Danny, the boy?
Ethan: That’s a good question. I think when we started we thought it would more evenly split, the point of view of the adult and the child, but during writing we kind of gravitated towards the adult more. I don’t know why. But we don’t see it as autobiographical. The setting was where we grew up, but…
Joel: When we grew up, we were the age of Danny, but we weren’t thinking of that character standing in for us, in any way. The events of the story outside of that context are made up. We went to Hebrew school, we were Bar-mitzvah’d, we lived in a community that was similar and our father was an academic, but what happened to Larry and Danny are just made up. We weren’t listening to music in class, even though we listened to the music in the film. Actually some of the music is a little later than 1967, like Hendrix.


People will say it’s your most personal film…
Ethan: I guess in some sense it is. Why deny it? It’s where and when we grew up, so while it’s not autobiographical in terms of the events that happen, the setting is a big deal, it’s the whole feeling of the story, so in that sense maybe there is a personal connection to us that the other movies don’t have.
Joel: But does it feel any different from our other films in terms of what we’re talking about, I don’t think so. It’s not just setting. What do you mean by personal? We’re Jews, that’s a big part of our identity, as it would be wherever we grew up. We grew up in Minnesota, and we’re defined by a Midwestern sensibility, that’s part of who we are. Yet it’s also true that you bring who you are as a person to the process of making any movie, whether it’s about sending a monkey to the moon. That said, we understand why people say that.


Why shoot with no big stars?
Ethan: We wanted to communicate the setting, and make it feel real, a slice of life from that period, and having a movie star would not help to ground it in reality. Larry is an everyman, although movie stars can project that quality. We wanted to immerse the audience in this exotic environment, and a movie star might take you out of this.
Joel: We’ve done movies with movie stars who haven’t taken movie star salaries. This was in no way dictated by budget. If a movie star had come up and offered to do the movie for free, that still probably wouldn’t have been a good idea. Fundamentally, though, for us, shooting a movie with Michael Stuhlbarg or Brad Pitt, it makes no difference to us, as filmmakers.


Was the film always going to be a comedy? It could play as a serious drama…
Ethan: We never really pick, the story is the story and we hope you feel free to laugh. But a man going to see three rabbis could be a set up for a folktale or a joke, it works as either. We don’t pick, it just unfolds.


Was it difficult to direct the folktale, which is in Yiddish?
Ethan: Very. When you have actors that are performing in a language you don’t understand, it’s hard.
Joel: There was a moment when we were going, ‘The actor is not saying what’s here on the page’. It was maybe too long or something. It wasn’t an accurate translation, even though I couldn’t understand it! But another actor who was in the scene, who had translated it for us, he said, ‘Yes, that’s what it says!’


Is A Serious Man based on a novel, i.e. The Book of Job?
Ethan: That’s funny, we hadn’t thought of it in that way. That does have the tornado, like we do, but we weren’t thinking of that.
Joel: Like when we were doing O Brother, we weren’t thinking that was sort of like the Odyssey story, but we did become a little self-conscious that it was about a man returning home, and we wondered whether to make it more classical. But with this film, we weren’t thinking this was like the Book of Job. We were just making our movie. We understand the reference, but it wasn’t in our minds.
Ethan: The film is also like the ultimate schmiel joke. There’s a whole tradition of those, and that’s true, too, but we weren’t thinking of that. The schmiel is the one who suffers. There’s no method to our writing. We just go back and forth in a room. It’s very loose and very back and forth.


Are you confident you would get this movie made now, in this economic climate?
Joel: It would be harder to get this movie made now than a couple of years ago when we were bringing it to the studio and asking for finance, but Focus Features and Working Title, people we’d worked with before, were totally behind us. This was written before No Country, and the finance was there before the Oscar.
Ethan: It is interesting that both No Country and this were written at the same time.
Joel: Maybe working on Cormac’s book opened us up to this…