Hold your books. It should die. People paid good money to see this
movie. When they go out to a theater, they want cold sodas in
hop pop corn and no monsters in the projection booth. Everyone for tend.
Podcasting isn't borings. Son. You've got a penny on your head. You
drove fast. The first time I met ed was in the county lockup in
tampe Arizona. Flower, you are a day I'll never forget. I did
you bet? I did? Okay. Then my lawless years were behind me,
our child rearing years lay ahead, but no biology inspired to keep his
childless. You go right back up there and get me a toddler. I
need a baby hide. They got more than handle. At the time,
his little plan seemed like the solution to all our problems and the answer to
all our prayers. He's beautiful. What are you kid? We got some
family here. I want bathing Junior. What's his name? Junior high Junior.
So far we've just been using Junior. We called you saw somewhat.
Hold on right, and we're gonna go pick up daddy. I've been taking
these Huggies and whatever cash you got. You busted out of jail. We
relation fish has on our own recalling whatever here is trying to say is we
felt the institution no longer had anything to offer us. We get a job.
Now everybody's stayed. Where's Junior? Who the hell are you? Oh
fan? We're absolutely going to get him back. Just ain't no question about
that one from an out And you want to know another thing, I'm gonna
be a better person from here on out. Let's gool didn't It didn't Junior
Raising Arizona a comedy beyond Little Leaf Broll. It ain't. Asie and Anne,
Welcome to the projection booth. I'm was Mike White joined me once again?
Is mister Rob Saint Mary? You're young and you've got your health.
What do you want with a job? Also back in the booth is mister
Keith Gordon. I don't have a line prepared. Oh man, I didn't
realize that was the assign, but it was. I like that one.
We round out a month of discussions about comedic films with a look at the
Cohen Brothers nineteen eighty seven film Raising Arizona. It is the story of recipivist,
repeatal fender criminal Hi McDonough, also known as High and his marriage to
Edwina, a police officer. They find that they are unable to sire a
child and do the most sensible thing about it steal one from the famous Arizona
quins from unpainted furniture retailer Nathan Arizona himself, and hell, you know who
he is. I sincerely hope that everyone within the sound of my voice has
seen Raising Arizona. But if not, you just owe it to yourself to
go and watch the movie first before hearing us talk about it. So,
when was the first time you saw Raising Arizona and what did you think.
I have a very specific memory the first time I saw this, and I
was young. I was ten, and it was probably the year after it
came out, which would have been nineteen eighty eight. Year came out ONBHS,
and I was at my parents friend's house, and I think they had
rented it and we all watched together, and I loved it as a ten
year old kid, and I didn't see it again until I got into high
school. Now, at that time, I had no idea ten years old
who the Coen Brothers score her. I just knew that this was this crazy
little movie. And then it became like one of my favorite films. It
is one of my favorite comedies of all time. And then when I made
my little, silly, little vampire film when I was nineteen, totally unrelated
to me, like I had no input on the script. The co producer
friend of mine at the time, who wrote the script has a whole section
in there about how he was dating this woman and he decided to stop seeing
her because she failed the Raising Arizona test. Jennifer, Well, Jennifer failed
a test. No, you didn't give her the Raising Arizona test, fucking
A I did. And there's no way the relationship could continue because she failed
that test. What the hell does that prove? It proves everything, all
right. If you cannot enjoy a brilliant, cinematic comedic masterpiece like Joel and
Ethan's Raising Arizona, then you are bound, I mean, like genetically bound,
to show up a deeper, numerous human flaw somewhere along the line.
And Will Chamberlaine, you're the last owner should be lecturing me about my love
life. I agree with that. There is very few people that I've watched
this movie with over the years who it was maybe their first time seeing it
and didn't love it. To me, it's broader enough, it's a big
enough kind of good hearted comedy, but it also has some really fun stuff
in there, in some deeper levels that I really enjoy and still enjoy it.
Like I said, I've been watching it, I guess thirty five years
or so, and it's still a favorite. Well, I've never seen it,
but I hear a really good thing. No, damn, it's another
elviral episode. No. I saw it when it very first came out,
but it's funny. My reaction at the time, much like a lot of
the critics, I was not that blown away by it. I had been
a huge fan of Blood Simple. I saw Blood Simple at the New York
Film Festival when it hadn't nobody really seen it yet, and you know,
everybody was so charged. It was like, oh my god, this is
amazing, and these guys in this new voice, and it was just everydy,
you know, super excited. And then this was the follow up film,
and critically it got very naked responses, and I remember the time being,
oh, it's too silly, it's too goofy, and you know,
where's all that deeper thematics that they you know, they were promising, and
then, as has happened with a lot of my very favorite films, there
was really an evolution with it, you know where you know, I saw
it again a few years later, and I liked it more. And I
saw it a few years later and I liked it more still, and somewhere
and there, Yeah, it became a very favorite film, and among my
very very top film of the Coen Brothers. I mean, it's a film
now that I deeply loved, But it was it was a process of coming
to greet it on its terms, rather than expecting it to be something that
it wasn't, and understanding that underneath the wackiness of the humor there was an
incredible amount of debt. But I will plead guilty. Well, but again,
like I say, a lot of the critical establishment was also that way
at the time that everybody was expecting the next blood symbol, and that's always
a problem because what they did was they did something new and special and different
rather than repeating themselves, and everyone's so confused by that. Yeah, they
have an interesting knack of exploring genres and just going to places that you don't
necessarily expect, and when you think they're going to go left, they suddenly
go right with films that they put out. Who would have thought that they
this is somewhat of a Western, but now it's, oh yeah, old
brother, we're out though, true grit, even no contratra old men.
These are all westerns now and it's oh okay. But then you still have
the Cia movie that they did, or cruel intentions or just that cruel intentions,
what was that? Intolerable cruelty, intolerable cruelty, just things that you
don't necessarily expect a remake of The Lady Killers, Like where did that come
from? This is it's always another one of their films that I've come to
like way more like at first, you know, like, oh it's not
as good as the original, and now I've come to really love it on
its own terms. And I think that's filmmakers that are brave and buying things
in odd ways. Often you kind of need to see things again and go
back to them. And like I say, if I looked at a list
of my top fifty films of all time, probably thirty of them, I
wasn't blown away the first time, and it was only on revisiting that I
really found. Oh, now I get it, and then how could I
not have gotten it before? This movie kind of sets up what would be
the checkerboard for them, because the thing I noticed is they went from serious
to absurd to serious to absurd, and they did this like every other film
for a while for about twenty years, and then it seems like they don't
get as absurd as much. They got much more serious later. I actively
refused to see this film when it was out. I had seen Peggy Sue
Got Married and was just so not a fan of this, this Nicholas Cage
guy. Who the hell is this guy? Anyway? So I'm sort of
weird nepotism going on here. He's actually Nicholas Copela. I had made a
movie called Peggy Sue Got Married. Chair had seen that movie, and she
immediately said, I saw Peggy Sue Got Married, and I thought, I
was your performance was like watching a two hour car accident. He was okay,
and Birdie and rumblefish, he was all right, small roles, valley
girl. He was really good and I don't need to see that. I
saw that performance in Peggy Sue and I just didn't like it at all,
and that I basically one of my college friends was like, you have to
watch this movie. You of all people are going to love this movie and
basically sat me down. And I wouldn't say forced me to watch this movie,
but there was a lot of cajoling going on, some pluckwork, orange
lidlocks involved, I guess maybe just about and I don't have to tell you
guys. At first eleven minutes before the credits even roll, it just grabs
you and throttles you, and I fell in love and I was just like,
oh my god, where has this movie been for the last five years?
You actively refuse to see it, you idiot. And then after that
it was like, let's watch Raising Arizona pretty much as I possibly could,
and oh my god, do I love it. This is one of those
where never gets old, and there are just the use of the music,
the dialogue, the camera work. Pretty much. Give me any aspect of
filmmaking and I'll be like, oh, yeah, this movie excels in that
production design, whatever you got, this movie excels at it. It is
so quotable, like I can't tell you. Actually, when we were making
my stupid little vampire movie, when we were ready to do a take,
we'd be like, we'll set the pop here, honey. We would say
that to each other because they take the photo with the kid. So I
mean there's just even just little just the phrasing the dialogue in here. Talking
to Mike about this before we started recording. We see this later. You
wouldn't know this, obviously, Keith. You wouldn't know this when you saw
this because you don't know what they're going to do ten years down the line.
But to me, I think from a dialogue standpoint, it shares a
lot with like Fargo, where it's supposed to be a regional but it's not
really. It's got this kind of weird mash and then Oh Brothers the same
way. Even though it's odd, it's like it's so charming in its way
of doing that it's really odd, Like I can't think of too many filmmakers
that can pull that off like that well, and then that really consistently they
write this odd poetic I mean, their dialogue is almost never naturalistic. I
mean, their dialogue is not the way people talk. And that's what's amazing
about it because it works really well. I mean, you know, it's
something I feel like I've seen a number of people try to do, but
it usually fails to write this kind of not naturalistic, poetic dialogue, but
yet have it not be distracting or dobe or just why are you doing that?
And there's stuff it flows so beautifully and in this movie, to me,
that actually hasn't. There's a Yeah. One of the things I came
to love about the movie is I think it adds a lot because one of
the one of the things that movie is accused over early on, and I
understood it and I actually felt it now again, I don't at all was
making fun of rural people and making fun of poor people in me. And
I actually think the language is one of the things that balances it because as
much as their use of language is goofy and strange, it's also very poetic
and beautiful and there's malapropisms, but there's also beautiful ways of expressing themselves.
And I actually think the movie is like a fascinating movie in that whole arena,
because on the surface it is it is, you know, make fun
of the dumb rural folk, and then you get into the movie you realize
it's way deeper than that, and it's way more complicated and it's basically,
yeah, you really think you're smarter than them, You really think this isn't
all of us? You really think you know? And I somehow think the
poeticness of the language is part of what creates that ballance of Yeah, they're
dokes and we're all dokes, and we're all insane and we're all and yes
they're cartoons, but aren't we all? And somehow that language is an important
part of why that works. And that was the thing that I got going
forward through their work is the people who you wouldn't expect to be able to
use these words like why Like, for example, John Goodman's character he uses
the word domicile. We're hearing your domicile? Why use domicile? What do
you just say? House? Or that? In their work over and over
with these characters who you're like, these words just seem too big, And
that's that artificiality you're really talking about. But lends something like it's almost like
there is an intelligence, but it don't know how to handle the intelligence.
Well, there's something I can't quite explain it, but it really helps to
flesh out the character in a way. There's a whole theme too of people
not understanding each other. When how you talking with mm at Walsh and he's
oh, me and Bill were part of this highway patrol thing, Bill Parker,
No, not that mother scratchers. There's always like little things where it's
even when Glenn is talking about swinging, he has to say it in so
many different ways. I'm talking about Lamore, I'm talking about wife swapping.
I mean like each time they're saying things, they have to explain themselves several
times. And the whole scene of the one cop trying to ask Nathan Arizona
about what was going on, and then you've got the two FBI agents and
FBI agents are acting like translators for this local cop and the local cops just
trying to get his questions in there. Anything when he was abducted. Nobody
sleeps nakedness. How I am asking the question's officer, if we're going to
put an AVB, I might need a description he was. We're better trained
to intervene in a crisis situation. What was he wearing a dinner jacket?
What do you think he's wearing his damn Jammie's child was wearing his jammies?
You're happy do you any disgruntled employee? Hell, they're all disgruntled. I
ain't running a damn daisy farm. What did my motto is do it my
way or watch your butt? So are you thinking it might have been an
employee? Don't make me laugh without my say so? They wouldn't piss with
their pants on fire? What did I don't know? They were jammies and
Yoda isn't shit on them. Everybody has problems communicating with one another. And
even when it comes through these balloons come in funny shapes. No, not
unless round is funny, and then later on how evil's Oh these are circular.
When gales, everybody get down on the ground. Nobody move when there's
that whole misunderstanding there. Well, which is it, young Feller? You
want I should freeze or get down on the ground. I mean to say,
it's a nice freeze. I can't write any drop, and it's a
nice drop. I'm going to be in motion. That's a real theme through
this whole movie is people not understanding each other and that language, that that
poetic language. Because I know there's references in here to Flannery O'Connor, William
Faulkner, to John Steinbeck. I don't know if it's adopting that type of
language. It's a more literary language than a spoken word language. It's not
what you would hear when you're having talk with somebody, like you said,
domicile rather than house or home. The only thing that I've read, I
think it was in the interviews that you sent. There was a book of
interviews, and they said that they wanted they figured that the characters would have
been informed by two things. One probably raised around the church, so the
Bible, and then also just like general magazines, just general popular reading.
So they figured it was this mashup of high art, high language, and
really low language at the same time, like Jugs magazine exactly. I worked
in a place that used to sell Jugs magazine, so when I saw that
and bade me last. But even the music has that too. I mean,
you know, it's one of the great scores ever, and it has
this mix of like Beethoven but played in a kind of almost Southwestern country kind
of way, and then opera, and it's doing the same thing. It's
kind of mashing together this sort of high art and low folk art and coming
up with something new and special and kind of the best parts of both,
and that's in a way what I feel like the language is doing too.
And that's what I mean about there's something elevating about the story and the characters
in it. As much as it's funny, it's also kind of saying these
people do live in a world where Beethoven is part of their sub conscious world
or opera or you know, they hear I mean, so some of these
things are in High's dreams and you know, and he's hearing this music.
So for me, there's something I like about it, and I may be
reading in but there's something about elevating the common man at the same time that
it's smoking fun at and it's something I think they do brilliantly well, and
they do it over and over again. A lot of movies is both mercilessly
teasing and kind of really appreciating and loving people will all types at. They're
one of the only filmmakers and I think of the best a filmmaker, and
it kind of does that things simultaneously really well, where they're both tease and
make fun of people mercilessly, and yet somehow you never feel like it's cruel.
And in the end, you realize they really love their characters and that's
really hard to do. At the same time. I mean, I definitely
feel there's a deep humanism in their work that they're willing to point out our
foibles but really hugging us at the same time and going it's okay, we
understand. The character that comes the closest to this pattern that we're talking about
is probably the George Clooning character in Oh Brother, We're Out though, and
with him when he starts spouting out about the pattern familius and just like using
these high falutin terms, there's also that notion of maybe he's not as smart
as he thinks he is. Because you get Temple like Nelson and John Taturo
and they're not necessarily using that sort of high language, and I would say
they're probably on the same playing field as him. You get Jim Blake Nelson
like they loved him up and turned him into walk Horn, talking about how
their prestidigitation or any of this kind of stuff. He's not using that level
of language. So I think in that one they are not necessarily making fun
of Clooney, But Clooney is playing such a blowhard at times, and just
this whole thing about his palmmaide and he's a dapper dan Man and all this
stuff. And of course I'm thinking Pommade because of the palm Aide that's in
this movie as well, and I just was really hoping that it was Dapper
Dan was the palmmaid, but unfortunately it's not. There's are great things that
carry over from one film to another, and you get these kind of running
jokes, Like I know a lot of people will be like, oh,
look at High worked at Hudsucker Industries and we're going to get Hudsucker later on.
Look at the film before, look at Crime Wave that they did with
Sam Raymie, that's all taking place at Hudsucker as well, So they love
that tour Man and then Rob. I know, before we started talking,
you were talking about kidnapping and like how that's such a theme for these guys
as well. When I look at all of their films, I think probably
good seventy five percent of them have a kidnapping in the plot. So there's
part of me that goes, do they have something they're working out? Is
this like therapy? Did they have a family member who was kidnapped or were
they just like going No. It's just a really good, like film noir
plot device that you can use, that you can play with. But there's
part of me that goes, yeah. But to have it in seventy five
percent of your work, I could probably list off most of the films.
I can't remember all of them, but almost seems like every single movie is
a kidnapping, and it's like blood simple does and that's one of the serious
ones, and then goofy ones like this one in Big Lebowski, So it
just keeps showing up. I want to say that Fargo is very close for
them, and that the whole idea of this kidnapping and stuff took place when
they were younger, and that probably worked its way into a lot of what
you're saying using kidnappings, because I think that whole because they say based on
a true story, which of course is an absolute lie. But I think
there are some aspects of that kidnapping that were true and that did take place
around where they grew up. If anything. Playing armchair psychologist, that's as
close as I can think of as why are there so many kidnappings in so
many of their movies? It's a damn good trope, And with this one,
it's not even really a kidnapping so much. It's just outright theft that
they eat. Those who have so much should give to those who don't.
Very socialist type of philosophy that we have here. They got five, they're
fine. Nathan Arizona probably well to do guy. And it sounds like he
and Florence had to go through treatments for her to have these kids, and
that was probably very expensive as well. So it's that whole thing of high
and ed are not rich, but yet Nathan Arizona's up on that hill,
that high and low type of thing, and just hearing this person as with
five boys and we can't even have one, So why don't we just take
what the good Lord can't give us? Yeah, And looking at them,
looking at that couple though, the way that they're staged and everything she is,
she looks like she walked out of the early nineteen hundreds, like her
hairs up, she's got these really very particular clothing, like a suffragette almost.
It's like school marmish. What is the dynamic between these two? But
in terms of Nathan Arizona, I absolutely love him, and I'm sad to
hear that he died relatively the after, died relatively quick after this film,
I think he meane like one mother thing he was supposed to actually, from
my understanding, play the Albert Finney roll in Miller's Crossing. But he's just
so amazing in here, and I love that character. And again a quotable
piece like I'll say to people chairs you got a Dynette set, No chairs
you got Dick asked my wife, you got more sense? And another character
of who we on the surface is a schmop. He's greedy, he's disconnected,
and when by the end he's wonderful. And that's that same thing that
they do where like you know, he's like, oh, he's the rich
guy and he's the shallow guy, and then by the end of the film
it really do kind of love him and there's a real heart within all of
his trappings. Through all the trappings are still there, but you know,
he lets them go and he is very empathetic and he tells them to stay
together. And you know that's that thing where they just, you know,
the humanity keeps finding a way to come out underneath everyy's trappicks, every's got
him. But then the good stuff kind of sneaks out in spite of themselves.
I felt very happy. I once met a friend of a friend named
Scott huff Heines, and I kept asking him, do you call yourself unpainted
half Heines? And he's like, no, do you think that people would
get it? I was like, yeah, I think they would, And
then from then on he went as Scott unpainted huff Heines. So I feel
very happy about that. Going back a little bit to the movie, because
we're just jumping all over the place here, because it's tough to talk about
comedy. It's really tough to talk about comedy. This is not just jokes
for joke's sakes. There is a whole lot of stuff going on in here,
and I love just the filmmaking prowess. When you come to that precredit
sequence, the guy who's mopping the floor, and every time High comes back
to prison, he has moved a little bit, or the counseling sessions that
they're having, and you get to see the different people that are in jail
with them. Why do you use the word trapped? Why do you say
you feel trapped in a man's body? Were? Sometimes I get the minstrel
crames real hard. That guy is overdubbed. It's William Preston Robertson doing that
voice, and just that they used him in so many movies, like even
when I think in Hudsucker, Proxy just has one line where he goes buzz
and he's got that huge, deep voice. We're talking about like economics and
stuff, and the way that at the end of every week he's got a
paycheck and that woman smoking that cigarette. The job was a lot like prison
sip ed was waiting at the end of every day and a paycheck at the
end of every week. Government, do take a bite, don't you talking
about that Reaganomics and all of that stuff that's in here. I tried to
stand up and fly straight, but it wasn't easy with that some bitch Reagan
in the White House. I don't know. They say he's a decent man,
so maybe his advisors are confused as a kid who grew up working for
during that era with a dad who worked in a factory what they show in
the film. I think that was another element to this movie that kind of
related to me because I didn't grow up with means and new people like to
mean. Obviously not as far out, So that's where I think the connection
came from. For me, It's like very much a working class film,
but in that way it's a blown out version, but it still has that
heart of these people are trying to scrape by and make it happens for them.
Well, they all have their dreams, and I love keep he mentioned
before about the dreams and that Hi. I don't know if he's necessarily controlling
things with his dreams, but he definitely seems to have some sort of influence
or things are being influenced by his dreams. Just that, I mean,
he pretty much manifests Lenny Smalls. Just that after he does this horrible thing
of kidnapping this child or taking this child, I should say, because they
don't ask for a ransom, that he manifests this lone horseman of the Apocalypse,
the ward hog from Hell, as Flannarey O'Connor would say, and Ed
says later on, and I just love that, and that they have that
connection of that woody woodpecker tattoo, and just that they seem to be coming
from the same place that Lenny Smalls has that tattoo. My mama didn't love
me when he's got the baby shoes and stuff, and you're like, Okay,
are those his baby shoes? Are those like a trophy from another baby
that he's stolen? And I love that you get these baby noises so often
when you see him on screen, like when he's camped out above mc done
a place looking down and you've got like crying of the baby when you see
him again. The sound is wonderful in this. I think it's alluded to
in the conversation with Nathan Arizona that maybe he was a baby that was sold
to someone at some point thirty thousand dollars he fetched on the open market.
As for that roadrunner tattoo, that has always been something that throughout my watching
of the film, I was like because I knew that image. I knew
that image because my dad used to work on cars, and my dad had
a nineteen seventy Chevy Nova and he had one of those like in the back
window, and it was this company that made like carburetors and things like that
for cars. So I knew that image ever since I was a little kid,
and so when I saw that they had it, I was like,
Okay, they both have this thing that's weird, but it was only just
recently, and I sent this link to you before we recorded a few days
ago that I guess there is a gangs in prison called the Peckerwoods that have
woody woodpecker tattoos that are like white supremacist gangs in prisons. I go,
wow, that that got dark real quick. I didn't realize that, like
I could have been initiated into some white Aryan Nations kind of things in prison,
and that they're like brothers of a fraternity. And that's why in the
end, when he pulls the grenade, he says sorry because he's sorry he
did that to a fellow member of the same fraternity. I found that video
interesting. There were some good parts to it. There are things that when
High is pulling one of the Arizona quints from under the crib and then you
get that same shot repeated when Lenny is pulling High out from underneath a car
and just like pointing some of those things out. I was like, Okay,
yeah, that's cool. Or like when he dreams about Lenny and that
he's moving his head back and forth to the right to the left, and
it's very similar to what happens later on when Lenny is meeting him and his
head is going back and forth to the right to the left. I thought
that was good. I don't necessarily buy High as a white supremacist, and
that he's really annoyed the only African American. Actually there's two African Americans,
because there's the guy who's got the metal cramps, but there's also his cellmate.
And I don't see him being annoyed with his cell mate because he's black.
I just see him being annoyed with his cell mate because it sounds like
he tells the same stories about craw dads all the time. When there was
no meat. We ate fall, there's no faull. We ate crowdy,
there was no crowd had to be found. We ate saying what we ate
sad. He ate sand. That's right, and I don't think I would
believe that they ate sand either. But also the use of visuals, and
I didn't pick up on this until years later, is the scene where he
I think it's in the dream, where he visualizes her Florence Arizona, going
into the bedroom and the baby's not there. Where the camera goes from the
ground over the car, up the ladder into the bedroom right into her face.
That is a visual lift out of Evil Dead, which of course Joel
Cohen was a co editor on Evil Dead. So I love that little nod
that they did to Sam their friend that if you're a fan of bull films,
you go now, Okay. Yeah, they use shaky cam like crazy
in this and backwards shots. I love good backwards acting, which I know
Bruce Campbell can do. And speaking of Bruce Campbell, I always felt he
should have been Glenn. I love the actor that played Glenn, but there
were certain line deliveries that he gives where I'm just like, may Bruce Campbell
could have killed that line delivery, oh yeah, and just that like group
of friends with Raymie and Tapered and you've got the Coen brothers, and then
Holly Hunter was one of their roommates for a little while. I remember hearing
commentary on the Evil Dead. I think the original Evil Dead disc about that
and that they didn't cast her and blood simple, so they said, Okay,
we need to write this character. That she was partially responsible for what
this movie ended up being. Having that strong female character and here was pretty
important. And that was the thing that I forgot to mention up the front
was when I made that film, the Little Vampire film. The guy who
wrote it and produced it with me who's in it. He's in Crime Wave,
So there's another kidding. He was a child actor, and if you've
ever seen Crime Wave, he's the kid who's in the yellow Vader who's pushing
the buttons and annoying people and then they toss him out of the elevator.
I think Brian James tosses him. So he's got this little cameo bit in
there when I think he was like eight or nine years old. So it's
funny, like it all comes full circle in that one, that video that
you said too. I never really realized that High's car is there when he
visualizes Florence coming in and the camera's going over the one car, that his
car is still in the driveway when he left the ladder up there. I
guess you just do that if you're coming old. But I love that whole
thing and just the use of the shaky cam and freaking Barry Snefeld when he
was strictly dpeeing at this point, just doing beautiful work. And I love
and I hope Keith that you appreciated this one. He would always sneak in
Kubrick references. So in the Bathroom, You've got Poe Ope so great,
I can no longer sit back and allow I'm innestant infiltration, communist doctrination,
communist subversion, and the international Communist conspiracy to sap and and purify all of
our precious bodily fluids. One of the things I love about the poems.
Their movies are so full of little throwaway nods to There are other films,
friends, films people that admires, you know, classical fiction, I mean,
and it's not always that meaningful. I do think you get to danger
with them because people can over analyze it and start you know. I mean,
That's why I kind of had mixed things of the video too, because
I started to feel like, Okay, you're really flying to tie this all
together, as opposed to the fact that I think they're just having fun with
symbols and symbolism and all. I don't think it always necessarily all flies up
to a grand thing. They're just kind of like, yes, I could
see for example, with the Ope Poe, which is from Doctor Strangelove.
In the bathroom, you know, first of all, it's a nod,
but also yes, it's two films taking place in crazy worlds where nothing makes
sense. Like you know, there's a certain amount of it that I think
you can say, yes, there was a meaning. But I could also
imagine reading some film arcles somewhere saying, well, clearly they were saying that
the apocalypse is coming, and it's the same as the Apocalytis. It's like
there's certain wines like, no, really, I think they're having more fun
than that. Someone wasn't denied the essence. That's what happened. So there
you go. I'm trying to remember the name of that critic who always reviews
the Coen Brothers movies and he will even do introductions on their DVDs. Do
you guys remember who I'm talking about. He's completely made up whole cloth by
them. Oh yes, it's not Roderick James, because that's the editor editor
that was made up. Yeah, no it was, and he's on the
Yeah, it's the it's on the Blood Simple disc. He does the introduction,
Welcome viewers to this special collector's edition of Blood Simple. Forever Young.
My name is Kenneth Loring, Artistic director for Forever Young film restoration, and
I'll be talking you enthusiasts or shall we say, aficionados through some of the
technical aspects of the filmmaking here, even as the scenes under discussion unfold.
But more on myself later during the slower parts of the movie. For now,
let's admire some of these so called plate shots, that is, some
shots that were filmed as background for titles, although tier as you see,
there are actually no titles, so they aren't in fact plate shots, but
simply shots. I suppose you'd call them. One of the movies actually one
best editing, and they were like, oh, how the hell are we
going to get Roderick James up here? Well, very few filmmakers seem to
have the fun with in the films but also around them making of the films
and their whole I mean, they do. They keep they have a playfulness
that it's just great and I think is too missing from a lot of filmmaking.
And they their films are playful, and their approach the filmmaking seems playful,
and I think it's great. I always took the whole Woody Woodpecker thing
to be more that this was a cartoon and that we were living in a
cartoon old and Kai's care as very woody woodpecker esque, and apparently it gets
higher and higher as he gets more stressed. And Alma's figured if money comes
from High, that's why he's got the tattoo. That's as much stock as
I put in that. I wasn't, yeah, thinking that he had joined
the Peckerwoods the video. Did they sing the Peckerwoods actually have woody woodpecker tattoos
or did they just were they making the connection between peckerwoods and woodpecker And because
I could see the Color Brothers hearing, oh, there's a gang called the
Peckerwoods and thinking it's really funny and doing a smriff on it called you know,
wood with woodpecker, I don't know that they would be literally trying to
make a point about High being a white supremacist, which is not referenced for
a part of this. I mean, because not like they're filmakers, they're
not scared of having their characters be really fucked up and you know, awful,
and you know there would go there if they wanted to go there.
So I think trying to make an hidden statement that Pie is actually a white
supremacist just doesn't seem like they're filmmaking. And I didn't remember that though,
that the real Pecker would actually did the woodpecker tattoos. I'm wrong, but
it appeared to be from what he was showing. The thing that I eventually
clicked for me later was, and this was in the video that I thought
was interesting because I hadn't made that connection before, is that, in a
way, the smallest character represents his future. That basically, if he doesn't
get on the path, and if he keeps doing what he's doing, he's
going to turn into a criminal, like a really bad criminal, and he'll
be alone and he'll have nothing, and he'll just be this loan man by
himself, miserable because you can't say that Small seems like a nice guy because
he has no friends. So it appears that character is really a mirrored,
twisted, darker version of where High could end up, and that the tattoo
is a visual. It's hard to imagine though, that that High could ever
be that guy. I mean, why doesn't even load his gunt? I
mean, you know, I mean you got the feeling. Its small to
me, Twalston, he seems like he was a guy who grew up.
He was given away as a baby, you know, for thirty thousand dollars.
He's a creature without a soul. And I just feel like, even
if High has fears of that in himself, he says, clearly, so
has a soul, and see for me, I don't think he says sorry,
the thing about sorry because their brothers. He's never hurt anybody before.
I think he's been sorry because he's I mean, he's been a career criminal
who's never loaded his gun. He's never hurt anyone. He's He's really as
harmless as you could be and be a criminal. I mean, the only
person he ever does any harm to is land he punches for saying I want
to swap with your your wife, But he just punches the guy he doesn't,
you know. But he's a very harmless guy and a sweet guy.
So I guess it's hard for me to imagine him ever becoming small, even
if he's afraid. I could see that being his nightmare of himself. But
I don't think that's really who he is. And I do think that he
says sorry because he's for the first time he blows up. He blows up
the worst human being in the world, and even then he's so sweet that
on some level he's like, Oh, I really don't want to hurt somebody,
even if you're gonna kill me if I don't. And I think that's
why we love him, no matter how much of a criminal he is,
because he's a really good soul who just doesn't know how to make sense of
the world. And I love that mirroring too, with punching Glenn and that
great edit, so he has to walk up to Glenn. He punched Glenn
so hard that he's six meters away, and then you get that mirroring later
on with Lenny where he punches high and then has to walk up to get
too high because he punched him so far. I love when they do that
kind of stuff. And then yeah, just those great visual jokes and they're
like lead mister mcdunna's car alone, and then that cut to them all just
beating the car just so loud, and you get I watched it today with
headphones on and just the sound of the children just ever present in that whole
scene. It's just so disrupting. Beauford over there writing on the walls,
yeah, in the hole on account of something went wrong with miss Semen.
Now I know that. I think it's Joel. They adopted Joel and Francis
McDormand they adopted children. So I always wondered if there was some connection to
the fact of, oh, we can't have kids on our own kind of
thing, that maybe that was another piece in here, But I have no
way to know that I've read anything that said that. No, you're absolutely
right, because I was reading about they had trouble adopting and that this was
a reference to that. So yeah, you're totally right out in the money
with that. So yeah, something went wrong with his Semen as well.
But speaking of Francis McDormand, blood simple, she's so good in a dramatic
role and then a year she's off the chain. I'm just like wow.
And this is before really I knew who she was because I had seen this,
And then when I was in high school, Fargo came out and I
loved Fargo, where everybody's like, oh my god, And ever since she's
been doing great work. The last thing I saw was actually the Macbeth that
Old did by himself, and I thought she was phenomenal in there, because
Macbeth is one of my favorites, but like her lying deliveries in here and
the chemistry between her and Holly Hunter. Then there's a dip theory of tetan.
It's what they call the dip tat. You gotta get him dip tet
boosters yearly or else we'll develop lock john that vision. Then there's the smallpox
vaccine, chicken pox and easels son if your kids anything like, oh,
you're gonna have to get all those shots yourself first four? He'll ever take
him? Who's your pediatrician? Anyway? When exactly fixed on one? Yet?
Have we high? No? I guess we don't have one yet,
Jess's what you gotta have one? You're gonna have one this instead? Yeah,
Well, what if the buddy gets sick, honey, Even if he
don't get sick, he's got to have his dip tat. He's gotta have
his dip tet. Honey. He started his bank accounts yet? Have we
done that? Honey? We gotta do that, honey. What's that for
dot that? There's for his orthodontre and his university. Now you soak because
thumb and I died and you might could buy without the orthodonti him on our
thing off the university. Me right, you take that dipper off your head,
you put it back onto your sister. Honey, what you probably got
the life insurance all squared away? Have we done that yet? Honey?
Got to that high and here's got our hands with this little angel man?
What would end little angel do? Truck came long, splattered brains all over
the interstate. Where would you be? Damn? Yeah, honey, what
if you get run over? Where he got carried off by Twister and then
Evil later on? Did he get his dip tit? I don't have kids,
so I don't know anyone who has children if they run into people like
this where it's oh you have a kid. Now, let me impart my
wisdom to you. Let me tell you all of these things. And I
just love the fact that like every time someone takes Nathan, they gotta grab
the doctor Spock book. You have to get the doctor Spock book, the
instruction maybe yeah, yeah. They have to rename the baby too. Each
time somebody tries to take him, it becomes Gail Junior, Nevill Evil Junior
High Junior. Guess we'll be calling him Glenn Junior. They don't even know
for sure if that's Nathan Junior. I think that's Nathan Junior, as Dad
says, but he doesn't even know for sure which one he is. Having
all of these couples as examples, having Dot and Glenn and then having Evil
and Gale. Snokes William Forsyth. You talk about how you didn't recognize Francis
mcdormant. She's got that great horrible wig on and just the over makeup and
all this stuff. William Forsyth. People will tell you that he's not in
this movie because after this he grows this badass mustache start. He starts pitching
his voice down about an octave or more and just becomes this like badass investigator,
serial killer, murderer type of guy where you're just like, really,
that's sweet, little gay. The only other movie that I remember him is
a character that I really liked as a kid. I haven't seen it since
is We played Flattop in Dick Tray and I really liked like his character worked
there, and then I liked him in Here, and then I've seen him
in the market crime film stuff that came out and that kind of neo no
our stuff in the nineties. I think he was in things of doing Denver
when You're Dead or something. He was in that. But I've always really
liked him. But like I said, this character, this type of performance,
it's like I've never seen him do anything like this since. No,
he's so good. And I'm sorry I called him Gil. He's actually evil.
I don't want the tweets to be coming at me, because I'm sure
there are a lot of evil fans out there. But then this was also
the movie where the Cohens started to work with John Goodman, and to this
day, I don't know if he was in Macbeth, but he sure has
been in a lot of Cohen Brothers movies, both the serious ones and the
comedies. And my god, he is just so good. I just love
these guys, and I love to talk about communication again. I love when
they break out a prison and they just are screaming it just and then later
on they misplaced Nathan Junr they're screaming again. There's no communication whatsoever. There's
just decretural screams that they're just laying out to us and pounding on the roof
of the car. Or even when they're like doing their hair at the gas
station, they turn to each other and they start screaming at each other.
They God. But speaking of screaming, like their entry into the film after
that group session is like a birth, like they're coming out of the ground.
They're being berthed. And then I think they did this on purpose with
them, it's probably planned. But you'll notice that out of the two,
I would say that Evil is I used to pitch down a little bit,
and he's reached birth like he he's borne by his leg Like, he doesn't
come out head first, he comes out by his feet. So therefore,
of course he might be a little more twisted, I guess, is what
they're saying. Okay, just the little things that he does yet oh good
cereal flakes, Miss Brandena, Oh, just so many good lines and yeah,
and then of course the start of the show, just Nicholas Cage,
what a performance. There's so many little things in here, like incredible chase
scene that happens, and just that the Cohens just have to keep adding to
it and adding to it. Once the dogs show up, it's just holy
cow. What And when he goes into the grocery store and suddenly the music
changes to a music version of the raising Arizona theme but I love that moment
when the guy that is working at the grocery store is using a shotgun and
at one point High's running down the lane and comes to the end and sees
that guy with the shotgun. Just that look on Nick Cage's face, just
this kind of like little like why is this happening to me? Kind of
thing, And he doesn't seem like he's put out. He just turns around,
puts that Huggi's container under the other arm, and starts running back as
this guy's just shooting wildly in the store, not to be outdone by the
cops though. That just loved shoot constantly, And when the one cop falls
out of his own cop car at the convenience store, that never fails to
him. Use me. I loves the love the old man in the truck
where he stops him and he's got a penny on your head, and then
when they stop and they go through the window because there's no window in the
truck, and then he gets up and runs into the house. Everybody runs
through the house, and the dogs go through the house, and the family's
just sitting there watching TV. That's just they're watching TV, and there's a
Nathan Arizona commercial on the TV. And I love when he runs into that
house and he turns and says thank you to the guy before he ends in
the house. Just all those little lines that they're doing, just the little
like sometimes adr stuff that they occasionally stick in, that one character who is
completely adr don't forget the bouquet ed just I love that they have these things.
Well. Also what I caught I mean the whole gun craziness thing.
I mean, still very much America, but they caught it really early.
This idea that that guy in the store just has a shotgun ready to go
and it's like, oh, an excuse to use it again. It's always
fun, but there's something about the violence of America that the film really captures.
And again that's why I think Pie sticks out because he's so not a
violent guy in the and really he's surrounded by people who are more violent and
there it's a whole country and that's where to use their guns and looks forward
to it. It's like, oh, I give the shooting somebody. Yeah,
And he's like the one guy who's gun has never loaded, which I
think is really really sort of interesting because it's it's everybody has a gun.
It's weird. It's guns not loaded, but he's shooting blanks. Or Ed's
insides truly are a rocky place where his seed can find out purchase rob we're
talking about quotable lines. There are so many things that I say from this
movie all the time. I love when Ed is so mad at high about
allowing the Snops brothers to be there, and Hi does that whole thing?
Well, no, you gotta have a little charity, you know, an
air Lands sit out a plate, just this delivery, just the pauses and
when he goes low, and I am sad. It sounds like the Cohens
didn't get along with Nick Cage as well as they could have. It's not
John Goodman or Clooney or who's another one that they work with, Jeff Bridges.
It's not like that type of relationship see BUSHEMI. Unfortunately they didn't get
along real well. So that's why Nick Cage has him been back in another
one of these movies. But my god, it feels like real lightning in
a bottle to have him at that point in his career, especially where he
was just balls to the wall. He hasn't really ever slowed down, of
course, but some performances are better than others. This one is right there
at the top for me. And then the Cohen brothers. This is not
a sophomore slum ladies and gentlemen. This is kicking their career into a old
different gear. Yes, I love Blood Simple as well, but coming off
of that into this, I can see where we really would have turned some
people off, and I definitely read a lot of those reviews as well.
But my goodness, does this movie still hold a special place in my heart.
The other aspect that I think really works for me is that they're dramatic
films, and especially they're absurdist ones really have this lived in field. There's
a real quality to the universe that they build, and it's even just through
small things. But like I said, with this film out there and not
realistic, but it still feels so authentic in a way. And I think
that anyone who would try to make a comedy would probably play it more safe
and go, we're just playing in contemporary time. We're just playing in the
way people speak and the things that they're concerned about. Most people would never
try to do this high wire act. Of what it is is that they
do in this film in that way you're talking about genre conventions and kidnapping being
a great trope for crime films. It feels like we have seen parts of
this movie in other movies since then, and it's nowhere near this outrageousness.
Okay, maybe Jason Segel started in a movie that was something like this,
but just that insanity. And I love that they had a rule on set
which was everything had to be wacky. Hey, Barry, is this shot
going to be wacky? And just really trying to go all out with that.
It's every shot counts man, everything, and these guys coming from an
editing background, this thing is edited to within an inch of its life.
It is so tight. There's nothing that's wasted in this and it's almost unfair
that they give us this amazing precredit sequence because after that you can't keep that
pace up. If you were to start the movie like when the credits start,
of course, you're missing out on all the backstory and where we're at
with this. But the movie that comes after that is really again very tightly
edited, moves at a pretty darn good pace, but it doesn't move at
that same pace as the rest of the movie. But it's nice. It
gives you a little bit of a breather. When you get to that kidnapping
scene, you're just like, huh, okay, let's enjoy watching these babies
terrorized Nicholas Cage for a little while. I actually looked at the opening.
I wanted to see how they wrote the opening in the script that you had,
and it's all there, and it was amazing because I figured that,
oh, it's voiced over, so maybe they added that in later or things
like that. But no, it was very meticulous and they do exactly what
they were visualizing to do it, and I can't think of anyone who's done
like a big sequence like that kind of brings you in that way, especially
for a medio's usually it's set up in a meet cute or something and then
you're off for the next eighty minutes after that or something. That first eleven
minutes could be a full movie in somebody else's hands. And just the weirdness
at that time, particularly, we've gotten more used to the convention now of
credits coming in at strange times, but it was very odd at that point
in movie making to have the credits start like twelve minutes into the movie.
I mean, you're basically so far into the film when that first sequence ends
and the title comes up. And that was, as I remember, at
least very kind of bowls for the time, because it was, you know,
things send it to be very you know normal. You'd start with the
credits, or there'd be one little teaser minute or two and you a doubt
the credits, and this was like your way into the movie. It's always
like, forgot, we didn't see credits and you're in the middle of the
story and then the credits sort of interrupted. It's like, oh, right,
credit, We're watching a movie where it's kind of it was. I
just remember that was a very unusual and cool thing to do at that time.
I mean now I feel like other people have done it, but it
back then. I can't think of any other films that had that structure.
Yeah, I think the closest you're going to get is like a James Bond
film. But that's still, like you said, three minutes tops before the
credits start for that, not eleven minutes. Not this continuous music that starts.
I think like as soon as you see high walk onto the screen and
start to talk, you hear that strum of the banjo and we're off to
the races. And then yeah, when those credits come up and you get
that amazing yode leging that goes with it. All, Right, we are
watching something very special here. And what's cool is it's edited so tight and
it moves really well, but it doesn't feel rushed. I'm not a fan
of movies that feel like they're rushing it, and this movie is yeah,
in the same way that they do a remarkable thing of kind of making funny
characters and loving them and honoring them. At this they like they edit it's
early kite and it moves really fast, but I never feel like, oh,
we're rushing through this. I never feel like, oh, we're just
kind of get to the next day. It always feels very deliberate, even
though it's very quick, and that's really hard. You don't see that often
because when you go at that basic usually feels like you're missing thing. It
usually feels like you're jumping overstuff. And somehow, as filmmakers, they know
how to make it so full that it doesn't feel like you're being cheated or
you're being rushed through the story. And that's tough and that's part that I
wonder how much of that previous work, like when you talk about Joel's work
as an editor before he became a director, that he was able to go,
Okay, I know how to do this much the same way. I
think there might be a corollary in that way with Martin Scorsese, because he
was editing before he really got into his directing career and really understanding how to
make those edits, how to use the pacing, how to use the music,
how to do all of those things. I think sometimes directors come in
and they're just like, I have a really good visual sense, or really
I can write a script and a very good sense of character and dial but
sometimes that pacing, like you were saying, that's a special thing unto itself
when you're talking about the script and just how tight the script is. And
Keith, feel free to call bullshit on this. But this is a story
I heard a long time ago about the Kohen Brothers. I might use the
wrong terminology, so you might need to correct me on this one. I
think it was The Big Lebowski and Jeff Bridges was talking to John Goodman and
he was so confused because there were no I think they were calling them blue
pages in this that every night when you're an actor, you get pages slid
under the door, and then now I have to learn the lines again or
learn new lines for the next morning. And he's like, there's no blue
pages, and goodman, no, this is the Kohen Brothers. There are
no blue pages. What you read, what you signed on to, is
the script that we are shooting. There's no deviation from this. And I
think that is unusual. I mean that, I mean it's not bullshit.
Most movies, what are their commercial or even are films most Now you're a
change and your people rewrite as the films being shot. They see something an
actor is doing and they want more of it or less of it wherever they
you know something, And it's a rare thing to write a script and go
that's the story we're telling me. I don't think they're the only people to
do it, but they do have the reputation that they don't rewrite. They
very rarely rewrite, and if they do, it's minimal. But I'm shure,
yeah, it's But again that goes back to the poetry. They're right,
I mean, they write their films are it's funny because they're so visual
and we think of them as these amazing visual artists, but they're also really
written. They're beautifully written pieces. The dialogue is thoughtful and poetic, and
the words are specific, and you know, every generation's got a few people
like that, Harold Pinter, Dennis pot or you know, they're they're writers
that write with just beautiful use of language and deliberate use of language. And
I think the Cohens don't get enough credit for that. They get credit,
people knowledge it, but because their visual style is so fond and free and
crazy seeming, people forget how amazing their words are. And yeah, I
imagine you get that script and that's the script, and that's what it is.
What I've heard. I know that story, but I've heard similar stories
about how little they change things and how much it takes to get them to
change anything during production like that that's something they really don't like to do.
I mean, the other element of this is because they give us that open
and then we have those dream sequences that the ending can work the way that
it does. And I think that's the place where we're talking about, like
the humanity again, where it's going there is redemption that there is. Yeah,
you're all goofballs, but we know that your heart's in the right place.
You know, you're trying to do the right thing. And I always
like the ending. I thought the ending was really well done. Yeah,
for me, the ending makes the film. I mean, to me,
the ending takes the film to another level because I find it so moving that
I get choked up. I mean, I you know, here's this completely
cartoon, over the top, silly film and the last five minutes make you
want to cry every time I see it, and it's so beautiful because you
don't imagine a film like that it's going to go there. You don't this
kind of film should end on a big, wacky final joke and that's end
of the movie. And instead it ends on a really deep consideration of family
and meaning and connection and generations and love and super heartfelt. I mean,
by all rights, shouldn't work. It should feel like, whoa, this
is a different movie. You can't put that, and they just it's so
beautiful. It just comes right out of everything we watch and you realize how
much it's been laid in. I mean, you couldn't just PLoP that on,
you know, on a Hollywood film that it would I could see something
saying, well put some put some heartfelt in the end there, and it
would just feel like that. And here you realize how brilliantly they have woven
through this completely silly movie the strains that will lead you to somewhere that really
is a deep embrace of humanity and love and caring and family and that we
gro old and die. But the next generation takes that all on and I
mean, it's it's gorgeous, and it's it's you know that Belonged could be
in any drama and it's remarkable because it it on paper would be impossible to
do, and yet they do it. We're talking about the editing background of
Joel and how that adds in. But I wonder if you guys think that
this is where the philosophy major Ethan comes in, where he's looking at philosophy
and humanity and man grapfully with truth and everything that is the human existence and
then plowing that into the films, because I think that's another kind of a
tour piece that runs through their thing is always these existential questions, always these
questions of humanity that run through all of their films freely that's a real one
two punch too, because you get that dream sequence. But even before that,
you get the confrontation between Nathan and then High and Ed, and like
you were saying before, he could be a real jerk about things, but
instead he shows us that humanity that we didn't necessarily see when he was talking
about how Miles is so dumb and that if if Frog had wins, it
wouldn't bump his as happen, and he's just so top of things, you
know, why wait, the security guard kind of thing, and then here
he's just so nice to them. Of course, he's still cheap. He's
trying to use a line of credit at his stores instead of actually given a
reward, but when he realizes who they are, and he does that whole
thing about keep trying and him and you really get the feeling there how much
he loves Florence, how he knows that he's blessed to have all these kids,
and that he tells Hi to sleep on it. And I love when
he's just like, sleep on it, because we know what sleep In this
movie comes dreams, and we get that great montage too of him dreaming of
High dreaming, and then all of the other people dreaming, the Snopes brothers
going back to jail, just getting all of these little threads tied up before
we go into that sequence, which just has I think that's three different parts
to it as well. There's the whole thing of Nathan opening up the present
and then showing him later on winning the football game, and then that whole
like, now we go deeper farther into the future where we don't know anything
and it may not be Arizona, that maybe Utah and I love that we
have a little button on there, but it's not that, like you were
saying, sprinkle heartfeltness on there. There's just a little tiny joke at the
end after you get that amazing like Norman Rockwell pull out across the table with
all the food and all the family, and then that the old couple that
we never see their faces and just hunched over and looking at how wonderful the
life has turned out. Just choke me up as well. And what's funny
is I actually think the little bits of humor that are in there, whether
it's Nathan still trying to be cheap or the very wonderful last line about Utah
again, part of what make it work. If they've gotten completely serious that
they dropped the sense of humor, then it would be suddenly like, oh,
wait a minute, this is another movie, but what the line,
and it is may talk about threading a needle. They keep just enough of
the absurdity in the humor that you're in the same movie. It's just that
same movie now is super moving and super d but it's still the movie you've
been watching. And you know, for anybody's ever made a movie or written
a book or whatever you've done, I mean, you know how hard that
is. I mean, that's like, that's really hard to like introduce an
entire new level to something right at the end, but not they could feel
divorced from what you've been. I mean that is that's like some kind of
acrobatic feet and they do it so easily that it doesn't I think you don't
realize how tough that would be. But that could have gone south about eighty
five thousand ways. And boy, they make it just without a ripple,
because I know at one point when he's dreaming, the music that is in
his dream eventually becomes diagetic with Ed singing that horrific lumma bye. It's a
murder ballad. Actually I looked it up. Yeah, it's Rose Connolly is
the name of the song. Yeah, And then I love that it's like
this beautiful music in a stream and then you hear and she's singing that to
this little baby, and I'm like, Okay, I guess that works.
You have a pleasant song, but the lyrics are pretty horrific. And I
can't remember if they use that again when High is dreaming in the future.
Well, I think that's the theme that musically is the theme that runs with
the whole piece. And that's it's so interesting because it's utie piece of music
and then she sings it and it really is beautiful and it's really horrifying.
And again it's that it's that dichotomy that they're just all through all their films,
but this one pretty everything's a psychotic everything is beautiful and ugly and hysterically
funny and really real. And you know that's another and that one seems very
attentional. It's really gorgeous melody, and even when she's singing it, the
first few lines you hear are not that horrific. He kind of takes a
bit to realize, what if she's singing. But of course that's very much
part of the draw of tradition with kids. And I mean, think about
me. Nursery rhymes, they're really dark. I mean rock a bye baby,
down, will come, cradle baby baby, nursery rhyme drake full of
depth and loss and injury. And that's a really interesting thing about human beings.
I think their films kind of capture that. But there's somebody about that
weird counterpoint that we all seem to be drawn to without even being aware of
it. I also took it like how we were talking about the Beethoven piece
and how it's done with what we would consider folk instrument. Murder ballads would
have been normal to people from Appalachia or something like that, who probably would
have moved west during the dust Bowl or something, and they brought these old
folk songs with them. So to me, it is that mashup of high
culture low culture, and it's say, it still cracks me up talking about
that chase where he goes into the grocery store and it becomes a music version
like that just perfect me. You know. That was one thing that my
friend pointed out to me as we were watching, and I was just like,
Wow, that is really clever. It was like the Long Goodbye and
just all the different versions of the Long Goodbye song that John Williams wrote,
and how he just will I think in there it's the Long Goodbye music version
when Philip Marlowe goes in to buy cat food for his cat at three in
the morning or whatever, and then he goes up and he writes a check
for sixty nine cents. Oh wait, no, I'm thinking of another detective
movie that these guys worked on. It's so funny that I went and saw
I think Big Lebowski's having its twenty fifth anniversary this year, and I just
went to see a screening and I took my in laws, and they don't
really care for swearing, so I don't think that they necessarily had a great
time watching this. And then it's still funny to watch Labowski. And then
you come back to this and this is basically like a kid's film compared to
Labowski. It's one of those where I'm like, yeah, I could probably
show this to like a ten twelve year old, but no problems. It
does get violent at times, but it's almost always cartoonish violence, like when
he is riding on John Goodman's back and pulling at his face and stuff.
For I'd love that little detail when High reaches up to like pound on him
and he scrapes his hand across the popcorn seat. Just all those little things,
those amazing camera angles on good Men and Cage is they're flying around and
Cage's feet going around destroying that entire trailer, and how thin the wall is
when he gets thrown through the wall. There's not one moment of this movie
roo. I'm just like, oh, yeah, this would this is the
one sour note. I don't think there are any sour notes to this film.
No, it's yeah, one of my favorites. It's so good.
All right, we're going to take a break and we'll be back with an
interview with Joseph McBride, author of the Whole during Human Comedy Life according to
the Cohen Brothers, and we'll be back with that right after these brief messages.
Hello, this is Will, a writer of three films plus a Christmas
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So if you want legal crack, subscribe it's the Best Bits Podcast. Please.
Professor McBride, always great having you on the show. Thank you so
much for being here today. We've talked a little bit before. We've talked
a lot a bit about some of the other books that you've written over your
illustrious career. Most of the time, your subjects seem to be dead.
I know there's a few living people out there, of course, mister Spielberg
is one of them, but I was very surprised when you put out a
book about the Cohen Brothers. I've written largely about people from the Golden Age
of Hollywood is We're College, john Ford, Orson, Wells, Howard,
Hawks, etc. Billy Wilder. I wrote a book on Billie Wilder,
Dancing and Catch, which came out in twenty twenty one, and the Cohen
Brothers book came out soon after that, Older in Human Comedy Life recording to
Cohen Brothers. And in some ways it's easier to write about a dead subject
because they don't give you a hard time. Wrote a biography of Frank Kapper
and I had a lot of trouble. In a way. It was great
having him around to interview for a year, and he was cooperative to some
extent, but then I ran into great opposition. He and his family and
his archivists Jenine Basinger tried to thwart the book, Stop the book, Censor
of the book. I wrote a whole book about that, called Frankly Unmasking
Frank Kappern. But Spielberg actually was one of the more cooperative people. He
wouldn't give me an interview. People said he was saving it for his autobiography.
We'll see if he ever does that. But he won't cooperate with unauthorized
biographies, which is the only kind I will write. But he told his
staff told people. When they called and said should I talk to McBride,
they were told I was kosher, which was really nice and opened doors.
He did tell his mother not to talk for me. I think your mother
knows all the really bad stories about you. But I talked to her and
she was very charming, and she said, I've been told not to talk
to you, and I said, by him, and she said, the
gods told me. I did interview his father, whom nobody had interviewed,
and he was just wonderful and fascinating, and I got to him before Stephen
found out I was talking to him. But his mother had been interviewed a
lot. I was able to find a lot of great quotes from her.
But the Cohen Brothers, Yeah, I like to write about people I care
about it. In the current film scene, I think my favorite current directors
are Spielberg and the Cohen Brothers, and I see the Cohen Brothers as the
sons of Billy Wilder. I call him. If Billy Wilder were making films
today, I think he would make films that are somewhat similar to the Cohen
Brothers films, although they have their own wacky style that's more avant garde than
his style, which is more classical. They're great satirists, and they also
deal with various genres romantic comedy, and Wilder was a click dick and his
choice of material. He did dramas he did comedies, different kinds of films,
and the Cohens do that to some extent. No Country for Old Men
is a very dark drama with darkly comedic overtones, but it's not a farcical
comedy like some of the films, although it has similar elements to films that
they do about kidnapping. And they have what they call their legal morons,
as John Malkovich puts it in burn After Reading, which is one of their
underrated films. They love people who are morons, and I used to think
didn't like comedies about stupid people. For example, sugarlined express Spielberg's early film
The first time I saw it a long time a good bother because the two
characters are pretty dumb and they get themselves into a lot of trouble. But
now I see it as a tragedy and it's very compassionate. It's a really
good film. And the Cohen brothers they treat people who do really stupid things,
and they're pretty ignorant on people in some ways. But they love their
characters. They are their characters. And one of them said, see,
we create all these people, and how could you not love them? He
said, it's a very weird concept to think of hating characters you create,
and there's such affection for these fools, and they're very human. They're like
us. We're all fools in some ways. And I think of Aristotle in
his Poetics, which is really the first screenwriting manual, written four thousand years
ago. I recommend people read this wonderful book. He even describes sitcoms.
He's so far ahead of the game. But he said that comedy is about
the worst in human nature, and tragedy is about the best in human nature,
which is a somewhat counterintuitive thought because you think of tragedy the best.
These are terrible people in tragedies. But what he means, I think is
when you have somebody like Macbeth or Lady Macbeth from Joel Cohen made a film
about without Ethan, they have a moment of truth. This is part of
the Aristotelian theory of tragedy. Toward the end of their crimes and overreaching,
they have a revelation about what they should have been, what human nature should
have been, and there's a regret and that that is instructive for the characters
and the audience, and so that shows what the best of human nature could
be. But comedy is mocking human flaws and vices. And we can talk
about get to raising Arizona in a minute, but I would just say my
book on the Crown Brothers the hold during human comedy. The way I decided
to structure it was to build it each chapter around a criticism of the Cohen
Brothers by their detractors. And they have a lot of them who just like
any working filmmakers. If you look back over the history of Safe Forward or
Wells or Kubrick or any of them, after they're gone, people understand them
better. But in their time they're more challenging, which is good. But
people attacked them for their combination of comedy and violence, for example, and
they call them cynical about their characters, and they criticize their penchant for caricature
and ethnic humor. And so each chapter answer is one of these strains of
criticism of the cones. But so to get to Raising Arizona, that's only
the second film, and I think it's the first kind of real Cohen Brothers
film. Blood Simple was their first, and it's a good small film noir
that they raised money for from dentists and other people in their hometown of Minnesota
and made this good, very dark film noir. And they showed their chops
and that established them as filmmakers, and then they were able to get money
for Raising Arizona. But Raising Arizona has this You can see all the Cohen
Brothers tropes and techniques and that film the rocket splendid comedy and extreme violence,
and it's all there. And the characters are moronic, lovable characters, but
they do terrible things, and it's got that kidnapping plot. They love.
Kidnapping, by its nature, disrupts everything. They made three films that are
big commercial hits, Fargo four actually Big Lebowski took a while to become a
hit, No Country for Old Men and True Grit, and Fargo is a
kidnapping plot similar to this one. A character has this dumb idea that a
kidnapping will solve all his problems that he gets into a World of Shit as
John Goodman. John Goodman puts it into Big Lebowski. So anyway, here
we are in racing Arizona in nineteen eighty seven. I'm surprised you didn't talk
about Crime Wave. Would you not consider that one of their written various films
that they didn't direct, And I think those films generally aren't terribly good.
They need the Cohen brothers as directors, and in the early days Joel was
accredited director and then but they always work together. They're a real team,
and they also produce and write their pictures. But later on they both took
directing credit. But there's quite a list of films that they've written but didn't
direct, Crime Wave, The Naked Man, which is really terrible, Gambit,
Unbroken, Spielberg's Bridges Spies Suberbicon. Bridges Spies is a pretty good film
in some ways, although it's flawed, I think because it's so different from
the real man. James Dunovan was quite quite ant, remarkably accomplished fellow and
Spielberg turned them into a kind of an ordinary lawyer, which is a problem.
But it's a good Cold War thriller with some comedy elements, and the
Crown Brothers did a rewrite, but just find films that they don't directly lose
some basic quality of control that they have over these disparate elements there films.
That's true of Crime Wave. I definitely read a lot of criticism of Raising
Arizona while I was doing my research, and so much of it was leveled
well against I guess two things, one the use of language and two.
And I think two relates to one the idea of them making fun of their
characters, which you already touched on, this whole idea of hating their own
characters and making fun of their own characters. And I think the idea of
the language, putting these high falutin words into their mouths was something that really
exacerbated it for people. My friend Sam Ham, who's a very good screenwriter
who wrote to Michael Keaton Batman film, for example, he pointed out to
me that they get this from Preston Sturgis. Preston Sturgis had has ordinary people
speaking very kind of ornate, flowery, high falutin language, and part of
the humor is like some thuggish characters about beautiful, ornate language. It's part
of the humor. The disparity between the person language is part of the fun
in the Sturgis film, and the Cones are very influenced by sturgis tremendous wordplay
and their films just like Sturgis, and also Solian's Travels, and particular the
wonderful ending of that film when the main character is a movie director who wants
to make serious capres, social dramas, and he winds up in a chain
gang. He goes out to see the world and he's in a black church
with a bunch of convicts, and he's desponded, and then they show a
cartoon and they're all roaring with laughter, and it's just it's a great tribute
to comedy. And the Cohen Brothers pay tribute to comedy. They love comedy.
It's a survival mechanism, and so they have that same strain, and
I think you just have to understand that that I quote some of my favorite
really ornate lines at one point, I love the character names in Raising Arizona,
that Nicholas Cage is called high and Holly Hunters add wonderful character names,
and at one point she tells him she's barren, the kind of children,
and this is the trigger for their kidnapping plot, and High explains to the
audience or insides were rocky place where my seed could find no purchase. I
love that light that's so formal and ornate coming from this kind of Yahoo character,
and it's very funny. But they just revel in the English language and
colorful ways of speaking. Bill or Wilder does that threats work too? And
I think that's the strength. If it doesn't match the perceived ideas of these
lower class characters, that doesn't bother me. Their films are not at all
realistic. They're extremely stylizing. That's a criticism too that I answer. I
have a whole chapter on that that some people say these rumps are too stylized,
as if realism is the only mode of making films. Visually, they're
extremely stylized, and they do all kinds of wonderful things visually, and that's
part of their worldview that they create around their characters. Was there any dissonance
around the idea of them going from blood Simple, which so many people saw
and was so influential, especially film students, to outrighte comedy where people okay
with that racing Arizona introduces some of the disturbing tropes that divide people. Jay
Horberman, who's a very good critic in some ways, is my whipping Boy
and the Cohen Brothers book. My son went to Stanford. One of his
English teachers said, one of the best rhetorical devices you can use is quote
somebody who don't agree with and then attack his point of view. Actually,
I learned that from the Jesuit priests, who I was taught by a market
university high school. Which you do in a debate is you get somebody else
to express their point of view and then you tear it apart. So I
do that with Horberman. He's very useful because he seems very obtuse towards the
Cohones. He just has some antipathy tournament. I quote Pauling Kale, who
hated quote, but she said of Bosley Crowther, the perennially clueless critic of
the New York Times reviewer, that you can always take his reviews and believe
the opposite because he's almost always wrong. And his review of Shoot the Piano
Player, the Trufo film. I quote because Trifo said Americans have trouble with
shifts of tone in a film, and Shoot the Piano Player has some of
the most radical shifts of tone. It goes from farce to tragedy, and
it's very much like a Cone film. And it came out in sixty two
in America, and it was not one of their more popular films, but
it's a tremendous film when you see it, and Crowther complained, or what
is this shift? It's farcical, and then there's somebody gets shot and you
know, what the heck is going on here? And then Doctor Strangelove came
out the following year, and he infamously attacked that, called it anti American.
That film changed my life, as it did probably a lot of people.
I was a different person literally from when I went into the local theater
that night in early sixty four, from the time I came out the first
time I saught Doctor strangel If. I didn't get it. I thought it
was a serious, scary thriller about nuclear war, which we were all terrified
by. And my best friend, who is really smart, kept chuckling all
the way through and he said, let's sit through it again. Back then
you could do that, and we sat through it and then I got it
that it's black comedy because we weren't prepared for black comedy back then, and
that still bothers and confuses people. I just thought a whole course on The
Manchurian Candidate, which came out in sixty two, which is a fantastic black
comedy, and people didn't quite get that film at the time. And Strangelove
divided people. But Strangelove taught me. It pretty much ended my respect for
authority, which I was raised to respect in the Catholic Church and the Democratic
Party, etc. I was much more skeptical when I came out. But
black comedy is a great mode for dealing with serious subjects. But it defends
people to some extent because it deals with the most serious things in the world,
nuclear annihilation, etc. And the Cohens don't shy away from working with
the more painful parts of life. And yeah, I think this is the
first kind of real Cohn Brothers stylized comedy or farst tragedy. It baffled some
people and started that divide. I still have a bit of a problem,
frankly, with one aspect of the film when they show that biker character who
is clearly an allegorical figure. He's you know, I could accept the fact
that he's not. It's not realistic, but it just seems like a heavy
handed device represents it seems like retribution or doom for these characters. And I
just think would be better sticking to the two main characters in their dilemma,
because part of what's going on in the film is Holly Hunter really wants children,
and she may not be very bright, but she's trying to stop her
foolish husband from a life of crime. And they kidnapped this child who's one
of quintuplets born to this rich family, and it's a very reckless, dumb
thing, and then they decide to return the baby. They try to rectify
the problem, but and there's an ironic happy ending too, and it even
shows them an old age. I was thinking it reminds me of Buster Keaton
ended college with a very strange coda, which is very moving and where it's
a frivolous college fun comedy, and then it ends with he marries this woman,
and there's a series of shots where they have children and they're older,
and then it ends with their tombstones. It's a very bizarre ending for a
comedy. But in the Cone Brothers film, it has this ironic coda where
they have this kind of Norman Rockwell family life, and I understand irony.
My favorite teacher in high school English teacher said never use irony because people won't
get it, and he was directed assess. But I use it anyway because
I love it. And the Cone Brothers use irony freely as well as black
comedy and one thing they do and I respect this a lot. I start
the book by talking about this. They don't give straight answers interviewers very much
there. They played dumb and mones syllabic and Joel was asked what it's like
to be a film director since beats throwing trash for a living. I love
that quote. But they just don't play the game of explaining their films to
audiences. They are somewhat more valuable than they go to Europe. They just
have a contempt for the American media, which I understand, but it reminds
me of John Ford, my favorite director. I interviewed him at the end
of his career and he frustrated me because he wouldn't talk seriously about his work
hardly at all, although he had moments of where he would say something candid,
but I wanted him to be very eloquent and describe as films. But
then I had a lot of respect for him over the years because he wanted
you to have your own opinions about his films. He didn't want to explain
it for you. And today, when a director makes a film, the
director gives a hundred interviews explaining everything as if for children, and that limits
the film to some extent. Some directors give very eloquent interviews, but it
tends to limit the discourse to some extent because artists is not always totally aware
of what he or she is doing, and people take their word for it
too much. This is what the film is. But the Cohens like john
Ford just say here, we made these films. Make of them what you
will, and I think that's a good trait. I'm sure you're familiar with
the fake critic that they employ sometimes to introduce their movies, maybe even do
commentaries. I can't remember the gentleman's name. I just remember Roderick James,
the fake editor that they use. Are they actually seeing things through the fake
critic or is it just on garbage? Is a wonderful character. We all
remember Big Lebowski played by Sam Elliott, who's the narrator, and he's ry
and wise. He's a cowboy kind of character, and he's forty an American
figure, and he's the chorus like in a Greek gramar. He makes sardonic
comments about human life, and in a way he's the voice the filmmakers.
But he's ironic and rye like the Crown Brothers are too, And he's not
trying to lay heavy philosophical views and you, but they are thoughtful philosophical views
and analyze the me. But he's got a kind of melancholy about human nature,
which is true of the Crown Brothers too. There helps give their comedy
the serious underpinnings that we watch these people do reckless, crazy things and we
regret what they're doing, but it's in the Aristotelian vein of what fools mortals
be, which is regretful, and their cautionary tales too in a sense that
like we think, wouldn't it be wonderful? For example, and No Country
for Old Men, which is based on the Carmack mccratic novel, Josh Brolin's
character comes across the drug deal gone bad and everybody instead, and he finds
this suitcase full of money, and one thing you shouldn't do is take up
the suitcase and walk away, but he's so dumb he thinks, oh wow,
great, that made my big score. I can walk away with money,
and that gets him into a world of pain and people come after him
and trying to kill him, and it's just terrible. So that kind of
it's partly what the public likes to see in movies is wish fulfillment of wouldn't
it be wonderful if I or we're a millionaire or whatever and or rich and
famous, and then you find out maybe it wouldn't be so wonderful after all.
That's part of what comedy does for us, and drama serious drama.
There are questionary tales of dramas. But part of it is when we go
to see a movie, we're safe in a sense that we're not. It's
like having a dream. You wake up and you think, oh my god,
I'm glad that was just a dream. I didn't really get trapped in
that situation. And that's part of the pleasure of horror films were scared of
our wits or whatever. We realized we were just watching it at a movie
theater, and the Cohen Brothers have affinities with horror as well, and that's
part of the artifice of filmmaking. I like to that raising Arizona, it
was a switch of genre, but that feels like there are so many genres
in there. Very interesting thing about the Cohen Brothers when they're asked about their
influences, they don't mention filmmakers. They have obvious debts to Kubrick and Wells
and Sturgis, you could those are pretty clear. But they talk about writers,
and they talk about James M. Kane and Nashville Hammett and Raymond Chandler
and Flannery O'Connor, who was one of the great American short story writers.
And I realized that O'Connor's very late story Revelation, which she wrote was published
in early sixty four, and she died later that year. She was dying
when she wrote this story, so it's for testament summing up her view of
life is a profound influence. Crohn Brothers and the Ending A Ballad of Buster
Scruggs, which I think is a great film, And in my book I
have a whole long analysis of it, and it's several different films Western stories
of different kinds. It's an anthology of the types of films the Cone Brothers
make, from Total Forest to Total Tragedy and everything in between. But the
ending is quite cryptic. It's a bunch of people crammed into a stagecoach en
route, and it's clearly unreal and stylized. You can tell through the sky
in the background, and it's a microcosm of humanity and this little stagecoach and
they're all squabbling, and there's an older lady, Tyne Daily, who's very
superior to everybody. She feels superior, and she's putting people down, and
she's horrified by these characters she's with. And then they wind up going to
this mysterious hotel which is clearly the afterworld. They're ascending steps into this hotel.
They're going into whatever the afterworld is. And the Cones, unlike O'Connor,
she was a staunch cath like a Nikon's at a Jewish upbringing. They're
very skeptical about religion in the afterworld. But Revelation is very similar, I
think to that ending, because in Revelation, it's about a doctor's waiting room,
which is like purgatory or the waiting room before you go to heaven.
And all these characters are crammed into this tiny space. And there's this heavy
set woman O'Connor deals with really bad people like the Coen Brothers, off and
doing, and she's very smug and superior and putting people down. And then
there's this teenage girl who is very emotion O'Connor surrogate named Mary Grace, and
she's college student, very bright, but she's grotesque, and she's reading a
book called Human Development, and at one point she just can't take it anymore
and she hurls the book at this awful old lady and attacks her. When
she attacks her, she says, go back to Hell where you come from,
your old warthog. So in this film, Ed says to the biker,
give me that baby, you ward hawk from Hell, very similar to
O'Connor. And here you have Raising Arizona early in their career, and Balladibuster
Scrugs, which to date is their last film together. They've gone their separate
ways as artists. I don't know if it's permanent or temporary. We don't
know. Joel made Macbeth on his own and Ethan has been working on projects.
And it's not that they don't get along. From what we understand,
they just wanted to try their separate ways. And they said that when they
started out, they didn't envision themselves as having a whole career as partners.
They're just brothers making a film and one thing led to another. But you
got their early film direct reference to O'Connor's revelation late film direct reference. And
O'Connor deals with some of the worst people in human nature, and she's exploring
that. And she was one who envisioned her audience as godless. She was
not writing for a Catholic audience. She didn't want to be seen as a
Catholic writer. Very limiting thing, but she was very Catholic. Tommy Lee
Jones, who's Cohen Brothers actor in No Country for Oldman, wrote his thesis
on Arcounter at Harvard and he was asked, what does your thesis say about
her? He said, she's Catholic. That's pretty laconic, but she was
very Catholic. But she didn't preach in her book. She's not trying to
proselytize for religion. She didn't see that as the artist's point of view.
She's writing about vice and human failings and then letting the reader make up his
or her own mind about them. And the Cohen Brothers do that in a
sense too. They don't moralize their lecture about their characters, and they don't
have somebody sitting there judging them, which is not the function of artists about
raising questions and not giving answers. I think today we've lost some of the
understanding of that because people want films to explain everything, and studios try to
sanitize characters. My friend Stuart Gordon, a light director. He made a
film of The Wonderful ice Cream Suit for Disney, and that's played by Ray
Bradbury, about a bunch of Latino men in la and nineteen forty one and
they pull their money and they buy a beautiful white suit and there's seven men
and each one gets to wear it one day a week and it's this sort
of magical costume. It's this very charming play. So he made this film
for Disney and Stewart teld me one of the executives, do they have to
be Mexicans? That's what's the stories about. That's the kind of idiocy you
get from studios, and probably too many directors to see. No, that'll
make them angle as people could relate to them where this is idiotic. But
their Coen brothers have said, we don't worry about this kind of stuff,
and they have their ethnic humor. That's the kind of thing studios get nervous
about when you have characters who are racist. They think, oh, they
won't like that character if the character is a racist. But they deal with
human life and all its messy reality, and part of what I think is
important about them. We live in this film world today in which the Hollywood
film industry, which I have spent my whole life writing about and love in
some ways, has really degenerated into utter garbage. Generally, once in a
great while you have a good film that emerges from that system. It's usually
some director like scris Asier Spielberger's got a lot of clout from over the years,
manages to make Lincoln or Killers of the Flower Moon, which sounds really
good and it is. It's a struggle making a good film in the system,
and most of the films now are mindless pizzas. For twelve to twenty
four year old males, and that we've gone back to what time Gunning calls
the cinema attractions film. I think the motto for modern American films could be
taken from Tennessee Williams streetcar named Desire, where Blanche says, I don't want
realism, I want magic. And when I first started teaching films in around
two thousand, the students were obsessed with realism. Everything was realism. Is
this film realistic or not? In Realism is just a style that changes from
time to time. But you don't hear that anymore. They don't talk about
a realism. They just talk about special effects. And if I never see
another CGI affect in my life, I will probably be happy. But obviously,
sometimes if it's subtle, if you're making a period film, you can
enhance things, and you can remove TV aerials and a lot of things much
more easily than you could before. But a lot of films today are basically
animated films on a big scale, and the Cohne Brothers are different from that.
And my point is that their personal filmmakers in the system that no longer
encourages personal filmmaking or even narrative filmmaking as much as it used to it.
I found out in my research the way they do that is most of their
funding comes from Europe. They're very big in France. The French love their
Cohne Brothers, just like they loved a lot of American directors in the fifties
that we didn't take seriously, like Hitchcock and Hack and Jerry Lewis and people
like that. And so they get a lot of their money from foreign sources
and that gives them a lot of freedom, and they just don't played the
studio game. And they started out being totally independent. As I mentioned,
Blood Simple was they went around and auditioned in living rooms in Minneapolis and talked
about their plans with a lot of people and got five thousand here and ten
thousand there, and they made a film and it made money. And they
have a pretty good track record of making money. They don't have too many
films that are bombs, and then once in a while they make a film
that is very popular. I think Fargo the reason that is the film that
is the most beloved Coen Brothers film, and I think it's because you have
this lovable central character played by Francis McDormand, who's Joel's wife, and she's
one of the anchors of their universe. And she plays this marvelous character of
this pregnant police chief in a small town and she's intrepid and selves this crime
and she's just a wonderful character. But she represents integrity, certain human values,
just Tommy Lee Jones as lawman does in our country for old men.
He's a sympathetic figure too, and that's one reason perhaps that film is successful.
You have somebody that you can relate to and care about despite all the
evil and violence that goes on around them. And in both cases they have
some eloquent lines that are laconic but moving about I just don't understand the kind
of evil that goes on in the world. They both have to deal with
mindless serial killing, which is one of the things that we deal with every
day, along with school shootings and that kind of stuff as shootings. Both
are trying to keep the law but as of shoot saying so that's a very
modern theme. But so they have this appeal to audiences and they I hope
they make some more films together. But Carter Burwell, who's there composer says
they have tons of scripts they wrote that they haven't felt, so maybe these
will be filmed. I felt the Cohen Brothers over the years. Yeah,
they're successful with the public, and they get to make films regularly, and
some are successful commercially. But they were they were still not taken all that
seriously by a lot of the reviewers who brush them off. I think just
because they're too quirking individualistic. It's easy to write people off. But that's
what an artist is, and we need more of those in our culture.
I had written part of that in a collection of my work called Two Chairs
for Hollywood, which came out in twenty seventeen. That's when I decided the
Cohen Brothers needed a thorough critical review, and so I wrote a monograph on
them for that book, and I decided to spin it off into a book
of its own because Two Chairs has been selling pretty well, but I wanted
more attention for the Cohen Brothers part of the book. And I thought Buster
Scruggs was really a great film, and so I thought, okay, I'll
write a critical, in depth, critical study of that film, which seems
like a culminating work. I think it was designed that way. They said
they'd been working on these various Western stories off and on for maybe twenty years,
and they didn't know what to do with them because they were short,
and they decided to do an anthology. And it seems they haven't quite confirmed
this that it was their testament culminating project that sums up who they are as
artists at that point. And then they decided to go their separate ways artistically,
and so it seemed like a perfect time. I didn't realize when I
was finalizing the Cohen Brothers book that they were going to have that split,
So it turned out a perfect time to deal with them. It's like when
I went to see forty, was retiring in a perfect time to write about
john Ford. And sometimes I have my finger on the zeitgeist, but I
think the secret, frankly, is to be out of step with conventional wisdom.
Like Mike Wellington and I saw The Searchers in the early seventies and we
thought, what a great film, and it was forgot and ignored, and
we wrote a long critical piece of rand in Sight and Sound. It was
one of the most influential things I've done, and it brought the film suddenly
back into prominence. People thought, oh, yeah, this is a great
American film. It is. Some people think it's the great American film.
So it suddenly catapulted the searchers onto the Site and Sound Critics poll in nineteen
seventy two. It had never been on that pole before, and then it
started rising in the poll. But that came because we were away out of
step with the conventional wisdom. We just saw something we loved and cared about
and we felt it needed more attention. And that's what I do when I'm
looking for a book, to write that something has been neglected or misjudged or
misunderstood, and I'm exploring that now and what should I do next to it?
But I'm just wrapping up the forward project, and I will do the
update that first Wales book, which was a book very close to my heart
because I was writing that when I was in my college years as working as
at dishwasher. I spent three years writing that book, and or was it
four years. I was living right around the corner from where Wells had lived
when he spent a year in Madison at age ten. He was going to
public school, great school. I didn't realize he was living right around the
corner. I was in a student rooming house and he was living in an
apartment in nineteen twenty five, and he had gone to a school. There
was a longer there. So one of the reasons I was attracted to him
was he's from Wisconsin, like I wasn't. So I've written three books on
him. So anyway, keeping these old books alive and reevaluating parts of them,
and that's part of what you do too. You have to be a
ton of your subjects as they keep working or is their reputations evolved. And
also with Wells, his career is still fully active because we keep finding new
Wells things that the other side of the wind. I spent five years acting
it, and I spent forty eight. It took forty eight years to get
it out, and I was trying to raise money to finish it. I
was part of that relay race to help it get finished, and then I
was a consultant on the completion and we finally got it out. It was
just a miracle in twenty eighteen. And there's still Wells films that I've seen
almost everything he did except Don Quixote. I haven't seen much of that.
I've seen about an hour or that maybe in Jonathan Rosenbaum is seeing more than
anybody else. It's in four different archives in Europe. That's the Welles film
that really needs restoration. And I don't have forty eight years left to work
on that film. But if there's anybody out there, hey, guys,
gals, get on too. Don Quiyote, it's another fiendishly complicated project to
finish it, but really needs finishing. I saw a forty minute assembly of
footage the Costa Govris put together for the Cinema Tech Front says, and it
looks wonderful. And there was this awful version put on ninety two by Jess
Franco, who was this hack director Wales work with. He put out this
really awful looking version that was cobbled together from Doobie Prince and he mixed in
a documentary Wells made on Spain and it's just appalling. But Costa Gavras had
access to original footage and it looked gorgeous, and that was Wells's dream project
for a long time. Peter Bogdanovich told me way back around nineteen seventy he
had seen a lot of Don Quixote and Rome Wells showed him parts and he
said it's Welles's most forty in film, which is true. He loved john
Ford above all directors, and so that's the project. But there are other
things too. Stefan Drassler, the Munich Film Archive, has put together collections
of scenes from films that weren't finished and thirty minute versions of The Dreamers and
other films, and he's restored The Deep, although Oyakoda wouldn't let him release
his restoration in a Deep. It has some technical problems. But you have
to go to Europe to see some of these films. They're mostly at the
Munich Film Museum. And I keep saying Stefan put these out in a box
set. But there are a lot of problems with Welles's work in terms of
ownership and finances and everything. And it's a shame because once in a great
while they play in archives in the US. Part of my Raisin Dad at
this point in my life is I want to see these films I've been hearing
about my whole life. That's why I wrote my book on Lubits. How
did Lubitsch do It? I wanted to see all these films, and so
I had to go to Europe a couple of times and see the films.
It was just a marvelous experience. And now I'm doing audio commentaries for Keeno
Lerber and Simlent German Lubitsch films, some of which have been never seen in
the US or rarely seen. The doll I don't want to be a man,
Madam Duberrie, the oyster Princess Meyer from Berlin when I was dead.
Some of these have come out in the US before, but they're beautifully restored,
and I've been doing commentaries. So that's part of what you do,
is a film and story into as you help these films get a wider audience.
Professor McBride, thank you so much for your time. This has been
so great talking with you as always. Thank you, Mike. It's really
wonderful talking to you because you're such a maybe and you know so much about
child history and you always ask these good, challenging questions to give me.
Thank you, so I really appreciate the time. All Right, we are
back and we were talking about raising arizone out and yeah, there's not a
whole lot more for me to say about this one. There's one great review
lineed, I wish I would have written down who said this about this movie
when it came out an episode of Heehaw directed by an set a mean crazy
doorson Welles. That's what's one, easily, because that was the other thing
you can find on YouTube is Ebert going, yeah, just not loving it,
No, not loving it at all. He just really did not like
this. And yeah, to your point from earlier, Keith, not a
lot of critics enjoyed this. I think Cameron Kale and Sarah's they were both
coming down at it. Yeah, it just really wasn't making any friends.
But but look how common that one is. I mean, look how many
of our of the movies that are twenty years later are the classics critically very
divide. I mean the Kubrick film that they referenced Doctor strangel I remember the
New York Time with view of that horrible and like, this isn't funny,
and you can't make jokes about a nuclear war and what president would be this
incompetent and America would never have a president that with this much of a walking
joke, and you know, just it's so funny when you go back and
look at reviews of things that we now think as as great works of art,
but not as films. It's books, it plays, it's paintings,
it's critics of the moment are rarely the ones that get to have the final
word, because time is what, really, I think, unveils what has
meaning and what has value, and just because something works in that moment,
you know, and a lot of people want to see it as little to
do with what's gonna last. And I think what the Cohen tab is richness
of the world they create is what laughs. And if you think about it,
in almost every art it's really richness is a big thing. I mean,
novels, whatever. And to me it's like, whether you know they're
like James Joyce or something, it's like, it's just such a rich world
that they give us over and over and over again, and that lets people
return over and over. You know, a lot of movies are trific,
but they're very simple. They are what they are, They do what they
do, and once you see that, there really is never need to see
it again. You can see it twenty five years later and yeah, I
saw that, and it's just like I remember it, and it was a
Cohen brother movie. I find every time I go back to just about every
one of their movies. There's something new, there's a feeling I didn't have
before, or a detail, but but even sometimes a whole emotional thing that
you realize, oh wow, I missed that or and that richness. It's
what's great storyteller. And film doesn't happen enough of that. I mean,
your novels have it more, but even novels, it's special. And to
me, they're like that great richness that you know, that that makes all
the sorting through a lot of draws worth it. I hadn't read much Dickens
and I just did a pro I just read a collection of all of Dickens
novels and it took me two years, but I mean he had that.
It was just like, it's so much fun, and each one of them
you're like just in this world of amazing characters and people you sort of forget
come back and and to me, that's what the Cohens do in film.
And they combine every aspect. They combine the visual and the music in this
down the productive design and the writing and the acting, and it's just like
everything comes together and it happens over and over again in their films where you
just are like, Okay, that was amazing, and then you see the
next one in that one's amazing too. Thinking about this in terms of The
Big Lebowski, because while I was watching that, I was thinking, Oh,
in a week, I'm going to be recording about Raising Arizona, and
just to see Jeff Lebowski has at least two dream sequences, and he's running
away from he's got castration anxiety, and that with the Nihilists with their big
scissors coming after him, I think Lenny Smalls is a much more real threat,
but of course it's two different movies. You need it the Nihilists to
be a joke whereas he or you need Lenny Smalls to be very much a
real threat. The way that he at one point shows up in a big
explosion with black smoke and then comes brawing through that on his motorcycle really works.
They make him so threatening. Appreciate that they have that prosthetic on his
nose, so it makes him sound stuffed up, but it really lends that
whole idea of him being pert bloodhound, and the way that he catches that
fly in front of Nathan's seniors face. I just love that little detail of
that that great extreme close up, and that performance is so great, and
they directed it and because he's so low key, you know, so often
a character like that would be busy proving how menacing they are all the time,
and it would just be a hat on a hat, and they kind
of all got including the actor, but I think they would, you know,
between the clothes and the motors that he doesn't have to do anything,
he doesn't have to. So consequently by being played underplaying by talking quietly,
but it's so much more fun and great because he doesn't have to. It's
all proven for him, and so we can talk about his childhood and talk
about being sold, and you know, he's so innately intents that it's more
scary and funny because the actor's not busy trying to make it scary and fun.
And that reminds me of obviously, a serious film is No countrysh old
Men, where you have the Anton Sugar character who he doesn't get loud,
he just talks very quietly, how are you okay? Flip the coin heads?
Your tails? Just very flat, and that's what makes the menace,
as you were saying, it's that understanding that there's something behind that that they
don't need to show you it. They don't need to be here. Yeah,
somebody, somebody really scary doesn't have to prove to you that they're scared
though his entrance where all the small things aren't being punished, when he's shooting
the rabbit and that poor little lizard, when the flower catches fire as he
pass his poet. I love that, And I love how he just shows
up at the hole that he shows up at, the that he's got the
scent of those guys and follows that. And I don't must be a chemical
thing that they did. But when he comes into the furniture store and he
lights that match and it's a trail of smoke down down the woods that goes
like see the mat chipping lip and you get to see the trail of smoke.
Like it's just little things. It's little things like that, Yeah,
the way the cigar and the match both just appear in the sand. But
also the thing of like when he's killing the sweet little bunny and the flower,
and he never he doesn't cackle, he doesn't do all the villain things.
It's almost like doesn't even it doesn't even affect him anymore. He just
kills because that's what he does, because he's like the angel of death.
But and that again is what makes it so much more funny and creepy and
interesting. Is that because if he shot the bunny and something and he was
like you know, it would be like, oh, yeah, I've seen
that. But the fact that he does that, and then it's like he's
not even registering that he's doing it. He's just killing stuff because that's what
he does. That's what makes us get pulled in as opposed to him lean
back, you know, Okay, I get it, he's steer it.
And that feels again like that connection to the character and No Country for Old
Men, because it's like we don't really understand why he's there. He just
seems to be outlowing this path and killing in his which just seems to be
what he does. It's like we don't really get what is his motivation?
Why is he doing this? Now he has a loose motivation, but it
doesn't seem to be like that's the real driver there. I'm trying to think
of other great villains in Coen Brothers works. Jerry Lunford, maybe the Swede,
poor BUSHEMI especially when he's cut the hole in his cheek and he's just
all oh man, just all gory in that movie, he's paying for it.
Yeah, that's rough. No, I can't think of any other ones
that are similar. And it's only just in Keith bringing it up that I
could see that connection between those two Carriacs and completely like Goofball and real high
drama. But they seem to be of a similar nature in that way.
Although charming villains that let you in in a way by the by their energy
you know, whether it's sugar or whether you know, but even lady killers.
I mean, it's very different. But again, you know, Hanks
is that kind of soft spoken. You know, it's funny as opposed to
being terrifying. But yet that thing that people who do bad things are interesting
if they're not acting bad, you know that that's that's like way more interesting.
And to be honest, it's probably a lot more to reality because I
think a lot of people aren't just sitting there playing with their mustache and sinister
Oh I'm so evil. No, they're just living their lives and doing their
thing. They just happen to do fucked up shit. He's not really a
villain, but to think about John Goodman's character and Barton Fink, and again
he's supernatural the way that he summons the fire and that he's there in the
hallway with all that fire around him, or he shows up again and no
brother, where art thou as the clan leader the cyclops with the one eye,
And yeah, they don't really go from the one lone villain because there's
a lot of villains and oh brother, where art thou? A lot of
them, And the same thing with Big Lebowski. There's a lot of villains
in that, including I would say, the titular Big Lebowski. And there's
like a little hierarchy of their villains. I mean, they'll often have a
lot of people who are morally questionable or do bad things or but there's always
like, well, there's this one, and then this one is even worse,
and this one is even worse than that. This one's even more scary
than that one. Yeah, and that's often a lot of how their world
works is that instead of the one villain, which is a traditional movie thing,
that they are much more layer after layer after layer, and there's like
this solar system of darkness and you know, whether the films are funny or
serious, and that leads you to also to injoy questionable who's really bad?
And you know who's the victim and who's the victimizer? And it's it's one
of the things that they do that's really interesting is give you characters who are
who do bad things, but they're not as bad as this other character.
And then you have to get caught in that whole. I mean, well,
High is that character. I mean High is the ethan or criminal,
but in this world he's the good guy. And that's what they go to.
There that that's the place they go a lot. You know, even
their heroes usually have regally deep, deep flaws, sometimes scary sometimes, you
know, but but their heroes are flawed human beings that the man who wasn't
there? And then it gets to this whole questionable what is villainy? What
is moral responsibility? What is And yet it never feels good for you.
I mean that's the thing that you're talking about, you know about the velocity
major you know, co writing, and but somehow it's so genius is they
is all this stuff, But you never feel like, oh, I'm at
this movie and I'm getting good essen, you know, but you do,
yeah though, you walk out of the movies and there are films and you
think about guilt and responsibility and good and evil and love and meaning, but
you never feel like it's being imposed on you. It's just invites you to
think about that stuff. To me, it feels, as we got into
it that someone probably could write a book on the philosophy aspects of these movies
and referencing what kind of moral quandaries these characters represent, or certain philosophical arguments
and certain philosophers and all of that stuff. I would read that that's actually
a really good idea. Even just thinking about these invincible, supernatural villains that
they have. I seem to remember that Walsh took a lot of punishment in
Blood Simple, that it was maybe he felt a little unstoppable, old terminator
esque. And then you get to that interesting fight that they have in Hudsucker
Proxy with the old man that's been narrating the African American gentleman and then the
guy who's working on the clock, and just all of that stuff going on,
and how clock time really can be controlled by Hudsucker Tower. I love
that stuff, and I won't even go Near Middlers Crossing because it's been way
too long since I've seen that one. But it's full of the same richness
and look. And then there's the ones that are very early, like Serious
Man, which is a film that there's that people don't talk about that much
but riefly talk about philosophy and richness and moral complexity and yet still completely entertaining.
But man, that's like that one's like a like a college thesis.
How I was talking about raising Arizona spoke to me as someone who has raised
working poor and a friend of mine who I worked with the public radio,
he goes as a Midwestern Jew. A Serious Man really spoke to me something
about that movie that it just felt like home. It felt like it was
speaking to me to your point from earlier, Keith, All of the worlds
that these guys create feels like I could go walking around in whether it's true
grit burn after reading whatever it is, it feels like I could just open
a door and walk into this world because it feels so fully formed. It's
funny. Somebody once worked with a cinematographer sort of wonderful thing, which is
you know that a film's working when you feel like you could follow any extra
or any person with one line and make the whole movie about them. But
we're choosing not to. We're cheating up all at the store. But but
when when you're shooting is Dome, when you feel that, you feel like
everything is as it's a complete life, That's when he said, as somebody
filming it, he knows it's good. And I feel like that's what the
coins always seem to have. It's like the person in the background, you
could move, You could pan over and do the next twenty minutes on that,
and they choose not to. But you could. And that's what that's
what they bring. That's that's amazing. It's that sense that every part of
that world is as full and fleshed out as the parts were choosing to see.
I would love to see what the hell's going on with Glenn and Dot
what's their story? Yeah, Nathan and Florence Arizona. Hell, even the
guy with the jugs magazine to be in store, the old feller that sells
them of the non funny balloons. You would talk about visual staging. That
kind of reminded me of No Country Old Men, where he goes into the
convenient store, and just the way it's shot, like the certain the editing
scheme. So I was having flashbacks to that was I was watching it too.
All right, let's go ahead and take another break and play a preview
for next week's show. Here comb Dennis, and he's such a nice boy.
She's such a sweet girl. You've never met two nicer kids. Still
scare the light out of you in Pretty Poison, Dear Dennis, clean cut,
hard working, the boy next door. Give me two weeks, two
weeks to keep my noly in Dennis, what we're talking about my life,
mister rouse. Now we're talking about my one on only life. And sweet
Suanne, a real all American dum. I eat him twice, he started
again, and then I bucked him on the side of the head. Together
they share the joys of being young and Blie Perkins is Dennis, Tuesday world
is Suanne. They're just a couple of crazy, mixed up, unloving,
homicidal kids in Pretty Poison. Exciting. That's right. We'll be back next
week. What they look at Pretty Poison. Until then, I want to
thank my co host Rob and Keith. So Keith, what is happening in
your world? Sir, oh, you asked this, and I never have
anything great. I'm doing what all independent filmmakers do, which is I'm out
trying to put together money in deals. And depending on what time of what
day you asked me, I'll say it's going well or it's not going well.
But other than that, I'm trying to really just enjoy my life and
feel lucky to have a wife that I love, and friends and family and
appreciate it all and no. Work keeps going doing whatever happens to do,
and Brown bond by yourself, Sir, I am finishing up my masters,
so I'll be spending the summer writing my big Campstone paper and I'll be happy
to be done with that. It's been basically since August of twenty twenty,
I've been taking anywhere between three to five classes every semister. So after about
three years of solid school and three different degrees completed, I am now ready
to say goodbye school and I have to go out and do the real world
and actually do real work, which means I may actually have time to watch
more than five movies a year. The five movies being that I think I've
been on the show with you for Thank you so much guys for being on
the show. Thanks to everybody for listening. If you want to hear more
of me shooting off my mouth, check out some of the other shows I
work. They are all available at weirdingwaymedia dot com. Thanks especially to our
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