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Joel and Ethan Coen write and direct A Serious Man, a tragicomedy about Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg), a physics professor from Minneapolis whose wife, Judith (Sari Lennick), asks for the religious divorce called a "ghet" when she falls in love with their neighbor, Sy (Fred Melamed). Larry has a daughter, Sarah (Jessica McManus), who steals money from him, and a son, Danny (Aaron Wolff) whose Bar Mitzvah is approaching and often smokes pot. As Larry's life continues to fall apart all around him in many different ways, he consults three different rabbis in hope of interpreting a meaning to all of the tragic chaos. Joel and Ethan Coen have previously writen/directed Burn After Reading, No Country for Old Men, Intolerable Cruelty, The Man Who Wasn't There, The Ladykillers, The Big Lebowski, O Brother, Where Art Thou?, Fargo, Miller's Crossing, Raising Arizona, Barton Fink and Blood Simple. It was a real privilege to interview them together. Focus Features releases A Serious Man on October 2nd, 2009 at the Angelika Film Center, Clearview 1st and 62nd, and Lincoln Plaza Cinemas. NYC MOVIE GURU: How did you find the right balance between entertaining the audience and provoking them intellectually? EC: It’s kind of all about entertainment, really, but people are entertained by different things. I watch movies with my kid who’s really entertained by certain action movies that I find very dull and when we sit down to think about what’s going to entertaining to us, it just tends to go off in a different direction. I don’t think it’s so much a question of saying, “How are we going to be thought provoking for the audiences?” It’s about this character and this and this happens to him and it’ll be funny or whatever. JC: “This’ll be good, this’ll get ‘um going, this’ll work, this’ll be interesting.” [We] never ever [thought], “this will be thought provoking.” NYC MOVIE GURU: How have your childhood experiences living in Jewish community influenced the film? EC: We grew up in a Jewish community in the suburban Midwest, so in that respect, it’s where we’re from. I’m sure we wouldn’t have made this movie in our twenties because the environment when and where we grew up than it was to us as people in their twenties and maybe even thirties. In terms of the narrative and what happens to the people in it, that’s not autobiographical [or] have to do with our experiences, but the context does. JC: Distance not only gives you a certain perspective about it, but also the whole period nature of it as you get farther and farther away gives [something that’s], sort of, alien or exotic. EC: Alienism is too strong [of a word to use]. It’s something we never would have said living there as kids. Getting some distance away from it makes you think, “Man, Jews on the plains. That’s odd.” JC: You don’t think that when you’re living in the middle of it. When you’re living in the middle of it, it’s just your life. NYC MOVIE GURU: Are you surprised that The Big Lebowski has such a strong following that there’s a Big Lebowski Convention? EC: We don’t really think about it much. The whole thing is as odd to us as it to other people probably, if not odder. Somebody was more surprised than we were. NYC MOVIE GURU: How has your perspective on Judaism evolved throughout your life? JC: I don’t know if it evolved. When you’re a kid, all of that religious and language instruction is just a chore. You don’t want to go to Hebrew school or shul on the weekend. Now neither of us is observant. I don’t if as a religion it’s that much of a live issue for us. EC: It’s part of your identity inescapably and part of the culture that you’re from. JC: It is what it is. We’re Jews. That hasn’t changed either. EC: Whenever you’re telling a story, you’re always looking for a, sort of, specificity in terms of the context of the story. In this case, it was something that we have a lot of experience with. It doesn’t need to be, but in this case it was. [We] put it in the context of a Jewish community and a man going to see rabbis, but, beyond that, we’re making up characters however they seem, sort of, appropriate, interesting or entertaining for the specific story. It’s not designed to say, “I want to do this because it’s going to say this about Jews or Judaism.” JC: We have this character who’s beset by all these problems and going to his religious leaders for his relief, but it’s just a story thing. No doubt, there are people who’d make a story about a guy who goes to his religious leaders for his relief and gets enlightened. That’s fine, but, God! We would never make that story. NYC MOVIE GURU: How tricky was it for you to come up the unconventional ending? EC: All the loose ends are tied up literally, but you want to have something that, to us, feels like a conclusion. Their endings are tricky. They’re not necessarily going to feel like a conclusion for everybody. They don’t, in any context, unless they’re very obvious. Those really obvious ones can be perfectly satisfying, but completely unmemorable and not very interesting endings in other ways. Take the ending of No Country for Old Men, which was the one that a lot of people had issues with. We ended it in exactly the way that the book ended. When I read that ending, I thought it was perfect. They’re not conventional endings, but, often, conventional endings are, in a different way, very, very unsatisfying. NYC MOVIE GURU: Have you considered making a sequel to any your films? EC: There is one sequel that we want to make and we talked to John Turturro about this. We told him that when he gets old enough we want to do a movie called Old Fink which is about Barton Fink decades later. We told John that we won’t do it until he’s bout 25 years older. NYC MOVIE GURU: What film are you working on next? JC: We’re working on an adaptation of [the novel] True Grit . Main Page Interviews Menu Alphabetical Menu Chronological Menu ______________________________________________________ |
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