To prepare for the new Coen Brothers film you might want to brush up on the movies of the time. Hail, Caesar! is set in a fictionalised version of the 50s Hollywood studio system and plays out scenes from several genres strongly reminiscent of actual films and stars of the era. Or you could take the easy way out, as recommended by the Coen Brothers themselves. “You might just want to go on YouTube and see the great clip of the dance number or the aquatic number,” says Joel. “That’s probably sufficient. The rest of it might bore you out of your skull.”
So why bother playing homage? This being the Coens, Hail, Caesar! is not as straight forward a tribute. The on-camera scenes — like Scarlett Johansson in an aquatic musical number or Channing Tatum as a tap dancing sailor — honor the razzle dazzle, but once the cameras stop rolling, real life murkiness emerges. An out-of-wedlock pregnancy (a scandal for the time) and suspected Commie connections all act as reminders not to get wildly swept up in the kitsch big studio shtick.
At the center of it all stands Hollywood fixer Eddie Mannix, played by Josh Brolin, who’s charged with making all the bad stuff go away — but he isn’t exactly sure if he wants to stick around himself. It’s all a farce, basically, but he’s deep in, in a way you suspect the filmmaking brothers — 17 films in — are too. i-D sat down with Ethan and Joel to try to talk seriously about all the silliness.
Was there one genre that kick started the story?
Ethan: We started with the George Clooney character and the sandal epic [a Biblical story reminiscent of Ben-Hur]. Starting with that premise, we thought it’s about a day in the life of the Josh Brolin character, who is confronted with the problem of Clooney’s character being kidnapped and other problems.
Joel: There was an early thought about this idea of a Western movie star who is asked to go into a different kind of picture. He’s only capable of being a cowboy so fails.
Have you ever worked with an actor where that problem arose? Of them not being capable of moving genres?
J: Not really, because it’s less of a thing now that someone is purely identified with a certain genre. It’s a more archaic idea that someone would purely do Westerns. I can’t say we haven’t been confronted with an actor where they have hit their limit [laughs] that’s as far as they can go. That’s not a completely alien situation.
One of the recurring plot devices of a Coen Brothers film is a kidnapping, which pops up again here when Clooney’s idiotic leading man gets snatched by Communists. What’s the appeal of a steal?
J: In a weird sort of way I’m as surprised as any one else that we keep going back to this. You know how Norse sagas are all about gift giving? It’s our own version of that. There’s a genre and stories you might spend your whole life telling. You might see the universe in one particular kind of trope. We seem to keep going back because it seems to point the way in terms of plot possibilities. And in some ways you need to limit yourselves, because if you can do anything [in a plot] you can’t figure out what to do.
Hail, Caesar! touches — as many of your films do — on the nature of art. Does the thinking behind it run on similar lines to Inside Llewyn Davies, where the singer gets tangled up in questions of art versus commerce?
J: They were less tortured then in Hollywood by that question, certainly less than the folk scene. The folk scene was concerned with issues of authenticity and how that was tied up to ideas of real artistic expression instead of just selling out and being commercial and poppy.
E: But even in this world, Hollywood 1951, in a big studio no-one was interested in art. They just didn’t think in those terms. Maybe a few people did — a few weirdos. But even the Ralph Fiennes character [an English director of 20s set parlor dramas] is not interested in art so much as quality. Like the main guy in our movie, they wanted to do a good job, they didn’t want to be “artists.”
Which do you think is more important — what you do or why you do it?
E: Why you do it is largely unexamined.
J: Right. It’s more of a puzzle. You can make assessments about the quality of your work in terms of whether you done a good job by your own yardstick or whatever you want to use.
Do you read your own reviews?
E: Oh yeah, I really enjoy them especially the bad ones. Not all of them because there’s so many…
J: Can’t read all of them.
E: But I kind of troll through the bad ones.
And how do you feel about the bad ones?
J: I’ll try to do better next time.
E: I feel chastened.
Is there anything from that era of the Hollywood studio that you’d like to see now?
J: There’s something kind of beautiful about the whole factory of it all.
E: Knowing what you’re doing with the assignment is great. We have to come up with our own assignment which is a bit of a pain in the ass to be frank. To be told today you’re going here and it’s a gangster film; there’s something great about that. I say that knowing we don’t have to do it.
J: You could thrive that way; I’m not sure we could. There’s something beautiful about it as a factory. You have all these highly-skilled artists and technicians who can accomplish whatever you want in the most beautiful way. It’s a machine to realize those things. It’s still there, but not quite in the same way.
Hail, Caesar! is in UK cinemas starting today.
Credits
Text Colin Crummy