There's Gonna Be Blood" In "No Country for Old Men," the protagonist, a Texas ranger, is investigating a murder when he bumps into a man who's looking for a place to take a dump. The characters recognize each other instantly. These two men don't need a third-party witness; they have telepathic powers. "They talk to each other like human beings," says Joel Coen. "We've taken a lot of liberty and freedom to make these people appear as real as possible. The only difference between them and a pair of real human beings is that they have different skin colors and different accents and different cultural backgrounds. So for us that's enough to give them these kind of distinctive characteristics." The brothers first discussed the film at their favorite bar in Burbank. "We were eating at a restaurant right down the street," Joel recalls. "We talked about a few ideas in the morning, and then we got together in the afternoon and talked some more." From the beginning, says Ethan, "we had this idea to contrast the ordinary and commonplace with a fantastic event." "It's an extraordinary act of violence, something that had never happened in those three hundred years," says Joel. "We wanted to make it seem natural. The point of no return for Jesse isn't that he kills the man at the gas station, it's when he looks down and sees that he's killed a man with his car." The brothers originally considered putting an entire film—their version of a "Sergio Leone spaghetti Western"—in black-and-white. "Maybe it was the influence of our friends Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino," muses Ethan. "We had a fascination with those '70s Westerns, but we wanted a different angle for ours." They decided to use sepia-tinted black-and-white photography in conjunction with color—like the "grit" photography in classic Western films—in certain shots. For a close-up of the severed hand in the back of Jesse's pickup truck, for instance, they made the lighting for the shot blue and the background sepia. "The contrast was quite a remarkable effect," says Ethan. "We used it in every shot of the blood." "We wanted it to be a very real story," Joel says. "It had to have an authenticity about it—a sense of truthfulness. We wanted to get as much detail as possible into the movie. So the story is about this couple trying to live a normal life with these special powers. But at the same time, it's a really violent story. If we wanted to do something really outlandish, it had to be true to something. It had to be grounded in our understanding of people and life." When they were finally ready to go to the editing room, the brothers knew immediately that "Blood" would be their next film. Their editing setup—two twenty-three-inch monitors with a video camera on a tripod aimed at one of them, the video split between the monitors—looks like any other editing room. But it isn't. "We didn't even have sound in the editing room," Joel says. "And you never will see it again." "It was pretty quiet—at times I can even hear my heart beating," says Ethan. "In fact, the only thing in the screening room was the film. It's what we needed to hear and what we wanted to hear." * * * Joel and Ethan are not the only Coen brothers who've worked for years with a film already in mind, just waiting for an opportune moment to become realized on the screen. Joel's father, Ethan, an aspiring writer, was involved in film from the beginning. While they were filming The Hudsucker Proxy, father and son were both busy at home writing a book about the making of the film that they hoped to publish as a companion piece to the film. "It's difficult to write about things in the past," Joel says, "when it seems like your memory of them is more fluid and more immediate. You see things and hear things and feel things differently than when you look back on it. You look at what was going on with people. Then when you look at the finished product, you're always changing your perspective on it—as you're talking to someone, or you see something, or you're reading something in a book that you hadn't thought about before. It's funny how it comes out when you're shooting it, and then when you're watching it later. You don't really know what's going to hit you." * * * The Coens' movies are filled with allusions to other films. "There's a lot of references," says Ethan. "We like our movies to be filled with other films. It's easier for us to identify with something you can't put a name on." "I get a lot of those aha moments," says Joel, "when I can put a face to a name. When you see somebody that's well known, that you know from films or from television or from other things you've seen, it kind of says, 'Oh, that's a movie star.' " But you might also catch a glimpse of a face and think, "That guy looks familiar—I just can't put my finger on it." You might have even seen the person on the screen but never really realized that it was Marlon Brando, and when you take a closer look, you find out that your mom made you watch those old movies—or the person is Brando's kid. It becomes obvious in the story that he's your dad—or your uncle. It might be someone you recognized right away, but once you know, you can't ever stop seeing them. The brothers don't write most of the titles on their films, but they have been known to make cameo appearances. For A Serious Man, the main character's name is Herman, and he is played by Michael Stuhlbarg, whom Joel and Ethan had been discussing around the house. Joel and Ethan worked with Stuhlbarg in another film called Inside Llewyn Davis. The Coen brothers were also behind the wheel in the music video for "Mighty River," recorded by U2 and directed by David Fincher. They had originally intended to have David Bowie direct the video, but when he became too busy with his own work, Fincher stepped in. Joel and Ethan had a good time writing this video, even though they weren't supposed to be on screen. "There was always some sort of funny dialogue," Ethan said of the film. "But the big laugh was when we kept getting our faces in there. It was all of us who were doing that—not just Ethan and Joel." In a sense, the film crew became a cast of comedians who came together to make a serious film. * * * Over the years, the brothers have found that their writing method is unique. "It is a very lonely process," Joel says. "If you're doing it by yourself in a room, you're constantly talking to yourself. But it doesn't get you anywhere. I don't want to give the impression that we just talk to each other all the time and tell each other jokes and crack each other up. We sit down and have these intense conversations and debate everything until we come up with something that satisfies us both." "You have to write well," says Ethan. "I write all day long. That's the only way I can keep up with my life. When I get tired and can't write anything, I realize I have to do something to move things along. Then I get so excited that I write. But it usually happens at two in the morning. I usually get up at seven in the morning." "Oftentimes we'll talk about things we didn't even write in the first place," Joel says. "When you're stuck, you try something else. You're not used to thinking, 'Oh, I'm stuck.' It's not normal for someone to sit down and talk about things you're not allowed to talk about. It's not a process that you're supposed to have in front of you—and it's not even possible to describe the thoughts that go through your head." * * * When they first started making films, the brothers went about their business with little thought of an audience or anything else other than just trying to get their work out on the screen. Their main ambition was to make movies of quality that expressed things they had to say. Ethan was inspired to write The Hudsucker Proxy after he saw The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), a movie that he said was "about how there is a better world out there, and that this movie is about how that world is not a better world." He had been making films with his father since he was thirteen. He was born in Minnesota to Canadian parents, but his family moved to southern California when he was five. "My father was a teacher," says Ethan. "He wrote these very dry and very dryly humorous essays on things like the importance of wearing a coat in winter or a hat in the summer. And they were funny." Joel started making films at the age of fifteen, when he joined his brother's movie-making enterprise. At first, he was given a camera and told to follow Ethan around while he made his films. Then one day, he got to make one of them himself—and Ethan had to sit