3 Screenwriting and Filmmaking tips with the Coen Brothers | SWN

the nominees for best screenplay based on material previously produced or published are joel cohen and ethan cohen for no country for old men based on the novel by cormac mccarthy you know i'm not sure we represent anything we play sort of in our corner of the sandbox you know we sort of been successful to a certain extent flying under the radar where movies are not that expensive to produce and so we've been mercifully pretty much let alone for our entire sort of movie-making career is to do what we want um it's outside our art yeah it's what outside our art outside our art yeah i mean i don't think they have pretensions to artists they don't have artistic pretensions but it's some it's somehow it's kind of stands outside the mainstream of what most people do but it still has a real significant audience and if you know one one audience member will love fargo and despise the big lebowski will love the big lebowski but over the world there's always one that becomes that that someone becomes really attached to and the oscar goes to ethan and joel cohen for fargo and ethan [Applause] uh mostly i'd like to thank francis um without whom the part wouldn't have been written we would the movie wouldn't have been made and we wouldn't be standing here we uh thank you very much [Music] i mean it starts with us with the writing you know but it's a hard question it's like legitimately what people want to know how do i get started how do you how do you get going and it's just impossible to answer because it happens differently for everybody who's done it or you know but as joel says for us it started as writers and writing and that was it's just whoever was sitting up here who you asked that question would give you a different answer and it's who knows what's relevant to you there is a mystery that's been created because the movies are so authentic and unique and personal and it's it's it's a different kind of filmmaking i'm walking in here on my knees ed free man proposing that occurred and so it was i do you bet i do okay then [Music] [Applause] they've created a very uh strong foundation to always resort to you know i mean wherever we can go ahead one line in the movie i i would like to think it was more than that but yeah there was one line that when i find the money i look to the dead guy which is absurd and then i said you know what i think that we should have something here like he's deciding okay the day is going to change or yes i'll take the money or i see where we're going here so we tried different what ends up in the movie is mm-hmm and i can always hear was my improvisation and i can always i always know where ethan is in the theater because i always hear him well it is kind of what josh says we have a plan because we're chicken you know we don't want to have to go on and you don't trust your actor what but just in terms of being our own ability to extemporize on this set or you know the obligation of extemporizing on this set we don't want that we want to have a plan for how we're going to shoot the scene whatever it is so we walk in with a plan which as joss josh says is always kind of subject to change but uh you know it's kind of a it's a security plan you know the mythology about alfred hitchcock in fact he was the biggest promoter of it was that idea that you know once once i actually get on the set the only thing that can happen is that something can go wrong he's already made the movie in his head and and he was he also was sort of you know very very prepared to the extent of having pre-thought the movie before he started production and it well it's true that we prepare maybe to an extent greater than a lot of other directors who that's just part of our process it's also true that we're we like the process on the set of actually seeing what happens being open to what happens when you go on to a into a new space when you're working with new people be the actors or technical people um and we do have storyboards but actually we don't look at them very much while we're shooting and once they've been done we probably we almost never look at the storyboards we have them in the back of our minds and we follow them to a certain extent but um but but that changes a lot as we go through the production and also since they deal with the visual way before they're able to focus on actors you know and be able to listen you know that's a good question i never say that it's true yeah in fact it gives them a chance to be more creative exactly if you've already laid out the other things so you're not worried about that or to be there for the actors when the actors are being more creative and to be able to go you know bring it down or tweak they do a lot of tweaking they don't do a lot of massive manipulation you know i guess it's best to explain just in the context of making movies in general because it's it's such a collaborative social enterprise in every respect not just the fact that we work together um as a team but uh it's a team sport making movies you know it's you work with a huge team of people and as we were talking about before many of them are people that you could say most of them are the major sort of people involved in the movies are people that we work with over and over again so in that respect working with each other for all these years and working as a team is not something that's at all alien to the process you you have uh you find a consensus and you know from the consensus it's not about arguing or you know having different points of view necessarily it's finding this similar point of view [Music] you

Channel: Screenwriters Network

Views: 5,485

Keywords:

Id: sLj51NYlKQU

Length: 7min 48sec (468 seconds)

Published: Fri May 07 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/Jhawksmoor]

along with PTA, the GOATs of American directors.