Sonnenfeld. Once in Austin they not only hired
a storyboard artist, but an architect. “Every shot in
that fi lm has a bird’s-eye view drawn of each room
and where the camera is and where the actor is.”
It is still the case that not a syllable of the script
was up for debate. “It’s not like it’s sacrosanct,”
says McDormand, who has worked with the
brothers several times, notably to Oscar-winning
effect on Fargo; and who has also been married
to Joel Coen since 1984, giving her a unique
insight into how the brothers operate. “They just
know the script is done by the time they shoot it.”CASTING WAS EVERYTHING...
McDormand’s fi rst glimpse of the pair was two
skinny geeks and “a huge ashtray full of cigarette
butts”. An equal unknown, she had lucked out
when best friend actor Holly Hunter opted to do
Broadway, passing on her details. “They gave me
the script and said, ‘Can you please come back and
read with John Getz?’” But McDormand’s then
boyfriend was debuting in a soap that afternoon.
She laughs, “Joel has pretty much said I got the
job because I said, ‘No, I’m good, thank you.’”
Walsh recalls being “pissed” that his agent
was passing on things, and so demanded to see
everything. “So I get this script from the Coen
brothers. It was fun, this classic Sydney
Greenstreet type: the yellow suit, the hat, the
whole thing. I thought I could fl esh it out.”ATTITUDE WAS EVERYTHING...
Channelling the novels they had read, the fi lms
they had seen, the mordant jokes that made them
giggle like mad men, the Coens arrived at a
brilliant slice of fi lm noir played for cynical laughs.
In a sense all of their fi lms have followed suit,
transforming whichever genre into black comedy.
“They were just two punks, but there was
a monomaniacal drive and they caught the
zeitgeist, the same way The Big Lebowski did,
and Fargo,” says McDormand. “They are a voice
of their time.”STYLE WAS EVERYTHING...
“I always felt the camera should be a character
in the show,” says Sonnenfeld, who went to town
with inky-dark nightscapes and smears of neon.
“I stopped them taking out that tracking shot
along the bar and over the sleeping drunk. Joel
was worried it was self-conscious. You are
going to pick on that shot? The entire movie
was self-conscious!”
McDormand honestly didn’t know any
different. “To me it just seemed like they didn’t
have the money for a Steadicam, so attach the
camera to a wooden board and run with it.”MOTIFS WERE EVERYTHING...
Every Coen fi lm begins with a tip-off on how
to watch it, be it a caption, a Yiddish yarn, or
a voice-over. However, Visser’s disembodied
overture for Blood Simple was a manifesto for
an entire career: “Somethin’ can all go wrong...”
And how: packed with double-crosses and
misunderstandings, as Visser — hired by Marty to
kill Ray and Abby for their betrayal — triggersClockwise from
left: What a pane:
Private Detective
Loren Visser (M.
Emmet Walsh) gets
framed; Joel and Ethan
Coen on set; Private
Detective Visser takes
aim; Abby (Frances
McDormand) hides out
in the shadows; Marty
(Dan Hedaya) proves to
Abby’s lover Ray (John
Getz) that he’s still alive;
Ray takes time out from
being violent to make
a call.Indemnity were an inspiration for the Coens, and
premature burials. Still, this piecemeal funding
gave them fi nal cut, never to be relinquished.
“They don’t go over budget,” states Frances
McDormand, who played the untrustworthy
Abby, whose affair with Ray (John Getz), a
bartender working for her husband Marty (Dan
Hedaya), sets the gruesome plot in motion.
“They got their freedom because they quickly
learned what the rules are.”
Months were spent in New York shot-listing
and storyboarding every frame. “We believed in
preproduction as the way to make fi lms,” says ❯