But things in the early 2000s seemed a little more serious. For a start, the brothers were no longer directing scripts that had fermented and matured in the hothouse of their shared brain; they were adapting novels and rewriting other people’s scripts. This seemed like a very bad sign. This more recent impasse started when a long-cherished project, an adaptation of To the White Sea by James “Deliverance” Dickey, fell apart. In retrospect, it seems like a signpost to No Country for Old Men. The White Sea project was about an American airman shot down in second world war Japan who witnesses the Tokyo firebombing and then, insanely, tries to make his way home to Alaska. It shares many things with No Country, particularly a fascination with processes, the mechanics of things, machismo, and lengthy sequences without dialogue or music.
“Yes,” says Joel, “that’s definitely true, something that we had both thought about to a certain extent. In fact we mentioned Dickey’s book to Cormac a few times when we talked to him about anything relating to the book.” “This one sort of displaced that project in a lot of ways,” adds Ethan.
“Jeremy Thomas was producing it,” Joel continues, “and Jeremy is the patron saint of lost causes in the cinema — he seems to make all these interesting movies that everyone thinks are impossible to get made. He got very close to getting the financing for it, which on the face of it is just an insane proposition — a movie with the firebombing of Tokyo in it, that’s very expensive and somewhat marginal. But he came close.”
It sounds like Slaughterhouse-Five, minus the sci-fi, married to John Boorman’s Hell in the Pacific. “That’s exactly right,” says Joel. “Hell in the Pacific is a good example of the same sorts of things we have here in No Country: almost no dialogue, a bizarre score, and guys fighting and doing lots of stuff with their hands.” That was your first adaptation? “We have written things for other people that haven’t got made,” says Joel. “Actually, the Dickey book was the first adapted thing that almost rose to the level of getting produced.”
Much of the dialogue in No Country is taken from the book almost word for word. Joel: “Ethan once described the way we worked together as: one of us types into the computer while the other holds the spine of the book open flat. That’s why there needs to be two of us — otherwise he’s gotta type one-handed. That’s how you ‘collaborate’ with someone else.” Ethan: “Paperback novels just won’t lie open properly! They flip shut.”
One wonders what a sci-fi movie by the Coens — who have done noir, screwball, a kind of western, even a musical of sorts — would look like. “Neither of us is drawn to that kind of fiction,” says Ethan of sci-fi. “There are movies that we both like. I don’t know that that would ever happen, and I don’t quite know why.” Joel knows: “I don’t think we could get our minds around the whole spacesuit thing.”
Instead, they have a script of their own that they’d like to film. “We’ve written a western,” says Joel, “with a lot of violence in it. There’s scalping and hanging ... it’s good. Indians torturing people with ants, cutting their eyelids off.” Ethan: “It’s a proper western, a real western, set in the 1870s. It’s got a scene that no one will ever forget because of one particular chicken.” And so, yet another innocent creature prepares to die for the Coen brothers’ art.
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