How Joel Coen Made ‘The Tragedy of Macbeth’
When your whole filmmaking career has been one of unexpected twists and turns, how do you surprise yourself? Adapt a Shakespeare play.You make enough movies about people chasing after things — outlaws, money, a kidnapped baby — and eventually someone comes chasing after you. In Joel Coen’s case, his pursuer was William Shakespeare.As Coen put it recently, “Shakespeare is unavoidable.” He gave a resigned chuckle and added, “For better or worse.”In a filmmaking career of nearly 40 years, Coen has chronicled a spectrum of well-spoken criminals and enlightened dudes in stories inflected with varying amounts of brutality and absurdity. He has directed 18 features and written several others with his brother, Ethan.Having built a filmography characterized by unexpected twists and turns, Joel Coen has himself taken what may seem like a surprising pivot away from that body of work. His latest film, “The Tragedy of Macbeth,” is a shadowy and phantasmagoric rendition of the Shakespeare play, presented in black and white.The movie, released theatrically in December and on Apple TV+ earlier this month, stars Denzel Washington as the murderous nobleman of the title and Frances McDormand as his scheming spouse, Lady Macbeth. It has already received numerous postseason plaudits and is considered a strong contender for Academy Award nominations; reviewing the film for The New York Times, A.O. Scott called it a “crackling, dagger-sharp screen adaptation.”Coen is a dedicated theatergoer and an avid reader, though not one with any special knowledge of or affinity for Shakespeare. “I came to it as an amateur,” he said. “I’m still an amateur.”But look closer at “Macbeth,” and there are aspects of the play that make it fitting and perhaps inevitable subject matter for Coen. “It’s a murder story,” he said. “In a way, it’s even a horror story.”Denzel Washington and Frances McDormand in the film. Washington said Coen told him to avoid “stick-up-the-butt Shakespearean acting.” Alison Rosa/Apple and A24This somber tale may have proved an ideal escape for the director, coming at an unfamiliar juncture when Ethan had decided to take a break from film. Just when Joel was seeking new approaches to his cinematic craft as a solo director, his inspiration emerged from a foundational text of English literature.“It was a deliberate choice to do something I had not done,” Coen said. “It was an opportunity to go out of the wheelhouse that I’d been in before. It’s something that demanded I do that.”Coen, 67, was speaking earlier this month in a video interview from California. His demeanor suggested a mixture of Harold Ramis and Larry David; he could be avuncular and witty, but also defensive and averse to self-mythologizing.A kind of interplay between high and low, serious and preposterous, foul and fair would seem to be omnipresent in the Coen brothers’ filmography, which has won them four Oscars, but Joel is not necessarily inclined to consider the through lines in their work.He acknowledged that he and Ethan had made some quirky films over the years but said that “it was a mistake to think that any of it is planned.”He added, “There’s never been any real design or architecture to what we’ve done.”But even that absence of strategy was upended after their 2018 western anthology, “The Ballad of Buster Scruggs,” when Ethan decided to focus on other endeavors.Joel said that their partnership was flexible enough to accommodate this kind of disruption.“It’s not like when we first got together, we planned on working together for 40 years,” he said. “It just kind of happened that way. When we said, ‘Let’s do some other stuff separately for a little while,’ it’s not like there’s any plan for how long and what that would mean.”Joel said that making a movie without Ethan was like “having one eye put out” but added that there was “probably something healthy in taking a break.”At the very least, it gave Joel the space to contemplate alien terrain like “Macbeth.” This was a thought he’d been kicking around since at least 2016, when McDormand, his wife and frequent collaborator, asked him about directing a production of the play, in which she had starred for Berkeley Repertory Theater.Directing “Macbeth” for the stage did not appeal to Coen — “I don’t think I’d know what to do,” he said — but as a film, he saw its potential to allow him “to retreat from a lot of the ways I’d been working before.”“I wanted to go as far as I could away from realism and more towards a theatrical presentation,” he said. “I was trying to strip things away and reduce things to a theatrical essence, but still have it be cinema.”Coen and McDormand on the set. She is a producer on the film. The director explained, “I’ve always worked with members of the family.”Alison Rosa/Apple and A24On a visual level, that meant leaning into the ambiguities of Shakespeare’s play, avoiding depictions that would provide too much specificity about when or where things are taking place.“There is nothing certain about this movie, nothing sure about where it’s set,” said Bruno Delbonnel, the film’s cinematographer, who also worked with the Coens on “Buster Scruggs” and “Inside Llewyn Davis.”“We were creating this world where you never know if you’re looking up or down,” Delbonnel said. “You never know if it’s night or day.”That also meant digging down to find an essential Coen-ness in “Macbeth.” Carter Burwell, who has composed the scores for almost all the Coens’ films since their 1984 debut, “Blood Simple,” said that their movies are consistently concerned with “the pathos of people desperately trying to impose meaning on this life, this meaningless universe.”The stories they have told — including “The Tragedy of Macbeth” — put the viewer “in the position of seeing everything that’s going on and the poor characters being helpless,” Burwell said. “The characters think they’re smart, they think they’re on top of things. And we can see that, in fact, they’re just flailing helplessly.”Unlike, say, the brothers’ 2010 take on “True Grit” — when he deliberately did not watch the 1969 version — Joel Coen immersed himself in influences on “Macbeth”: He considered cinematic adaptations by Orson Welles and Roman Polanski, as well as Akira Kurosawa’s “Throne of Blood,” which transposes the drama to feudal Japan. He looked at films from Carl Dreyer, Masaki Kobayashi and F.W. Murnau, and read up on Edward Gordon Craig, the early 20th-century stage designer.And when paring down “Macbeth” to under two hours, Coen didn’t hesitate to unsheathe his sword, citing Welles’s 1948 version as a gold standard of sorts. “That’s a wacky movie,” Coen said. “Welles had no problem rearranging, cutting and inventing with Shakespeare. It was kind of liberating. You look at that and go, well, all right, he’s doing it.”McDormand, who has won three Oscars for her performances and a fourth as a producer of “Nomadland,” joined “Macbeth” as its leading lady and as a producer, for self-evident reasons. “I’ve always worked with members of the family,” Coen said.He had few words about the exit of Scott Rudin, who had produced Coen films like “No Country for Old Men” and “True Grit,” and who left this project and several others following a series of news media reports about his abusive behavior. “It’s a whole other discussion,” Coen said. “I don’t know what else to say.”Coen and Delbonnel spent several months designing the aesthetic of their “Macbeth” and planning the shots for when filming took place in Los Angeles. Delbonnel said that Coen brought him in much earlier and more extensively than in movies Joel had directed with Ethan.But in a fundamental way, Delbonnel said, Joel was no different than on previous films: “Sometimes he’ll ask you a question and say, ‘What do you think if we do that?’” Delbonnel said. “But then there’s a moment where he decides, OK, that’s what we’re going to do. And he knows exactly where it’s going.”Coen consulting with the cinematographer Bruno Delbonnel on a scene involving Kathryn Hunter. Nothing is certain in the film, not even where it’s set, Delbonnel said.Alison Rosa/Apple and A24Not that there was much hesitation in casting Washington, a two-time Academy Award winner, as the title character. Washington said he was just as eager for the role, as he’d never worked with either Coen but considered himself a fan of their “dangerous” films.“You’ll laugh or you’ll see somebody get their head blown off, possibly at the same time,” Washington said. “‘O Brother, Where Art Thou?’ is one of my favorite movies. I don’t even know why. It’s just so weird.”Five Movies to Watch This WinterCard 1 of 51. “The Power of the Dog”: More
