Coen Brothers & Color

By Jerry Roberts
Photos by Melinda Sue Gordon/SMPSP

From left: Ethan and Joel Coen with cinematographer Roger Deakins.

Fargo won the brothers the Best Original Screenplay Academy Award for 1996 and collected another Oscar for Joel's wife, Frances McDormand, who won for Best Actress playing a pregnant police chief trundling through snow drifts to solve a murder.

Director Joel Coen and producer Ethan Coen, who collaborate on their screenplays, have been all over the map geographically, theme-wise and with their homages - to movies, music, writers and those pockets of Americana that they warp into their own idiosyncratic and synthetic worlds. The title of their newest release might be pluralized to find out where they're going next: O Brothers, Where Art Thou?

The place is rural Mississippi during the Great Depression. O Brother, Where Art Thou? stars George Clooney, John Turturro and Tim Blake-Nelson as chain-gang escapees heading cross-country to find a loot stash and encountering a raft of diverse Mississippians including Holly Hunter, John Goodman, Charles Durning and Michael Badalucco. En route there are also encounters with a political campaign, robbery, bloodhounds, romance, a recording session, fires, a flood, Baby Face Nelson, a Ku Klux Klan rally with choreography suitable for The Wizard of Oz, blind benefactors - in this case, a handcar rail traveler and a radio station owner - and cans and cans of pomade, an aromatic hair ointment of the era that's a particular obsession with Clooney's Everett.

And all of this is grafted onto a loose interpretation of Homer's The Odyssey, replete with nymphs breaking into song and a storybooklike glow to the photography. O Brother is not your high-concept Hollywood blockbuster - and yet Touchstone Pictures is bringing it out on Christmas Day, the traditional blockbuster-cluster release date.

"This is not normal," Ethan said. "It really beats me. But this movie isn't a downer like a lot of our movies tend to be. It's been released in Europe by Universal and it's doing really well there, better than anything else we've done. I can't explain it, except to say that there's no moping around in it, like in Barton Fink. There was a lot of moping in that."

But there was some moping on the set, which was plunked down amid a traditionally humid and hot Mississippi summer.

"The hardest part of the movie was to spend four months in Mississippi," said Joel in a joint interview with Ethan. "We shot mostly around Jackson, Natchez, Yazoo City and Vicksburg. The filmmaking experience wasn't difficult in itself, because we had the regular crew we always work with, like our cinematographer, Roger Deakins, and a lot of actors who we've worked with before.

"And it was really fun working with George Clooney and Tim Nelson for the first time. I found Tim Blake Nelson down the block from me in New York. He's a movie director too. Miramax is bringing out his third movie," Joel said. That movie is the single-character title, O (for Othello), starring Mekhi Phifer, Josh Hartnett and Rain Phoenix.

As a filmmaking alliance, the brothers say they often overlap duties across discipline lines - Ethan may do some directing, Joel strays into the producer's realm.

A scene from O Brother, Where Art Thou? with George Clooney (right).

"We both deal with the actors," Joel said. "We tend to work with the same people. George we didn't know, but he's an easy, friendly guy. We just give them the script and stay out of the way. We don't do much. We're very hands-off, but good at delegating. Fran just did a film with Cameron Crowe, and he worked with her very specifically and differently than we do. With us, it's a lot less personal. With Holly, who's an old friend, the only direction we gave her was to tell her one thing about her character: ÔPenelope from the Dust Bowl.' That was it."

The film's title was derived from Preston Sturges' 1940 classic, Sullivan's Travels, in which Joel McCrea plays a Hollywood comedy director who wants to shift gears and make a socially conscious movie about the Great Depression against studio wishes. The title of the movie of his hopes is O Brother, Where Art Thou?

"We imagined our movie to be something like the movie Sullivan would have made," Ethan explained.

Despite the specific geography in most of their pictures, the Coens emphasize that, like the time-place details they fixate on - half a dozen pomade gags in O Brother, for instance - the places they create, like their characters, are completely original. In fact, Mississippi was chosen only after locales in Alabama and east Texas were scouted.

"I wouldn't say either of us are students of American history in the usual way," said Ethan. "All our movies are set in the United States in specific locales and times, and those locales tend to be important elements. Most of the detail is not researched - it's made up based on a certain amount of knowledge." And a certain amount of odd humor; The Big Lebowski, for instance, is set "during the time of the Gulf War."

Two aspects of O Brother made for more post-production than the brothers had yet experienced. The film has many musical and dance numbers that had to be synched, and they made a decision to digitally recolor the film. The soundtrack, which is available on Mercury Records, was produced by T-Bone Burnett and includes such traditional tunes as "Big Rock Candy Mountain," "I'll Fly Away," "Keep on the Sunny Side," "Lonesome Valley" and "In the Jailhouse Now."

"We used the music of the period and depended a lot on T-Bone Burnett," Joel said. "It was an interesting aspect for us, being involved so deeply with that much music and doing it in all ways - some of it was pre-recorded and lip-synched, some was created on the set by musicians. Jacqui and Bill Landrum were our choreographers, and they did the KKK rally, the chain-gang stuff, even helped out in coaching the sirens' movements."

"It was sort of like The Wizard of Oz in a kind of obvious way intersecting with The Odyssey," Ethan added.

The technology coloring the film in browns and yellows goes a long way toward refining and defining a palette selection to deepen a sense of the past as well as to generate an otherworldly feel for classical fantasy interpretation.

"We wanted that faded photograph effect," Joel said at a special screening seminar at the DGA last June. The director left most of the technological pains of achieving the look after principal photography to cinematographer Roger Deakins, ASC, BSC, who has shot five Coen movies, beginning with Barton Fink in 1991.

"Ethan and Joel told me they wanted to eliminate greens," Deakins said. "They favored a dry, dusty look with low golden sunight." But the Working Title production was shot on location during the summer of 1999, when the Mississippi Delta region is a riot of greens.

The director thought his own biggest problem in achieving the unusual color scheme would be convincing the two studios who financed the film - Buena Vista for domestic release and Universal overseas - to kick in the extra $150,000 after the fact to have Cinesite, a division of Kodak, use O Brother, Where Art Thou? as a feature-film guinea pig.

"We expected them to be suspicious of the new technology," Joel said at the informal, onstage DGA seminar, which consisted of moderator Leonard Maltin of Entertainment Tonight, both Coens, Deakins, Cinesite CEO Colin Brown and Kodak's director of business development Sarah Priestnall. "So we hit 'em with it at the last minute. But once we sat down and told them about the effect we wanted and what this new process will do, they said, 'Go ahead.'"

The first thing the process required for maximum visual effect was a straight Technicolor image with full saturation. Deakins said that the normal procedure in achieving any bleaching or color-altering effects requires color desaturation or overexposure of the stock or the usual use of sepia or warm-color filters on the lens.

"We found that you needed a pristine Technicolor print so that you could select the colors later," Deakins said. "That left us to look for other qualities in the dailies to concentrate on other things. We didn't have to worry about color qualities on the set. Today, print stocks are highly saturated for contrast effects, for action movies, to make everything glossy. We shot it in Kodak Super 35, and the sharpness of the images is still there after the color correcting we did."

And that color correction took ten weeks of work instead of the normal ten days of post-production lab time for the average feature. "The flexibility we had with color was extraordinary," said Deakins.

"This is a great tool to go with," said Brown. "We're still experimenting with it, but essentially the process is a marriage of high-speed scanning, digital color manipulation and laser rerecording to alter the color, contrast, brightness and saturation of the movie, to give it a unity and a clarity.

"The original cut negative of O Brother, Where Art Thou? was actually loaded into a Philips Spirit DataCine Scanner at Cinesite (in Los Angeles)," Brown added. "And the film was digitized at a very high speed and the entire movie was scanned end-to-end." Each scene was then treated for color sharpness and contrast. This was a deeply collaborative process with Roger (Deakins), who went through the eight reels with us, painting in the colors. The final completed files from O Brother were then recorded back onto negative using Kodak's Lightning Laser Recorder."

Computer technology was used to create the underwater flood scenes when debris, a bloodhound and cans of pomade go floating by, and to create a rather realistic-looking scene in which Baby Face Nelson's car plows into a cow.

"Those scenes were totally done in a computer," Joel said. "The cow was a digital leftoverfrom some rodeo roping footage that we watched to see what the right way was for a cow to fall. That dog in the flood was also created in the computer. People don't like it too much when you go around drowning dogs."

While pushing the envelope on color correction, what's ironic is that the Coens edit - and have always edited - manually, on a flatbed. "It is kind of ironic," Joel agreed. "We've done bits and pieces digitally, but we cut our films ourselves, mostly because the AVID screen is harder on my eyes."

Maybe the irony carries over to their fresh takes on the peculiarities of Americana that abound in their movies - via old-time songs, brassy racketeers, vintage clothing, bad hotels, backroom politicking and blazing submachine guns. Baby Face Nelson's use of this last weapon even outdoes Albert Finney's in Miller's Crossing. "The Thompson submachine guns are a pain in the ass," Joel said. "Those 50-round drums are temperamental, constantly jamming, requiring retakes."

The brothers also return to John Goodman as a harbinger of strange violence as they did in Raising Arizona, Barton Fink and The Big Lebowski. The Ku Klux Klan rally involving Goodman in O Brother was the one main exterior that the director shot in California. "I didn't want to shoot a Klan rally in Mississippi," he said.

The brothers have their follow-up movie in the can and intend to shoot another film this summer. The one in post is an, as yet, untitled period piece about a barber in Northern California in the 1940s who wants to get into the dry cleaning business. The USA Films release stars Billy Bob Thornton, McDormand, James Gandolfini, Jon Polito and Tony Shalub. It will have its colors desaturated and largely removed by Deakins in post. The 2001 shoot will star Brad Pitt as a tail gunner in a B-29 bomber who's shot down over Japan in World War II.

Jerry Roberts is a frequent contributor to DGA Magazine.

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