MOVIES : Minnesota Maniacs

Ethan Coen is finishing one of his brother Joel’s sentences. Again. Then, minutes later, Joel returns the favor.

They are discussing the characters in their latest film, “Fargo,” a black comedy based on a real-life incident about a bungled kidnapping plot masterminded by an otherwise nondescript Minneapolis car salesman.

“We were so intrigued by the fact that this happened in the Midwest that it made us immediately interested in the story,” says Joel Coen, who along with his brother is a Minnesota native. “A crime of passion combined with the [bleak] landscape and this Scandinavian lack of emotional display. . . .”

“Lack of display, more than necessarily lack of emotions underlying it,” Ethan qualifies.

Then each co-defends a charge that the film, which opens March 8, could be interpreted as condescending to the Midwestern natives it chronicles.

“It’s true that you’re laughing at them and some of the things that they do, but that isn’t to say that it’s derisive, necessarily,” Ethan explains. “We’re from there and some of the traits that are sort of amusing are traits we share. And certainly you’re allowed to laugh at yourself and that doesn’t imply condescension. . . .”

“It’s just that our movies are frequently hard to categorize,” interrupts Joel. “They’re not comedies and yet you’re free to laugh. So, that makes people uncomfortable somehow because they want an unvarnished comedy if they’re going to be sitting in a movie theater, laughing.”

“Otherwise they start to doubt themselves or their responses,” Ethan adds. “They don’t trust themselves to go with it, if they’re not being given cues as to how they’re supposed to behave.”

No one could accuse the brothers Coen of taking their filmmaking behavior cues from standard Hollywood fare. Rather, the Coens have always trusted themselves to go with their creative urges. What has emerged is a quirky, dry-eyed body of work that is hard to classify, though much of it is typified by their trademark sense of dark humor, attention to detail, gory realism and dead-on characterizations. Despite their wide-ranging plots and genres, Coen films all have an identifiable stamp.

Their first film was “Blood Simple,” a slow-paced Texas gothic film noir, followed by the goofy, breakneck-paced “Raising Arizona” starring Nicolas Cage and Holly Hunter. Their subsequent films were the gangster art film “Miller’s Crossing”; “Barton Fink,” the story of a ‘40s Broadway playwright lured out to Hollywood; and their most lavish project--”The Hudsucker Proxy,” a cynical yet Capra-esque fairy tale.

It is unusual that the pair have managed to remain very independent filmmakers in a very dependent Hollywood universe.

Also, the New York-based brothers--Joel is 41 and Ethan 38--have an unusually intertwined, symbiotic relationship in a business that focuses on the individual.

But working together is how it works best for the pair, who jointly conceive, write, direct and produce their films.

Though both names are credited as screenwriters on their films, Joel is usually listed as director and Ethan as producer. In reality, the divisions of labor are not that neat.

Indeed, they write together, procrastinate together, go to the same movies and are both even simultaneously raising sons--Joel’s is 16-month-old Pedro and Ethan’s is the newborn Buster. (Joel is married to actress Frances McDormand and Ethan to film editor Tricia Cooke.)

The two are reserved, but wittily engaging and--perhaps unusual for siblings--they seem to get along famously.

“Pedro Coen,” muses Ethan. “Joel says he’s got to be a performance artist. And Buster won’t be able to run for president. The name just doesn’t inspire confidence.

“What would his slogan be?” says Joel. “ ‘Buster Coen: A Man You Can Trust.’ ‘Buster Coen: It’s Time for a Change.’ ”

The pair erupt into contagious, though low-key, laughter.

“They are always together on set,” says Steve Buscemi, who with his role as the kidnapper Carl Showalter in “Fargo” has been in four Coen films. “Usually Joel is the first to say something, but Ethan is always there and adds to what Joel says. If there is a disagreement it is never anything major. They have a very easygoing, compatible relationship. They really listen to each other and support each other.”

The Coens began their cinematic partnership when both got out of college. After Joel graduated from NYU Film School, he began working as an assistant editor on low-budget horror films. Ethan was killing time working as a statistical typist when they decided to collaborate on a script.

“I didn’t really have career ambitions,” says Ethan. “Film wasn’t something I studied in school. I was doing statistical typing, so writing movies seemed certainly more interesting than that. I had been typing rows and columns of numbers. I got to actually write words. That was the initial appeal.”

The result was 1984’s “Blood Simple.”

The Coens do not work in a linear fashion. Their next project will, of course, be a joint one, but they have not decided which of several ideas they will pursue first.

“We’ve got half-written stuff lying around, one of which we might go back to,” says Ethan. “Or we might start something new.”

“We frequently write with particular actors in mind,” says Joel. “I think every movie we’ve done, except ‘Hudsucker,’ which was written really early, we’ve written for specific actors in at least some of the parts. [John] Turturro we’ve known as a friend. We wrote ‘Miller’s Crossing’ and ‘Barton Fink’ for him. We’d known Holly [Hunter] for a long time, so we wrote that role for her in ‘Raising Arizona.’ John Goodman, we write stuff for him all the time. We’d known them as friends, then we’d put them in movies. . . . So I guess what we do next depends on our having a project that works with an actor’s schedule.”

Theirs is an oasis of creativity and unpredictable plots in a sea of formulaic Hollywood films.

“We have a lack of overt sentimentality in our films,” says Joel. “In books, it’s not expected that the protagonist be a sympathetic character. But if you take a movie like ‘Miller’s Crossing’ or ‘Barton Fink,’ the characters are not perceived as sympathetic. They’re flawed characters. They’re interesting and they’re human, but they’re not sympathetic characters the way your sort of standard movie hero is. The other part of it is we don’t give our audience cues as to how they’re supposed to respond to the movie as a whole, or to given situations.”

In “Fargo,” there is only one wholly sympathetic character--Marge Gunderson, a pregnant police chief played by McDormand.

“With ‘Barton,’ we kept saying to John Turturro: ‘He’s the kind of guy that if you were invited to a cocktail party, you’d say: ‘Is Barton going to be there?’ You don’t want to be around the guy that much,” Joel says. “But that was the whole point. What Turturro did with that character was make him human.”

In order to achieve these more complex, human portrayals, the Coens frequently cast character actors for all the roles--especially their leading ones.

“We don’t use movie stars very much because the use of movie stars often dictates falling into those formulaic patterns,” says Joel. “It hasn’t been a reluctance to work with movie stars on principle, but we’ve always worked on very small budgets and we’ve populated our movies with essentially character actors, actors that we’ve thought are interesting and talented, great actors, but not necessarily the leading man, leading lady movie stars that audiences are familiar with.”

‘If you do what is genuinely engaging and entertaining for you, hopefully there will be an audience out there who also thinks it’s entertaining,” says Joel. “But it’s hard to predict. I don’t know why ‘Raising Arizona’ did a lot of business and ‘Hudsucker Proxy’ didn’t. You do a ‘Barton Fink’ and you know they won’t be lining up in the malls in the Midwest to see it. It’s pretty obvious, so you take a calculated risk and you do it for a price.”

But just because they generally don’t follow established Hollywood formulas doesn’t mean they’ve been embraced by audiences or critics every time out.

Their most lavish production, “The Hudsucker Proxy” (made on a budget of $25 million), was a critical and box office flop.

And, while lauded for their originality and lack of treacle, they have also been criticized for a certain cold detachment.

One reviewer called them “the perfect postmodernists for a race of androids.”

As for “Fargo,” made on a modest budget of $6.5 million, early reviews have been favorable. (The Hollywood Reporter called it a “small-scale, character-driven gem.”)

A few critics, though, have wondered if the natives had not been made to look unusually foolish.

“The funny thing about that is most of the charges are people thinking we’re exaggerating the characteristics of the people or that we’re in some way bringing an attitude,” says Joel. “The people from the area are sort of unfazed.”

He breaks into a singsongy dead-on Minnesota accent: “Yah--so what’s the big deal?”

When it came to the trademark Minnesota-speak, the principals in the movie all trained with a dialect coach. (Some smaller roles were played by Minnesota natives.)

William H. Macy plays Jerry Lundegaard, the felonious car salesman. Steve Buscemi and Peter Stormare play a pair of hapless, though violent, criminals. McDormand is the dogged police chief.

Of the four key roles, only Macy’s was not written specifically with the actor in mind.

“Bill was definitely able to embrace the blankness of the character,” says Ethan. “Most people would have been afraid to play that.”

‘Fargo” was loosely based on a real news event, brought to their attention by a friend in Minneapolis. But the cinematic version was largely a product of their fertile imaginations.

“We sort of invented the characters,” says Joel. “Obviously we weren’t interested in making a documentary. A lot of the names in the movie were names we took from our classmates and neighbors: Gustafson, Gunderson, Lundegaard, Mike Yanagita.”

Overall, the pair keenly enjoyed making “Fargo,” which is distributed by Gramercy Pictures.

“We were making a movie essentially with a crew that we were very, very familiar with, people we’ve worked with a very long time,” says Joel. “I have to say that just in terms of the actual shooting this one was a very enjoyable shoot where the pressure was low. I think everyone had fun doing it.”

“We all had a good time,” says Buscemi. “The atmosphere on set didn’t feel tense or rushed. Everybody felt like we were making something that was important to us.”

Buscemi has also had roles in “Miller’s Crossing,” “Barton Fink” and “Hudsucker Proxy,” but this was his largest part in a Coen film.

“I really admire their vision and their aesthetic and their attention to detail,” Buscemi says.

What do the senior Coens, who still live in Minneapolis, make of their sons’ portrayal of Minnesotans?

“They haven’t seen the movie yet,” Joel says. “They always say they like our movies. What are they going to say? But, my father is really a ‘Dr. Zhivago’ man. So, I’m not really sure. . . .”

“I don’t know if he’s really liked anything since the movie ‘Fiddler on the Roof,’ ” says Ethan.

Will they ever make a historical epic or a musical to please their dad?

“I don’t think we’d be good at a musical,” says Joel. “This is our ‘Dr. Zhivago.’ “*