Gates of Ethan

Screenwriter and author Ethan Coen on violence, prejudice, and his new book, Gates of Eden

by Nicholas Patterson

Ethan and Joel Coen are the reigning heavyweight champions of independent filmmaking. As the big Hollywood studios pump millions of dollars into mindless remakes, this producer-director-writer team has cranked out a line of intelligent, original, and relatively low-budget movies, from the early Blood Simple and Miller's Crossing to the more elaborate Barton Fink and Fargo, and their most recent film, The Big Lebowski.

Now Ethan Coen has released his first collection of short stories: Gates of Eden (William Morrow, 261 pages, $24). The stories exhibit many Coen hallmarks: close attention to diction, a fine eye for ethnic conflict, and a taste for grotesque violence and deadpan humor. Coen, who jokingly describes himself in his bio as "the Samuel Gelbfisz Professor of English as a Second Language at the University of Colorado at Boulder," employs a bizarre cast of characters that includes a college-educated boxer trapped in a mob feud and a maverick weights-and-measures man.

Coen's knack for dialogue has made him popular with actors as well as audiences, and the vocal talent for the Gates of Eden audiobook (Simon and Schuster Audio, 5¹/2 hours on four cassettes, $25) includes Steve Buscemi, Matt Dillon, John Goodman, William H. Macy, Ben Stiller, and John Turturro. Coen himself, who spoke to us on the phone from New York, sounds eerily similar to Jeff Bridges's slow-talking, California-surfer-slang-slinging "Dude" in The Big Lebowski.

Q: I didn't start reading your book till last night, but I didn't stop reading it until I finished it, around 5 a.m. this morning.

A: That's good.

Q: In your book and in your movies, you pay homage to gangsters, from bootleggers up through Godfather-esque Mafia types. But they're all vintage gangsters. What do you think of gangbangers today? Do you think they lack style? Creativity?

A: Ah, Jesus, man. Style and creativity? I don't know, it's more an alien style to me, you know. It's a different ethnicity now. Lack style? No.

I'll tell you who has style: snowboarders have style. They have the shit, man. They got the wardrobe. Those are my current role models in terms of the culture. But there's not a lot of drama to be wrought from snowboarding.

Q: You could say the same thing about bowling, which you got a lot of drama out of in The Big Lebowski.

A: Bowling is more communal. You can have characters interacting, which is more difficult on snowboards.

Q: In Miller's Crossing you have Jewish, Italian, Irish, Danish gangsters. What's the appeal?

A: I don't know. Well, actually, I do know. Miller's Crossing is pretty much just a shameless rip-off of Dashiell Hammett, mostly his novel The Glass Key, but to a lesser extent Red Harvest. More than anything else, it was an enthusiasm for Hammett's writing that was the genesis of that movie. It's Hammett -- in a word, that's what it is.

Q: Do you think some of the stories in the book are influenced by Hammett? When I think of "Destiny," the protagonist, Hector Berlioz, is trying to be a Dashiell Hammett-style detective but not quite succeeding. He wants to be a badass, but he doesn't really have his shit together in the way Sam Spade did.

A: Right, and he has the handicap of being a symphonic Romantic composer. Yeah, I mean [Hammett] is an influence -- more than an influence. If Hammett hadn't written his books, then obviously those stories wouldn't exist, certainly not in anything like the form that they exist now.

Q: You're probably going to hear this question over and over, but what kind of differences do you find between writing a screenplay and writing these stories?

A: The main difference for me, the obvious one, is that I write movies with a collaborator -- with my brother -- and these I wrote by myself. They're different things. It's common that you see collaborations among scriptwriters, and probably to a lesser extent in drama.

When you're writing fiction for print, you're finishing it to a higher polish. What you are writing is the finished product. So you get very fussy and try to perfect everything in a way that precludes working with somebody else. Whereas when you're writing a movie, the script is by no means the finished product. It's a little more slapdash -- you're just sort of putting together a blueprint for what the finished product is going to be: to wit, the movie itself.

Working alone is better and worse. It's different. That's why I like doing both. The liability is you don't have the immediate feedback, and you don't have anybody to share the burden of having to come up with ideas. The work is that much less cross-pollinated. The virtue of working alone is that you can sort of follow ideas a little bit without having to justify them. You can sort of work it all the way through, wherever it goes. You don't have to think "How can I make sense of this?" as you would have to in presenting an idea to somebody you were collaborating with.

Q: Does it give you more freedom?

A: In a way. But there's a different kind of freedom in having ideas come out of left field that you didn't have to have the onus of coming up with. There is something liberating about that as well.

Q: Why did you decide to write the book in the first place?

A: Well, I'd been writing these stories for quite a while. As we've been working on movies I've been writing stories. A couple of them, three of them, have been published in magazines, but the rest of them not. At a certain point I just had a sufficient number of them to peddle as a book. My agent circulated a manuscript consisting of 11 of the stories and a promise to write three more within a certain amount of time to sort of fill out the volume.

Q: Have you run into people saying, "Oh, your book only got published because you're a celebrity"?

A: I haven't yet, because it just came out. But I wouldn't be surprised if I get that. But I couldn't complain, because the fact that I am a familiar name is part of why it was so damn easy to get published. I'm in a position to reap the benefits of that familiarity and not take the sort of grousing that might go with it from other people.

Q: To change the subject, what do you, as a Minnesotan, think of Jesse "The Body" Ventura?

A: I wish I knew. I haven't lived in Minnesota for a long time. I watched a lot of professional wrestling when I was a kid there, but he was after my time. I was back with Verne Gagne and the Crusher and the Bruiser.

Q: I've noticed in Barton Fink you have John Goodman showing John Turturro how to do American collegiate wrestling. Then later in the film you contrast that with the fake professional-wrestling movie Barton Fink is trying to write.

A: Yeah, we did wrestling in high school, actually. Now this is exciting, this is really good: I read this book, City of Nets. It was a book about Hollywood in the 1940s. I read this story in passing that Faulkner was assigned to write a wrestling picture, and I thought, "What the fuck is a wrestling picture?" I mean, we all know what boxing movies are, but have I ever seen a wrestling movie? That was part of what got us going on the whole Barton Fink thing.

But if you're interested in wrestling, I wrote another movie with a friend of mine, Jay Todd Anderson, who went on and directed it, called The Naked Man. It's about pro wrestling. It's going to come out sometime late this year, early next year. So you'll have to watch for it.

Q: So, following in Faulkner's footsteps, you wrote a wrestling picture?

A: Yeah. [Laughs.]

Q: Are there professional wrestlers in it?

A: Michael Rappaport plays the main guy -- he's the main wrestler. There are some professional wrestlers in small parts, but like I said, I'm not very conversant with the pro-wrestling scene now, so I don't remember their names.

Q: You have an interesting way of portraying violence in your stories and movies. In Blood Simple you have the guy's hand impaled with a knife, and in Fargo, of course, the wood-chipper scene. Do you intentionally try to turn your audience's stomach?

A: That's a good question. No, it's not like you're trying to turn their stomach. Clearly at the end of Fargo there is something right about coming around behind the house and seeing Peter Stormare stuffing the rest of Steve Buscemi into a wood chipper. But why is that right? I don't know. It's good. I mean, it's right, right? Anything else wouldn't have been as good. It has to be that grotesque, but why? I couldn't really tell you. It's compelling, man. And there is something really appealing about presenting something that grotesque in a very deadpan, matter-of-fact fashion. That stuff works in movies and in stories.

Q: It's kind of neat to see stuff like that happen. I can't believe I just said that, but it's true.

A: Yeah, it's true. [Laughs.] We all take part in it.

Q: It's not just sadistic. I mean, when you see movies that are really dumb, it's just . . .

A: Then it's offensive. There's always something good, be it violence or whatever -- there is something that makes it more intense. Being specific -- you know, like a knife in a hand -- is something more than "she hurt him, he got punched, he got stabbed," or whatever. An audience can feel it sympathetically.

Q: Did you ever torture little animals when you were a kid?

A: No, no, not at all. I don't equate it with -- I don't think [violence] is a bad or reprehensible thing in a movie or a story, and I don't equate it with personal evil or reprehensible acts. I don't think one is in any way related to the other. But I do wonder why it works so well. It's a drama and you want the stakes to be high and palpable.

Q: How do you research this stuff? Do you try things out on your friends?

A: No, we don't. We don't do any research, in a word.

Q: The characters in your stories and in your movies speak in idiosyncratic ways. Why do you focus on diction and accents so much?

A: You mean, what's the deal, maaaaan? You know, it's how you establish a character. Part of what a character is is how he expresses himself. It's a different issue from something like Miller's Crossing, where everybody shares a vernacular, all the characters in the movie share a vernacular. In that respect, it's how you establish the world they're in, as opposed to just each specific character. I have the feeling that what I am saying is incredibly obvious and banal, but there it is. You think about dialogue in conjunction with the character who is speaking it.

You've got a finer characterization through how they express themselves as opposed to the raw content of what they are saying. You want to establish a character by showing him or hearing him instead of saying he is X, Y, Z.

Q: Do you research different accents?

A: No. I go with what I hear. None of this stuff is really very arcane. It's just what I've been exposed to in life and movies, books, whatever.

Q: You seem to play with ethnicity and prejudice a lot in your stories and films. Why do you do that?

A: Well, nobody does in movies, but that's because movies are really expensive to do, so studios really feel -- probably with some reason -- that they have to pander to people's sensitivities. They feel they can't offend anybody with a $60 million investment in the movie. It just gets kind of dull in movies -- nobody is specific ethnically because nobody wants to offend anybody. We've never felt constrained by it in the movies that we do because our movies are sort of a little off the beaten track anyway, and have been fairly inexpensive and don't have to be $100 million movies at the box office in order to make their money back.

But in terms of the stories, I don't think it's that remarkable. I guess some people would be offended there, too, but people's sensitivities are really their problem. If you want to make a character specific, his ethnicity is part of who he is. If a character is specifically Jewish, say, I don't feel that I have to make him 100 percent attractive in order to appease people who would be satisfied by nothing less. And frankly, there are such people.

You want to make characters who are real, have some validity, have some light, have some spark, have some life to them. Part of how you do that -- all of how you do that -- is by making them specific, you know? You have to be specific about how they talk, which we've touched on, and how they behave, how they do everything. And their ethnicity is naturally going to be part of that. I mean, it seems natural and self-evident to me, although some people are, as you suggest, a little more nervous about it. It's a nervousness I just don't share.

Q: I thought that the ethnic conflict in Miller's Crossing was one of its most appealing aspects.

A: Yeah, and they call each other sheenies and guineas and whatever. In real life people are more relaxed about their ethnicity than they are for purposes of public debate or public presentation.

Q: Does your career as the Samuel Gelbfisz Professor of English as a Second Language at the University of Colorado at Boulder take up a lot of your time?

A: No, that's an emeritus position. I don't actually have to teach classes; I don't even have to show up.

Q: Was English your second language?

A: No, but I speak it as if it was. Oops, as if it were. It's a subjunctive.

Q: Have you thought of or are you working on a novel?

A: No! I must say. . . No. No.

Here's one big reason: the stories are something I do in my spare time as we are working on other things that are really my career -- that is, movies. So a sustained, long, concentrated period of time that I would imagine one would have to devote to a novel is something I don't think I am going to have in the foreseeable future, even if I were interested. Which I'm not, particularly.

Q: Do you think you'll keep working on stories?

A: Yeah. I actually have started one. I feel that I have another story for the weights-and-measures guy [the protagonist of "Gates of Eden"]. He goes to Amsterdam and goes to a hash bar and visits a prostitute and various horrible things happen to him. So that's in the works.

Q: Have you ever been to Amsterdam?

A: Yeah, a long time ago. I liked it. I didn't get to spend much time there.

Q: Your characters have interesting experiences with drugs and alcohol. Would you say that drugs and alcohol have had any influence on your work?

A: Drugs and alcohol? Yeah . . . not really. I have firsthand experience with drugs and alcohol, but I'm not really dissolute. I mean, actually, far from it. It's almost the reverse. But it's interesting. The whole hash thing, it's going to be good.

Q: How's that?

A: It's just in the context of the story I'm working on now. You know, pot is a good thing, isn't it? Although, like I say, I'm hardly a drug-culture writer. I've never read any Irvine Welsh, but having seen the movie Trainspotting, I'm sure I'm no Irvine Welsh.

Q: One last question. If I send you this profile after it's done, and you like it, is there any chance of getting a part in your next movie?

A: [Laughs.] To be honest, next to none.