Sleeping and Severed Toes: Ethan Coen & Joel Coen on the art of screenwriting

By William Preston Robertson

'You had written in a severed toe, with no idea who it belonged to,' I muse.

'Right.'

'So is screenwriting something of a found process for you?' I ask.

'Yes. I mean, that's just an example, but that's the rule. We get the idea first — 'Oh, it would be good if a severed toe shows up here — ''

' — But you don't logic it out in terms of some motivational need for the plot or character,' I say.

'Yeah.'

'You just come up with a bizarre image.'

'Right. We want to goose it with a toe. And then you're left with the problem of whose toe it is.'

'You're sort of deliberately setting up hurdles for yourself. Is that part of it, do you think?' I say.

'Well, yeah… I mean, that's a way to work, painting yourself into a corner and then having to perform whatever contortions to get yourself out,' Ethan says.

'The ultimate example is The Hudsucker Proxy,' he continues, 'in which we began the script with the idea of Tim Robbins's character jumping off a building. But then you're at the end of the script and you have to figure out how to save him. That stumped us for a while. And we had to resort to the ridiculous extreme of, you know, stopping time. That's the worse case. That's sort of the limiting case.'

'Do you write thinking about camera angles and camera setups?' I ask Ethan.

'To varying degrees,' he says. 'Sometimes not at all. I mean, sometimes scenes are just conceived as 'This character says that and then this character says that.' While other scenes are like, you know, this one, obviously-the one we're about to shoot,' he says, referring to the pointedly camera-conscious tumbleweed-climbing-over-the-scrubby-nocturnal-hill-into-the-L.A.-vista scene.

Which leads me to that most pointedly camera-conscious of scripted Coen scenes: the dream sequence, which is perhaps the most consistently recurring Coen cinematic storytelling device.

The Big Lebowski script has two dream sequences, and they're two of the most elaborate and ambitiously designed dream sequences yet in a Coen brothers movie. 'So what's the fascination you guys have with dreams?' I ask.

Ethan shrugs. 'It's just the cheap, gimmicky, obvious way to depict the character's inner life,' he says.

'Uh-huh,' I nod.

'But it's also very fun to do. Again, it's dovetailing things,' he says, harking back to their technique of juxtaposing interesting but disparate elements. 'You know, the character's a pothead. He's flying. The rug tying the room together The whole flying carpet, Thief of Baghdad thing.'

Ethan lifts his hand, drops it limply.

He shrugs.