The Making of Joel & Ethan Coen’s The Big Lebowski William Preston Robertson
Edited by Tricia Cooke
Faber & Faber, paperback, 182 pages, £14.99
ISBN 057119334X
Review by Gerald Houghton (1998)
A welcome but ultimately strange and unsatisfying volume. Welcome because over the last 14 years the Coen brothers have delivered some of the most oblique, stylish, charged cinema to come out of America. As Hollywood got bigger and uglier, the brothers busied away at their heartfelt and often very funny personal examinations of US culture.
But strange and unsatisfying, too, because this is an unprecedented opportunity. Robertson is a friend. It was his car they used in their marvellously chiaroscuro debut, Blood Simple. They will talk to him, in as much as they will talk to anyone: they give a notoriously taciturn interview. But even talking a lot for them doesn’t amount to a whole hill of beans against, say, a Martin Scorsese. Joel and Ethan give nothing away.
Thus, this book can only go so far in decoding the mechanics behind their latest, the fabulously broken-backed bowling-noir (‘a slaphappy grab bag of juxtaposed styles and imagery’), The Big Lebowski. They’ll say things about bowling and Chandler, but the whole process of scripting remains locked forever inside their heads. We are not really privy to anything you might call creative until they bring in J. Todd Anderson, their supernaturally aware storyboard artist. But at least then we learn something: Coen films are storyboarded to the nth degree. Not for them the chance meeting of screenplay and location. As copious illustrations reveal (four scenes are dissected in detail), the whole is mapped in detail before it ever sees a camera.
Of course, it has something to do with the fact that they almost exclusively work on low budgets, so advance planning is dollar-squeezing as much as artistic. But you are left with the impression that there is more to it. And it’s noticeable that the book makes no attempt to sever the two Coens in terms of their ostensible production (Ethan) and directorial (Joel) roles. Like Powell and Pressburger, they truly are one of a kind.
Thus the book relies on extensive interviews with their talented cinematographer Roger Deakins, production designer Rick Heinrichs and costumer Mary Zophres (more fascinating than you think). It’s good, solid stuff, even if it is realised in Robertson’s perhaps rather over-familiar prose (‘I shit you negative’).
But even accepting Making for what it is, things come unstuck just when you think the book is taking off: it goes no further than shooting. That is, considering the Coens edit themselves pseudonymously (the Oscar nominated Roderick Jaynes), we are not privy to the process. Maybe they don’t so much edit as assemble, with all their storyboards and scant coverage, but it would be nice to be told. Just like it would be nice to have had composer of choice Carter Burwell and long-time Sound Designer Skip Lievsay interviewed for the book. The book is less a Making Of and more a Making Half-Of. We may hanker after the authority of The Hamster Factor, that brilliant documentary about the making of Gilliam's Twelve Monkeys, but when your subject’s greatest philosophy is ‘You sort of do it by feel and not with reasons,’ we don’t stand a chance.