Miller's Crossing Home Page

Ethan and Joel Coen
Coen brothers

Joel:

Director Joel Coen received much critical praise for his handling of the stylish crime drama "Blood Simple", which marked his directorial debut, and Raising Arizona, a comedy about an unconventional couple whose obsessive desire for a child leads them to redefine the rules of parenthood. Those films, like Miller's Crossing, were based on original screenplays which he co-wrote with his brother and filmmaking partner, Ethan.

The critically acclaimed director learned his craft at the New York University Film School. After graduation he found work as an assistant editor and also began doing a bit of writing with this brother. "I was working as an editor on some low-budget horror movies after I got out of school," explains Joel. (One of the films he worked on was The Evil Dead by Sam Raimi, who dies spectacularly in a brief scene in Miller's Crossing.) "Then Ethan and I started doing some writing for a few of the producers we were working with."

Seeing other independent filmmakers putting their own picture deals together, the Coens decided to go out on their own and find financing for a script they had written entitled Blood Simple. They found the money, cast the parts and headed to Austin, Texas, to film their movie.

Blood Simple appeared on several prestigious lists of top ten films of 1985, including Time Magazine, The Washington Post, and USA Today. It was also honored as one of the year's best pictures by The National Board of Review.

Their next film, Raising Arizona, was produced by Circle Films, the Washington-based company that distributed Blood Simple. An original blend of screwball comedy and hyperbolical action filmmaking, it charmed reviewers and audiences alike with its wild humor and unexpected sweetness. Albert Finney & Gabriel Byrne

Quotes from Joel on Miller's Crossing

  • "We weren't thinking of so much of gangster pictures, just novels." [And while their first film had been inspired by the plot-driven pulp fiction of James M. Cain, for this they turned to Dashiell Hammett [author of The Glass Key]: "He took the genre and used it to tell a story that was interesting about people and other things besides just the plot. In Hammett the plot is like a big jigsaw puzzle that can be seen in the background. It may make some internal sense, but the momentum of the characters is more important."

  • "Because [the music is] emotional and overwrought, it worked as a counterpoint to other aspects of the movie. Our thinking sort of evolved on that and turned 180 degrees around as we started listening to different things. It seemed to add a dimension to the movie, and at the same time it's underlining something that's there already, which we liked."
Gabriel Byrne & Marcia Gay Harden

Ethan:

Producer Ethan Coen co-wrote Miller's Crossing with his brother Joel. Ethan and his brother previously collaborated on the screenplays for Blood Simple and Raising Arizona, on which they also functioned as producer and director, respectively.

Ethan has been interested in film since he was old enough to buy a theatre ticket, but never seriously thought about it as a career until after graduating college.

He attended Princeton and earned a degree in philosophy. After graduation, he took some temporary clerical jobs and started writing, both on his own and with his brother.

Quotes from Ethan on Miller's Crossing:

  • "I was always interested in movies the way everyone is interested. That is, I liked to go to the movies", says Ethan. "Joel was working as an editor on some low-budget films, and we started writing as a lark for some of the producers he was working with. Then we started getting paid -- and what we were being paid made it only slightly less a lark."

    tommy gun scene
  • After a film noir and madcap comedy, the Coens were again, according to Ethan, making "a conscious effort not to repeat ourselves" when they understood the writing of Miller's Crossing. They started from a genre they wanted to do, the gangster film, and an image: "Big guys in overcoats in the woods -- the incongruity of urban gangsters in a forest setting."

  • "[The opening sequence of the hat blowing in the wind] was one of the first images we wrote. The idea of the hat blowing away in the woods, without really knowing how it was supposed to fit in."

  • "When we were finishing the movie we started listening to a lot of Irish music. Gabriel [Byrne] gave us a whole list of stuff. The tone and feeling of the music seemed really appropriate to the movie -- the melancholy feeling that it has."

Joel and Ethan Coen's films since Miller's Crossing include Barton Fink, The Hudsucker Proxy, Fargo, The Big Lebowski and O Brother, Where Art Thou?.



Gabriel Byrne Albert Finney Marcia Gay Harden Jon Polito J.E. Freeman John Turturro Ethan and Joel Coen
Deleted Scenes Tommy Gun Scene: Shot by Shot
Classic Lines Glossary
Washington Post review / poster Trivia
Production Notes Full Script

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