Joel Coen: ‘The Tragedy of Macbeth’

The Treatment

KCRW

Arts

4.6 • 639 Ratings

🗓️ 8 February 2022

⏱️ 29 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This week on The Treatment, Elvis welcomes Academy Award winning director and writer Joel Coen, whose latest film is “The Tragedy of Macbeth,” currently streaming on Apple TV+. This is Coen’s solo directorial debut. He shared the Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay Oscars with his brother Ethan for their 2010 adaptation of “No Country for Old Men.” Coen talks about playing with the line between theater and cinema for the adaptation of “Macbeth.” He says watching previous film adaptations of the play was helpful in determining what he did and did not want his film to be. And he talks about how casting his wife Frances McDormand and Denzel Washington as the leads led to a small but significant change in the story.

Transcript

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0:00.0	From KCRW Santa Monica and KCRW.com, it's The Treatment.
0:14.6	Welcome to the Treatment, the Home Edition. I'm Elvis Mitchell. For my guest, Joe Cohen,
0:19.2	he's made many movies that were a tale told by an idiot
0:22.3	full of sound and fury. This is the first time he's got to use the line in the movie. The movie
0:26.5	is the tragedy of Macbeth. Joel, thank you so much for being here. Great. I'm glad to be here.
0:32.0	But I guess I can't help but think about this as almost this movie is this intersection of the passion of Joan of Arc and the public enemy.
0:40.9	I mean, it feels like Dreyer and a 30s Warner's crime movie to me.
0:46.2	Yeah, well, Dreyer was certainly a visual sort of reference point for us when we were thinking about the movie.
0:54.5	And in another respect, from the beginning of thinking about it, we were also thinking about
1:01.3	film noir and certain kinds of pulp fiction.
1:06.3	It struck me at a certain point that it was interesting that this play in particular sort of prefigures a lot of 20th century tropes of, you know, American pulp fiction, a couple plotting a murder.
1:24.4	I mean, the also thing I found myself thinking about, too, in this is that you have made so many movies about marriages, you know?
1:33.1	And this fits into that, too.
1:34.8	I mean, we think about raising Arizona or the man who wasn't there or no country.
1:40.5	From an old, which even that's based fundamentally around a marriage
1:43.4	and ends with one of the characters talking to a wife.
1:46.5	And I just wonder what it is about marriages. That's so interesting to you.
1:51.2	Well, I don't know that that was, I don't think that's been a sort of, it's certainly there, although how consciously there it is and the work that I've done previously with Ethan.
2:02.7	Yeah, it runs throughout it.
2:05.0	I haven't really thought about it specifically that way.
2:08.0	But with Macbeth, we did think about it specifically that way
2:11.4	because it was, first of all, a project that was brought to me by my wife, Fran.
	...

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