You’re at the Toronto International Film Festival, one of the major fests of the year. It’s where the Oscar race begins. Many huge filmmakers debut their work here. You’re a large outlet, so you get some one on one time with the Coen Brothers, famously reticent cinematic geniuses. What do you spend that time talking about? If you’re MTV Fucking News, a sequel to The Big Lebowski.*
And shockingly one isn’t happening. I don’t even know where the ‘rumor’ that MTV is peddling came from – the site is the American internet version of the British tabloids when it comes to simply making shit up. But they did inadvertently get one interesting thing from the Coens (which has probably been out there before, but this is the first I saw it explicated):
“That movie has more of an enduring fascination for other people than it does for us,” Joel Coen said.
I always suspected this about the Coens. I imagine that they move right on after a movie, not ever looking back. And that the movies they make very much encapsulate them at that moment, but once they move past it’s no longer of interest to them. I had the opportunity to do a roundtable with them once and besides being impenetrable interviews, they showed almost no sign of being open to going through their own history, or relating their current film (at the time No Country For Old Men) to the rest of their work.
The movie they had at Toronto, by the way, was A Serious Man, which I see tomorrow night. Expect a review soon!
* Allow me time to vent here in this footnote. There’s something so fucking maddening about people who get access to these sorts of talents and then squander their time with absolute bullshit hit whoring questions. You think that the Coens are hard to get to open up in an interview? Sitting through moronic MTV News interviews certainly won’t help. And to the people who can’t be bothered to actually ask the talent about their work at hand – or who ask and never run it, as many, many sites do – fuck y’all. You’re the cancer of the internet.