Three times and counting now, for each of them. They don’t think about whether someone is black, Jewish or a dog (hmm) but they do-completely by weird coincidence-write characters who are right for their friends Josh Brolin and George Clooney to play. The Coen brothers are artists, they tell us. Yet apparently they would have drawn the line at a fixer with dark skin. I also assume that had he not been available there were other actors of necessarily varying heights, weights, ages, accents and skill, whom they would have considered - Brolin's character was based on real Hollywood fixer of the same name, but Brolin could hardly be mistaken for the real Mannix's twin. I’m sure that, if asked, the Coens would say they cast Josh Brolin as '50s Hollywood executive Eddie Mannix in "Hail, Caesar" because he was right for the part. That’s the kind of pretense to artistic purity the Coen brothers usually find gag-worthy, as in the kind of slipping-on-a-banana-peel fate they routinely dish out to characters who speak that way.
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Now, that’s the kind of dialogue that makes a movie like “Hail, Caeser” so enjoyable. “If you don’t understand that, you don’t understand anything about how stories get written and you don’t realize that the question you’re asking is idiotic.” "So you have to start there and say, ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about.’ You don’t sit down and write a story and say, ‘I’m going to write a story that involves four black people, three Jews, and a dog’ - right?” Joel continued. He said: “It’s an absolute, absurd misunderstanding of how things get made to single out any particular story and say, ‘Why aren’t there this, that, or the other thing? It’s a fundamental misunderstanding of how stories are written." Oh, wait.Īfter the Washington Post’s Ann Hornaday recently questioned the “pervasive whiteness,” of the new Coen brothers’ film, “Hail, Caeser,” the Daily Beast’s Jen Yamato asked Joel Coen to respond. They always cast the very best actor for the part in every movie they make, and never worry, about, say, whether that actor is famous or not.
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They never let commercial considerations, or anything other than the demands of the story they’re telling affect their artistic choices.