Coen brothers: A glimpse into their creative process

Today’s Daily Variety has an article — “Coen brothers script Hunter’s career” that not only provides some fun and interesting historical tidbits (e.g., Holly Hunter was responsible for her roommate at the time, Frances McDormand, auditioning for Blood Simple), but also a chance to see how the brothers generate story ideas:

Writing their second feature, the brothers had Hunter in mind.

“‘Raising Arizona’ was written for her,” Ethan recalls. “That’s actually how the movie got started.”

“It was the beginning of the exercise,” Joel concurs. “It was us thinking, ‘What would be fun to have Holly do?’ So we thought: ‘A police officer. Who wants a baby.’”

“It was the beginning of the exercise.” Sounds like brainstorming to me — and those of you who have taken courses with me know how important I think brainstorming is to the creative process. But wait, there’s more:

Asked to define how Hunter suggested the character, Joel can’t give a straight answer.

“It’s hard to quantify,” he says. “It’s very inchoate impressions of a person that these things grow out of. You think about her Southernness, and how the story would grow out of that. Even just that she’s from Georgia and has an accent.”

So the Coens used the actress, Holly Hunter, and her own innate personality attributes to inform her character in Raising Arizona, even down to her accent.

“Star casting,” wherein a writer ‘picks’ an actor and envisions them in their screenplay’s central role, is an interesting “exercise,” and as the Coens demonstrate can result in a movie.

One caveat however: what if you write a screenplay for a specific actor with very specific physical and/or personality characteristics like Danny DeVito or Arnold Schwarzenegger — and they turn down your script? Better to choose a more ‘generic’ actor so the role they inhabit in your screenplay can be played by any number of actors.