Pitt, Swinton, And Malkovich Work With Coen Brothers For The First Time In Burn After Reading
Posted September 8, 2008 12:00 pm.
This article is more than 5 years old.
Joel and Ethan Coen, aka the Coen Brothers, often write their scripts with certain actors in mind for the parts.
In their latest film Burn After Reading, for example, they created the role of Osborne Cox, an ousted CIA analyst with a fiery temper, for John Malkovich. They had a part in mind for Brad Pitt, too – dim-witted gym employee Chad Feldheimer, who sports a hairdo almost as bad as Javier Bardem’s in No Country For Old Men.
At a press conference at the Park Hyatt on Saturday promoting the film, which arrives in theatres Sept. 12, Pitt admitted the role wasn’t what he was expecting.
“It’s a mystery to me and I’m somewhat disturbed by it all, including my other half (who) is kind of disturbed by it as well,” he said.
“I’ve been knocking on the Brothers’ door for a few years so I was really happy when they called, and then I read (the script) and was a little upset again.”
Burn After Reading sees the Coens return to the realm of farce, which is a marked shift from last year’s Oscar-winning No Country. It’s set mainly in Washington, D.C., and opens on Cox’s unceremonious CIA demise. He decides to publish a tell-all memoir (or ‘mem-wah’ as his character pronounces it), but a CD with his notes on it falls into Chad’s hands. Chad and fellow gym employee Linda Litzke (Frances McDormand) try to blackmail Cox , and everything spirals out of control from there.
“We wanted to do a spy movie,” Joel Coen mused, adding, “It didn’t really turn out that way, I don’t think it is a spy movie. But that was one of the original ideas. Like most of our stuff it’s not really meant to be a comment on Washington, it’s really about these particular characters.”
One of the characters not written for a specific actor was that of Katie Cox, Osborne’s unhappy wife. That part went to Tilda Swinton, who won the best supporting actress Academy Award last year for her turn in Michael Clayton. Not having worked with the Coens before either, she said the thing that impressed her the most was how tight the film’s script was.
“As another first-timer with the Coen Brothers, one of the most fantastic things about working with them is, there’s this script that is so rock solid. (An) immediately, kind of, clean thing to work with, that playful is what everybody is,” she described. “Then you go home again and the script is absolutely written down on paper, and you mess with it at your peril. You feel the invitation to play with them is exactly that, and let’s all amuse ourselves with this script.”
Malkovich, who has one of the most intriguing character arcs in the film as the tormented Osborne, echoes Swinton’s sentiments about the Coens’ process.
“There’s a reason a football field has boundaries,” he remarked. “And there are a million plays to do a good script within those boundaries and you play with those.”
Burn After Reading is about as far away from No Country, considered by many the Coens’ masterwork, as you can get, both in tone and in substance. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing, Ethan Coen maintains.
“We don’t relate one movie to the other, among any of our movies – why would we?” he said. “They’re different movies, they feel different, but that’s good, certainly our ambition is to change from movie to movie, you don’t want to repeat yourself.”
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