The emergence of the Coen brothers as the Hollywood comedy cavalcade’s most original voices–fabulism’s Frick and Frack–coincided almost exactly with the arrival of Tom Hanks as the American screen comedy’s leading man. Hanks became a huge star in 1988 with the release of “Big,” a year after Joel and Ethan Coen’s deliriously dizzy “Raising Arizona.”
But while Hanks retreated from punch lines to the harder knocks of drama with “Philadelphia,” “Forrest Gump,” “Apollo 13” and “Saving Private Ryan,” the Coens were reeling off “Barton Fink,” “The Hudsucker Proxy,” “Fargo,” “The Big Lebowski” and “O Brother, Where Art Thou?”–comedies so inventive and unusual that sometimes you weren’t sure whether to laugh or cry.
Their paths now have converged at the unlikeliest of places: a remake of the 1955 British caper comedy “The Ladykillers,” in which Hanks plays the mastermind of a gang of bumbling thieves, a role first played by Alec Guinness. It is his first broad comedy in more than a decade.
Hanks made the unfunny “Joe Versus the Volcano” at 34– 13 years ago–and then gave up due to lack of innovative scripts. “I said, ‘I’m not going to play these kinds of guys that I’ve been playing anymore.’ And that instantaneously removed 98 percent of the offers that were on my desk,” Hanks says.
The Coens never had to wait for offers. They simply created stories from their wildly original imaginations. “The Ladykillers” is their first outright remake.
“No, not a remake,” Ethan corrects. “We considered it a theft from the literary source, not a remake of the movie.”
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“I don’t think we would have ever, on our own, said, ‘Let’s rewrite ‘The Ladykillers,’ ” Joel says. But when Barry Sonnenfeld, who had been the brothers’ cinematographer before becoming a director himself (“Get Shorty”), asked them to write a script for him to direct, they agreed. Then Sonnenfeld lost interest in directing the movie, handing the reigns to the Coens.
The Coens sent the script to Hanks, then went off to direct “Intolerable Cruelty,” which also had started as a for-hire writing project. Whether it was a good idea for the Coen brothers to enmesh themselves in the Hollywood shuffle of taking up remakes and remaindered scripts is something that very much remains to be seen.
“If people have certain expectations of you, of what they think you ought to do, the impulse is to subvert that,” Joel says. “If they go, ‘They only do their own material,’ you kind of go, ‘Well, you know what? Because you think that, maybe I’ll go off and do remakes.’ It’s a childish and perverse impulse.”
Hanks was not initially attracted to the idea of rewarming a nearly 50-year-old British chestnut.
“The idea of remaking any movie is kind of anathema to me, but I was reading a Coen brothers script, so I saw the possibilities of it,” he says.
With their reputation for inventiveness preceding–and possibly exceeding–them, the Coen brothers have their pick of Hollywood actors, in the same way Woody Allen did in the 1970s and ’80s.
“As a guy who wants to do this as long as I can, but wants to do it only on terms that I dictate, the desire to work with filmmakers who are subversive in their choices is very attractive,” Hanks says.