The Coen Brothers have shown interest in the Western genre for years, dating back to their Western set-early films “Blood Simple” and “Raising Arizona” to their later more direct takes on the genre, their Oscar-winning Cormac McCarthy adaptation “No Country for Old Men” and their John Wayne remake “True Grit.” As they sat down at the New York Film Festival to discuss their latest, they revealed that they had been writing the episodes comprising “The Ballad of Buster Scruggs” on and off for years. “They were written over 25 years really…but they just got put in a drawer because they were short movies and we didn’t really know what we were going to do with them and probably didn’t expect to make them until maybe 8 or 10 years ago when we started thinking maybe we can do this” (about the time they won Oscars).
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“The Ballad of Buster Scruggs” is an anthology film, consisting of six stories with different characters and tones, but all set in the Old West. Joining the Coens to discuss the film were Tim Blake Nelson, who plays the titular dapper singing cowboy Buster Scruggs in the film’s hilarious opening as well as Zoe Kazan and Bill Heck, who star together (along with a loud terrier named President Pierce) in a chapter that takes place on a wagon train heading to Oregon.
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Many of the questions from the audience and moderator Kent Jones focused on the episodic nature of the narrative. Addressing early rumors that the stories would form a limited series on Netflix, they revealed that they had always intended the stories to be seen together and there was no other material considered for inclusion. Asked about how the order of the stories came about, Ethan Coen said “We didn’t really think of an order, in terms of ordering them they sort of fell into an order by virtue of when we wrote ‘em. And we looked at the order they’d fallen in and thought ‘that’s a good order.’” Another audience member asked if they had been tempted to tie the narratives together into what Ethan describes as “a grand Balzac-ian thing,” the brothers demurred. “We had these stories, they were all Westerns, and then they seemed to relate to each other, but sort of retrospectively rather than consciously. So no, it was never the impulse to [join them]. It’s kind of a strange form, but it’s just a product about how it came into existence.” Joel went on to compare them to short stories in a collection or tracks on an album.
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Describing their experiences working in an episodic format, the actors seemed pleased to see how they fit into a larger whole. Nelson said “We all got to read the entire script before we shot our individual constituent parts, unrelated to the others. But I think probably as actors we all felt a responsibility toward the genre of each film in which we appear. What I think is astonishing about this is it’s six different movies within the western genre but then each one is in the vernacular of a subgenre in and of itself.” Nelson went on to describe how the Coen’s precise tones in different episodes gave the actors a “responsibility to appear indelibly within the genre in which you appear…what was most gratifying about seeing the whole, was seeing the success of others.”
Kazan joked that she enjoyed the episodic format in alleviating her performance anxiety. “When you see a movie that you’re in, I don’t know about other actors, but I spend half the time like this [covers her face], and so to know that I can watch eighty percent of this movie happily was wonderful.” On a more serious note, she commented that she perceived a hidden flow to the chapters, culminating in the spooky finale in a stagecoach that Ethan likened to a “Rod Serling thing.” “I had the same experience watching it as I did reading it, which is that I could see a tremendous internal dream logic between the chapters and to see how they sort of accrete, or accumulate together, like what the feeling is when you hit ‘Mortal Remains’ at the end, that hit me all anew watching it and there was so much treasure there that I did not get see get shot.” Bill Heck added that they had noted at a previous appearance that “each piece sort of gives permission, leads into the next one, and there’s something so satisfying in seeing how it’s lifted up by everything else that’s come before you and something very safe about that that you don’t usually get.”
“Flies are hard to work with” was Joel Coen’s response to a question on the difficulties of working with animals. He continued that they always have a tendency to fill their films with domestic animals, but it’s even more pronounced in a Western, “It is true, I have to say, if you do a Western you spend ninety percent of your time thinking about the horses.” Ethan said that the oxen were even more novel to them. “I asked Travis, who was the oxen wrangler, I wanted the oxen to do something specific and I asked Travis if he could get that and he just sighed and looked at me like I was an idiot and said, ‘Driving oxen is not self-evident.’”
The film reunites the Coens with musician Carter Burwell on the soundtrack. The brothers explained that they spent time debating how much the music should ‘tie the room together,’ so to speak. “We talked about to what extent the music should play all those different things and to what extent it should tie everything together.” They mostly decided to give different themes to the different episodes, but they noted the unifying influence of one song, ‘Streets of Laredo,’ which serves as the overture over the title, and “Brendan [Gleeson] then sings it at the end and the end recalls it, and again in the end credits so to whatever extent that unifies things musically.” Joel went on to explain that “we knew from the beginning that we wanted Brendan to sing what is essentially the early version of that, it’s the Irish-Scottish version of the song, where the song came from.” The brother continued to say that the question of unifying vs differentiation came up not just with the music, but with everything. “How much are you going to accent the differences, how much are you going to say it’s all the same movie. And there isn’t a uniform answer, it’s just [the question] we always confronted.” Specifically, Joel said that question came up when they were colorizing the film, which doing on the computer allowed them to make many iterations of before settling on their preferred mix.
Tim Blake Nelson was asked about his experiences years apart working with the Coens and joked, “They finally know what they’re doing.” He went on to say “I finally realized the oxymoronic nature of who Joel and Ethan are as filmmakers, they’re incredibly, unbelievably, in an unparalleled way, meticulous and prepared as filmmakers so when you get to the set there really are no decisions being made during the shooting day that could have been made earlier and that rigor pays off in an interesting way because it allows for the actors inside of that meticulous preparation to be utterly free, to have all the time an actor could possibly want to do this very careful writing, shot in very careful and specific way.” Nelson related that he had never encountered that style before working with the duo on “O Brother Where Art Thou” and that their exactitude allowed him to find the correct tone for Buster Scruggs. “I found the specificity that they were working on in the one I’m in, the sort of Gene Autry singing cowboy aesthetic, unbelievable in terms of its extremes and its fearlessness and in the way they were pushing me and also allowing me to do certain stuff. And then seeing the whole movie, watching five other versions of that was truly astonishing. So what I really mean to say is the opposite of my joke is true, they continue to be unparalleled in terms of the work they put in, the preparation they do, and the specificity that’s born out in the shooting.”
“The Ballad of Buster Scruggs” is now at the New York Film Festival and will appear on Netflix on November 16 after a theatrical run. Watch the full press conference video below.
Check out all our coverage from the 2018 New York Film Festival here.
