Yesterday, we discussed a rare pandemic highlight: Team Deakins, the podcast that legendary cinematographer Roger Deakins—started with his wife and digital workflow consultant James Ellis Deakins. It’s cinephile mana with terrific guests and the latest is filmmaker Joel Coen, one half of the Coen Brothers. The previous post chronicled some highlights from the podcast; Coen’s insistence he will never make a Western again, his initial dislike for Orson Welles as a filmmaker, how the Coens have always had final cut in their directing career and a little bit about his next movie, “The Tragedy Of Macbeth,” his first filmmaking endeavor without his brother Ethan Coen.
It got long, but there was one last bit we wanted to spotlight that got into television, movies made for television via streaming services like Netflix (the Coen Brothers’ “The Ballad Of Buster Scruggs” was produced by Netflix), because it’s rather fascinating and shows Coen’s conflicted nature with the small screen and or watching films at home—the way the business is headed, especially during a pandemic. It also gets into a topic many film critics are often discussing amongst themselves when it comes to streaming services: quantity over quality.
Coen and the Deakins get into a conversation about streaming services and television. It begins with a talk about how documentaries are all becoming documentary series now in the age of streaming (especially crime docs) and how, frankly, many of them are becoming way too long and overstay their welcome. They discussed both the recent Michael Jordan ESPN doc, “The Last Dance” and the Oregon cult leader Netflix documentary “Wild Wild Country,” both of which they feel are strong at first, but probably should have been much shorter (Deakins said the 6-episode “Wild Wild Country”: “it would have been brilliant as two hours, but at six hours, you’re not going anywhere.”)
“[Marcel Ophuls’ Holocaust documentary] ‘The Sorrow and The Pity’ is only four hours long, how many hours do you need?” Coen said with a laugh.
Asked whether he would want to make a TV series, Coen struggles with an answer that mostly hews towards no. “I think like many filmmakers, I’m very conflicted about it,” he said at one point. “Most streaming services just want to buy by the yard.” Coen notes that in the past, film studios would always put a maximum running time in their contracts—studios generally don’t like films that are too long. But now, Netflix and the like, want the opposite. “The last contract had no maximum time, it had a minimum time and that’s where the business has gone,” he said.
Back to the would-you-make TV question which Deakins asks—which for Coen, kind of morphs into a question about making movies for the cinemas versus making movies that are seen on streaming services (aka ‘Buster Scruggs’).
But here’s the fundamental problem with TV bit (editorial note: amen). “As writers… long-form was never something we could get our heads around,” Coen said. “It’s a different paradigm. Not to be shitty about it, but you can look at stories that they have a beginning, middle, and end. But so much of television has a beginning, a middle, a middle, a middle, a middle, until the whole thing dies of exhaustion. It’s beaten to death and then you find a way of ending it. That’s how a lot of long-form television works, so it’s a hard thing to get your head around.”
He did speak to it on a practical, streaming-service level. “On the one hand, as filmmakers, we’re all disturbed by the prospect of doing what we do to be seen on every diminishing platform,” he explained. “So, you don’t want be making ‘Lawrence of Arabia’ to be seen on an iPhone. You want [everything to be seen] in the best possible theater.”
But then Coen explains that they owe their career to home video and how films like “The Big Lebowski” were flops in theaters but massive hits on VHS and DVD (and how film studios always knew this and would greenlight their movies with this in mind). He equates streaming services, at least in some regards, to that ancillary market and how it’s evolved and how audiences have always seen their movies at home and that’s just how it is for some audiences.
“Our whole career, really, was made possible by the fact that there was a television market,” he said. So for me to say, ‘Oh, I’m not going to make anything that’s going to be seen on Netflix,’ well, that’s kind of odd. I can’t bust on that. It’s just another aspect of that market which you owe your entire moviemaking life to. So, I can’t be precious or Christopher Nolan or Quentin Tarantino about it. I go, ‘Look, I want my movies to be seen on big screens, and in fact, I would like the people that ordinarily go to see my movies in a movie theater to at least have the opportunity to do that. That would make me very happy and then let everyone [who doesn’t care as much], see it on TV.”
Well, there it is. If that seems a lot, all our aggregation of this podcast, well, it’s nearly an hour and a half podcast talk and really, this is just the tip of the iceberg. There’s a bit about Jeff Bridges being miserable on the set of “The Big Lebowski” because there was no video playback on set—spoiler: there eventually was and he didn’t abuse it the way the Coens fear most actors will—that’s worth the listen alone.
