Andrew H Walker/Variety
Ethan CohenHis first narrative film as a solo director will hit theaters this year. On Monday, Focus Features announced that the Coen’s road comedy “Drive-Away Dolls” will debut on Sept. 22, putting it on track for a possible premiere at one of the big late-summer film festivals in Venice. in Telluride, Colorado or Toronto.
Coen is also co-producing the film Tricia Cook, his wife. The pair previously worked together on the 2022 documentary “Jerry Lee Lewis: Trouble In Mind.” According Deadline, “Drive-Away Dolls” “follows Jamie, an uninhibited free spirit grieving yet another breakup with a girlfriend, and her low-key friend Marian who desperately needs to relax. Looking for a fresh start, the two embark on an impromptu road trip to Tallahassee, but things quickly go awry when they cross paths with a group of inept criminals along the way.” The cast includes Margaret Qualey and Geraldine Viswanathan as the leads as well as Beanie Feldstein, Pedro Pascal, Coleman Domingo, Bill Camp, and Matt Damon.
Coen, of course, spent decades making movies with his brother, Joel Cohen. The pair won four Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Director for No Country for Old Men. But after their 2018 film “The Ballad of Buster Scruggs,” the brothers went their separate ways creatively. Joel Coen directed the 2021 film The Tragedy of Macbeth, in which he stars Denzel Washington and Frances McDormand.
Speaking on a podcast in 2021, longtime Coen brothers collaborator composer Carter Barwell, said Ethan Coen just getting a little fed up with the business. “Ethan didn’t want to make movies anymore. Ethan seems very happy doing what he’s doing and I’m not sure what Joel will do after this,” Burwell said in a interview before the release of “The Tragedy of Macbeth”. “They also have a bunch of scripts they’ve written together sitting on various shelves. I hope they go back to them. I have read a few of them and they are great. We are all at an age where we just don’t know… we could all retire. It’s a wonderfully unpredictable business.”
Last year, however, Ethan Coen said there was “nothing dramatic” about his decision to step away from making movies with his brother. “You start when you’re a kid and you want to make a movie. It’s all excitement and goog-ho, let’s make a movie. And the first movie is just a lot of fun. And then the second movie is a lot of fun, almost as much fun as the first. And after 30 years, not that it’s not fun, but it’s more work than it used to be.” Ethan Cohen he said in the Associated Press. “Joel felt the same way, but not to the extent that I did. It is an inevitable byproduct of aging. And the last two films that we made, me and Joel together, were really difficult production-wise. I mean, very difficult. So if you don’t have to, go to a specific point: Why am I doing this?’
After Cooke suggested that the brothers had made “too many westerns,” Ethan Cohen added, “It was a little old and difficult.”
Asked by The Associated Press if he envisioned directing with Joel Coen again, Ethan Coen said nothing had been finalized. “Going our separate ways sounds like it might be final. But none of this happened definitively. None of the decisions are final. Maybe we’ll do another movie,” he said he said. “I don’t know what my next film will be after this. The pandemic happened. I became a big baby and got bored and quit and then the pandemic happened. Then other things happen and who knows?”
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