Ethan Coen Says He Never Would've Made Drive Away Dolls With Joel

Joel and Ethan Coen exploded onto the indie filmmaking scene in 1984 with the terse crime film "Blood Simple," a bloody and raw picture that was unlike the genre films that surrounded it on either side. When their film "Raising Arizona" was released in 1987, it was clear that the brothers were important new voices in the then-expanding indie movie scene. Throughout the next decade-and-a-half, the Coens' brand of bleakly whimsical crime movies became a welcome staple in cinemas and provided an antidote to the dull blockbusters of the 1990s. (Would you rather watch the Coen Brothers' "Fargo," or the dishwater-dull 'splode-fest "Independence Day" in the theater next door?) Collectively, their movies have received 42 Academy Award nominations.

With the 2021 film "The Tragedy of Macbeth," however, Joel and Ethan seem to have begun traveling on separate creative paths for the first time in their careers. Joel wrote and directed the dour Shakespearean murder flick without input from Ethan, revealing that the tragic folly of Coen Brothers characters perhaps came from the elder brother. Ethan, meanwhile, has co-written and directed the upcoming "Drive-Away Dolls," a high-energy crime-laced road movie about two 20-something lesbians evading gangsters that's scheduled to open in theaters on September 22, 2023. It seems the "quirky" comedic tone of the Coens' movies came from the younger brother.

In the most recent issue of Empire Magazine, Ethan revealed that, indeed, the two Coens will likely be making movies separately from now on. While the two brothers made multiple excellent, zeitgeist-rattling movies together, something like "Drive-Away Dolls" would not have been made with Joel's input.

The idea for "Drive-Away Dolls" was actually originated by Ethan Coen's wife and co-screenwriter Tricia Cooke, who served as an editor on many of the Coen Brothers' older projects. The script was actually conceived several decades ago when Cooke struck upon the title "Drive-Away Dy**s" one afternoon and fully intended to write it with Ethan. At the time, it was going to be a project for director Allison Anders ("Strutter," "Gas Food Lodging"). The Los Angeles Times even reported that "Drive-Away Dy**s" was in the works in 2007. It seems that it would take until 2023 for the film to get off the ground, largely because Ethan Coen and Cooke wanted the movie to be trifling and not "important." Ethan explained:

"Me and Joel would never have made this movie. [...] It would not have happened [...] I don't think me and Joel would have written a romantic comedy with two female leads. [...] Here's the funny thing: I think 20 years ago, we could have gotten an important lesbian movie made. But this is an unimportant lesbian movie. That just didn't compute then."

One can look to the 1990s to see an explosion of queer indie cinema. And while there were multiple lightweight queer comedies to come from this era, each one was undergirded by a sense of political freedom; these types of queer romances, presented in a massive volume for the first time, were new and novel. Cooke wanted to make a queer crime comedy with a disposable tone and it seems that such a thing was not possible in the late 1990s.

Tricia Cooke and Ethan Coen described the film as a blend of several generations of exploitation movies, with Cooke saying that "It's not exploitative, exactly, but it's down and dirty. We wanted to have a lot of sex in it, and to feel a little bit like a B-movie." 

Coen compared the tone to the works of Russ Meyer, the notorious B-filmmaker who populated his movies with buxom, take-charge women who murdered and slept with men by their own whims. Coen noted that Meyer's movies are most assuredly exploitation movies, but are infused with a sense of fun and even a tone of innocence; Meyer rarely abused his female characters in what might be considered a spiteful or misogynistic way. Cooke also compared "Drive-Away Dolls" to the 1992 film "Poison Ivy," a sleazy "beware the babysitter" sexploitation film starring a teenage Drew Barrymore.

Cooke chuckled in spite of herself. "Some people quote 'Citizen Kane,'" she said. "We quote 'Poison Ivy.'"

That "Drive-Away Dolls" is set in 1999 might be the final remnant of the project's original intent. For reference, 1999 saw the release of "But I'm a Cheerleader," "All About My Mother," "Better Than Chocolate," Chutney Popcorn," "Beau Travail," "Flawless," "Boys Don't Cry," the documentary "After Stonewall," the German film "Aimée & Jaguar," and Nagisa Oshima's "Taboo." It was also the year when queer characters or queer-coded characters cropped up in films with casual regularity. "American Beauty," "The Matrix," "Happy, Texas," "Cruel Intentions," "Go," and "The Talented Mr. Ripley" all came out in the same year. 

"Drive-Away Dolls" seems to hearken back to that time. Perhaps Joel Coen was merely more interested in looking back further to the time of Shakespeare.