The Coens Brothers Talk Home

A Serious Man comes out in selected theaters today and to coincide with the release indieWIRE has published an interview by Eugene Hernandez with the film's writer-directors, Joel and Ethan Coen. One of the topics that Hernandez particularly dwells on is the idea that this new movie taps directly into the siblings' experiences growing up in St Louis Park, Minnesota, and that it represents a return home for them.

Below is an extract from the interview:

The film is set in the mid ‘60s in a distinctly Jewish community in suburban Minnesota, exactly where the Coens grew up, at a time when Joel would have been about thirteen and his younger brother Ethan would have been about ten. Sitting for a chat with them in a narrow fifteen minute window recently, I was focused on the personal nature of the movie, reiterating how I found it so rare for them to overtly examine themselves in a film.“Well, Fargo is very much drawn from the place where we grew up,” Joel Coen gently countered. I politely persisted that this one goes much deeper than Fargo and then he agreed that “[Fargo] was in a world that we sort of observe but didn’t inhabit much…”“This one is more,” interrupted Ethan Coen, “It’s not just the geography.” Pausing, he then added, “When it’s about your ethnicity, people take notice more. When the period is from your childhood, I don’t even know if other people notice, but, they get more of a kick out of it.”

You can read the full article over at indieWIRE.