The Big Lebowski
Filmmakers Joel and Ethan Coen, and actors Jeff Bridges and Julianne Moore
From their home base of New York City, the Coen brothers try to explain how Raymond Chandler and bowling came together in The Big Lebowski (1998), their follow-up to Fargo (1996), the out-of-left-field hit that brought them an Academy Award for best original screenplay.
While Joel, 43, is listed as the director, and Ethan, 40, as the producer, the Coen brothers actively work together on every aspect of their films, from writing to shooting to editing (using the pseudonym Roderick Jaynes). In keeping with their collaborative working process, they also meet interviewers together, alternating answers and sometimes expanding on what the other has said.
In The Big Lebowski, the Coens create two radically different men with the same name, one wealthy and self-important, the other a happily marginal figure who calls himself The Dude (played with trippy charm by Jeff Bridges). They cross paths in Los Angeles, a city whose terrain — both geographic and mythological — the Coens very much wanted to explore. Their way in was through the hard-boiled writer who methodically documented this complex city from the 1930s to 50s.
"It's suggested by Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe novels," says Ethan, "and it's about L.A. in the same sense that those stories are about L.A. It's also this episodic narrative about a character — who's not a private eye, he's just this sort of lay-about pothead — who works his way through L.A. society trying to unravel a mystery."
"It's what Ethan said, a way to look at L.A. and the people who live in L.A.," adds Joel, "his books all take place in Los Angeles and the character Marlowe would meet people from these different social strata and different parts of the city, and that's part of what was interesting to us about doing this and why it's so specifically L.A."
Chandler, who later worked as a Hollywood studio screenwriter, rarely dealt directly with the movie business in his novels. This also appealed to the Coens, who had already made the Cannes-lauded Barton Fink (1991), which viewed the old studio system as a descent into hell for an eager writer.
"Barton Fink was more a sort of Hollywood specifically story," Ethan explains, "as opposed to Los Angeles, which is broader."
"And that's much more of an internal story and very sort of claustrophobic where as this is sort of opened up," Joel continues, "they're both about a character's perception of L.A., but they're very different in other respects."
The central characters in The Big Lebowski, The Dude and Walter (a gruff and spirited John Goodman), were based in part on friends of the Coens who live in Los Angeles and have been actively involved in amateur sports leagues. But what personal connection do the Coen brothers, born and raised in the suburbs of Minneapolis, have with that Midwestern mainstay, bowling?
"We don't really have one," said Joel, "we like the design aspects of bowling, and the retro aspects of it seemed like they were the right fit with the characters who were also products of a former era."
The Big Lebowski's rapturous and wildly inventive bowling sequences (one involves a camera actually inside a bowling ball) were filmed at the Hollywood Star Lanes on Santa Monica Boulevard. Several actors, including Coen regulars Steve Buscemi and John Turturro (wickedly funny as Jesus, a fabulously attired and fiercely competitive rival), look completely at home on the lanes, which was not always the case.
"I didn't bowl once in the damn thing!" says Jeff Bridges with a laugh, "we shot a scene and we worked very hard, John and I, perfecting our bowling skills, but they didn't use the shot. We didn't make the mustard."
For both Bridges — who recently published a book of his photographs taken on The Big Lebowski set — and Julianne Moore, their first film with the Coens was a physical challenge, involving not only flying sequences but a fantastical musical dream sequence where Busby Berkeley meets Wagner in a bowling alley.
"I was feeling like a real moron," Moore explains, "because I'm in this styrofoam suit and I had to march with this trident and there were all these dancers around me, and [the Coens] were telling me stories about them feeling dorky doing something physical. They're such brainiacs, I didn't know what the atmosphere on the set would be like, and they were just so incredibly supportive and normal. I didn't expect that because here are these guys making these very rigorous and interesting and eccentric films."
"They have total creative control," added Bridges, "and while being very structured, with a very set idea about how it should be, they're very open and loose and they want to know what you have to bring to it."
The Coens have already completed a screenplay of Elmore Leonard's Cuba Libre for Universal, which they are not set to direct. (Leonard is a fan of the Coens, particularly their elegant gangster epic, Miller's Crossing.)
Their next film should include a role for Frances McDormand, who won a best actress Academy Award for Fargo and is married to Joel. Ethan's wife, Tricia Cooke, is a film editor who worked on The Big Lebowski and also put together a making-of book. And key members of their working family, including cinematographer Roger Deakins and composer Carter Burwell, continue their long and fruitful collaboration with the Coens.
Their future may also involve another project with former Detroiter Sam Raimi, the writer/director (Evil Dead, Darkman) and sometimes actor, who made a brief but memorable appearance with a Tommy gun in Miller's Crossing (1990).
"He's an old friend of ours and was a big help to us when we first got started making movies, and we worked with him on Hudsucker," Joel says about their much-maligned big-budget foray The Hudsucker Proxy (1994). Then he adds with a grin, "maybe we should blame him for that."
While the Coens can turn monosyllabic at some questions, particularly when asked to discuss the overriding themes of their films, Jeff Bridges has no qualms about summing up The Big Lebowski.
"It's a film about grace," he states with some of The Dude's aplomb, "how amazing that we're all allowed to stay alive on this little speck hurled out in space as screwed up as we all are."
© 1998, Serena Donadoni. All rights reserved.