How the Coen Brothers Direct Comedy & Violence [Directing Styles Explained]

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Chapters:
00:00 Who are the Coen Brothers?
01:34 Seven Catagories that make the Coens unique
01:43 Story — from comedy to thriller
03:35 Production Design — standing out with sets and costume
06:24 Color — when to saturate and desaturate
10:06 Cinematography — having Deakins on call
13:52 Editing — exercise with 'Burn After Reading'
17:15 Sound Design — exaggerate and enhance
20:29 Music — building story with song
24:54 Summing up the Coens catalogue

The Coen Brothers are two directors with one vision. Perhaps working as a pair helps them cover such a wide range of subjects — from Looney Tunes-style comedies to bleak, fatalistic thrillers. And they seem to operate within these disparate modes with equal prowess and control. There are few filmmakers with such a definitive style and we’re here to see if we can decode the Coen Brothers cinematic DNA. Using seven areas of focus, including cinematography, sound design, and editing, we’ll work through their filmography to isolate how each piece of the puzzle fits together.

The Coen Brothers love a good idiot and they revel in watching them try to cheat the system. We can find these dimwit desperados in Coen Brothers movies like Raising Arizona, Fargo, The Ladykillers, and Burn After Reading. Coupled with their insanely tight and pitch-perfect dialogue, Joel and Ethan Coen also use production design to make each character (from the leads to the bit parts) completely unique. Think of any character in The Big Lebowski, for example — the diversity of their personalities is matched by their costume choices. In other words, the Coen Brothers populate their movies with fully realized individuals giving the overall film depth and a tone that can only be described as Coen-esque. Between their two main modes (dark comedy and thriller), the Coen Brothers use color as a way to negotiate tone. For comedies, the colors are often bright and saturated; for thrillers, the opposite — desaturated and monotone.

In their cinematography, the Coen Brothers again use lighting to direct or contrast the genre they are working in. Sometimes, and this is when it gets the most interesting, they counter our expectations altogether. In movies like The Big Lebowski and The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, we might see dramatic, chiaroscuro lighting for comedic scenes and flat, even lighting for suspenseful moments. In their editing, comedies are typically edited around the rhythms created by their dialogue, but in thrillers like No Country for Old Men, it is the silent moments that are presented with Hitchcockian tension.

Sound design in the Coen Brothers’ movies also ping pongs between almost cartoonish effects to dramatic silence, dripping with suspense.
Barton Fink finds the Coen Brothers soundtracking the Hotel Earle as if it were some haunted, existential labyrinth. And in The Hudsucker Proxy, the film’s screwball-throwback mise-en-scene is complemented with light and playful sound design. Music is one of the Coen Brothers’ director trademarks and each film has a distinct world-building score. Think of the Southern bluegrass of O Brother, Where Art Thou? or the menagerie of folk music at the core of Inside Llewyn Davis. One could argue that the Coen Brothers approach their music choices with the same amount of thoughtfulness and purpose as anything else in their directing style.

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