Blood brothers

The Coens' latest, 'Burn After Reading', premieres at the Venice Film Festival next week. Geoffrey Macnab pays tribute to a pair of genre-defying, subversive mavericks

The Coen brothers' new feature, Burn After Reading, is a world premiere at the Venice Festival next week. The comedy-thriller will have a painfully topical resonance for British civil servants who've lost classified information in recent months by leaving it on the train, or trusting it to the whims of the postal service. It is the story of a computer disc containing highly sensitive CIA material that falls into the hands of two dim-witted gym instructors (Frances McDormand and Brad Pitt). In time-honoured Coen fashion, these small- timers try to sell the information.

After their very dark Cormac McCarthy adaptation No Country For Old Men, this is the Coen brothers back in a lighter groove. For most directors, making a big-budget film with several top Hollywood stars and rushing to finish it for the opening night in Venice would be a cause of extreme stress. However, on this, there have been no advance stories of budget overruns or Heaven's Gate-style meltdowns. James Schamus, the boss of Focus Features (which produced the film alongside Britain's Working Title) recalls being startled by the prevailing mood of calm during the film's making.

"It's like a dream. We started watching the dailies - and, of course, they were incredible. The other thing is that they finish their days early. When you have people who are that creative and original, you tend to assume that for them to be that way, there has to be chaos. But they [the Coens] are incredibly organised. "

Ask the brothers if they are indeed more orderly than most of their Hollywood brethren and they say it is impossible for them to tell. Ethan reflects, "Quite honestly, I don't know what goes on other sets. Part of it comes from the fact that we come from, and are still involved in, relatively low-budget film-making. A certain amount of organisation is key to be being able to operate in that world.... It is also possible that it is just a temperamental thing. Other people may function better in a chaotic environment than we do."

The Coens give the impression that they regard themselves as old- fashioned craftsmen. They claim to enjoy every aspect of film- making - from the "semi-solitary" writing of their screenplays, to production, and even editing. "It's nice that it changes. We enjoy all of it."

Their third key collaborator is the editor, Roderick Jaynes. Jaynes has worked on all their films. The one hitch about him is that he doesn't actually exist. The name is a pseudonym that the brothers first started using because they couldn't afford to hire an editor and ended up doing the job themselves. Joel has talked of the "strange, juvenile thrill" he still experiences when Jaynes's name comes up in the credits. To the brothers' detractors, this sort of skittish in-joke is precisely what can make their work so frustrating. There is a sense that they are directing films for themselves rather than for their audiences. Then again, they are defined by their maverick, absurdist streak.

"The boys live to make movies," the Coens' friend and former cinematographer Barry Sonnenfeld remarked of them. "Money isn't important to them, except to make movies. They never want to be in a position where anyone has any power to tell them what to do." Generally, as long as their budgets aren't pegged too high, the brothers have complete liberty to make their movies just as they wish.

Perhaps because they are so disciplined and work under the radar, there is a tendency to take the Coens for granted. European festivals aren't always as welcoming to their work as might be expected. It's almost a quarter of a century now since the Minneapolis-born siblings made their feature debut with Blood Simple (1984). Since then they have turned out a steady string of astonishingly inventive films - Raising Arizona, Miller's Crossing, Barton Fink, Fargo, The Big Lebowski, The Man Who Wasn't There. Even movies pronounced by critics as relative misfires (The Ladykillers, The Hudsucker Proxy) would be considered highlights in most other directors' careers.

Not that the Coens seem much enamoured of these critics. The brothers were clearly irritated when reviewers treated No Country For Old Men as a return to the darker, richer themes of Fargo or Barton Fink after the (perceived) lightweight diversions of Intolerable Cruelty and The Ladykillers. "It's a story that writes itself. That's what journalism is," Joel observed of the way he and Ethan are periodically accused of selling out when I spoke to the brothers late last year.

The brothers insist that there was no desire on their parts to make some deep artistic statement by tackling No Country For Old Men. "It got thrown into the transit by [producer] Scott Rudin. We liked it and we made it," they say. "There was no more conscious decision to place it into the body of everything else we were doing than that."