Code of Coens: How to succeed in filmmaking

From their audacious 1984 debut “Blood Simple” onward, filmmaker brothers Joel and Ethan Coen have built a remarkably consistent and unmistakably personal body of work.

Their latest, a hard-edged adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s novel “No Country For Old Men,” is one of the frontrunners at this year’s Oscars, tied with “There Will Be Blood” with eight nominations, including best picture.

While it clearly ranks alongside “Fargo” and “The Big Lebowski” as the brothers’ best work, “No Country” has an unusual place among their movies, in some ways perfectly typical of their style and in others an unexpected reinvention of it. Here’s a quick look at some of the characteristic hallmarks of the Coen brothers’ success.

Know what you excel at and don’t be afraid to specialize in it
The Coens make essentially two kinds of movies: Wacky dark comedies about well-meaning idiots with a penchant for larceny, and brooding crime thrillers inspired by the classic authors of the noir genre. They established that pattern early on: “Blood Simple” drew its noir themes of jealousy, murder and revenge from the stories of James M. Cain. Their follow-up, 1987’s baby-kidnapping comedy “Raising Arizona,” at the time seemed like a 180-degree turn into wacky and cheerfully ironic territory.

INTERACTIVE Meet the Oscar nominees Learn more about this year’s Academy Award nominees and vote for your favorites.

Looking back, it’s now clear that every film since then lives somewhere between the signposts defined by those two films. There is some crossover between the two modes — “Fargo” is a near-perfect synthesis of both — but generally they alternate between the two styles from film to film, and have not significantly stepped outside their self-defined boundaries. Some might call that a lack of range, but nobody complains that Van Gogh painted too many sunflowers.

Find good people to work with, and work to their strengths
The Coens often write their scripts with specific actors in mind. For instance, they had to wait to film the upcoming “Burn After Reading” until George Clooney, John Malkovich, Brad Pitt and Frances McDormand were all available at the same time. Their loose-knit stable of actors has been a hallmark of their films, with memorable repeat performances by John Goodman, John Turturro, Steve Buscemi and Stephen Root, and sometimes a bit of in-jokey humor: Holly Hunter moves from an infertility in “Raising Arizona” to a mother of seven in “O Brother, Where Art Thou?”; Billy Bob Thornton plays the taciturn title role in “The Man Who Wasn’t There,” then an irrepressible motormouth in “Intolerable Cruelty.”

Video interactive Design your Oscar outfit Select Courtney Hazlett's red-carpet outfit and hear comments from her and Glamour style expert Suze Yalof Schwartz on your choices.

And on the other side of the camera, the same people tend to show up in the credits over and over — perhaps most significantly cinematographer Roger Deakins, who’s been with the duo on every film since 1991’s “Barton Fink,” and Carter Burwell, who’s scored every Coen movie.

Know your roots
Though their sense of humor is the product of the irony-heavy 1980s, the Coens’ favorite era of moviemaking is clearly a generation earlier, with the film noirs and screwball comedies of the 1930s and 1940s, not to mention the classic crime novelists of that age. Dashiell Hammett’s “The Glass Key” and “Red Harvest” were sources for the Coens’ “Miller’s Crossing, “The Big Lebowski” lovingly parodizes Raymond Chandler, and Cain inspired not only “Blood Simple” but “The Man Who Wasn’t There.” (There’s even a minor character in “Miller’s Crossing” that’s a dead ringer for Hammett, a likely homage to Hammett’s own real-life roots as a detective in the underworld).

Less directly, you can find echoes of the darkly comic tales of Jim Thompson and Charles Willeford in the Coen comedies; they’d do wonders with something like Thompson’s “The Killer Inside Me.” Not to say they always have a golden touch at reviving older styles: “The Hudsucker Proxy” and “Intolerable Cruelty” aimed to breathe new life into 1940s-style screwball romantic comedies and satires in the Preston Sturges mode, but flopped both critically and at the box office.

MORE FROM ACADEMY AWARDS

Academy Awards Section Front

‘No Country’ is the big winner with 4 awards Oscar prognostication improves, drama lessens Brad Renfro excluded from Oscar memorial Whoopi gets choked up about Oscars Oscars could reach all-time low in viewership Let ’er rip: Blogging the Oscars Viewing-wise, a pretty good night for Oscar Newsweek: Show was gold-plated boredom Elton John is the belle of the after-parties Gary Busey harasses stars on red carpet Academy Awards Section Front   Add Academy Awards headlines to your news reader: