The News Herald (Willoughby, OH)
Re-charted territory
The Coens head west again with Netflix’s ‘Buster Scruggs’
When writer-director Joel Coen gave Tim Blake Nelson the script for a part Coen and his brother Ethan Coen hoped he would play — the title role in “The Ballad of Buster Scruggs” — Nelson didn’t hesitate.
“I said, ‘Oh, yeah, I’ll certainly do it,’” Nelson says during a recent interview at the Four Seasons Los Angeles at Beverly Hills. “Which was a bit of a departure for me with them because when they gave me ‘O Brother Where Art Thou,’ I said I’ve got to sleep on it.”
He wanted to make sure that the role, his first for the Coen brothers, was a good fit for him, because his biggest fear was he’d get to the set and disappoint them, Nelson says. For the new film, though?
“I didn’t tarry. I said, ‘OK, I’ll do it,’” he says. That was in 2002 — no, that’s not a typo — and Joel Coen replied along the lines of, great, we’ll get back to you when we’ve written the rest of the movie.
“The Ballad of Buster Scruggs,” which opens in select theaters but also debuts on Netflix Nov. 16, is an anthology film, its six standalone chapters set in the Old West telling archetypal stories of that dusty genre in the signature Coen brothers style.
The cast includes Zoe Kazan, whom you’ll meet in her own chapter momentarily, as well as actors such as James Franco, Liam Neeson, Tom Waits and Tyne Daly. It’s visuals are spectacular — filmed mostly in New Mexico and Nebraska — and the storytelling has that mix of humor and violence, fate and deliverance for which the Coens are known.
So when they called 14 years after offering Nelson the part, he was ready to go.
“It was the kind of prep that actors live for,” he says of developing new talents to play Buster Scruggs, a singing and gun-slinging cowboy who’s also a bit of a sociopath. “This was six months of three to four hours a day of twirling pistols and learning to play the guitar.
“It’s a Peter Pan life,” Nelson says. But a lot of hard work, too. The movie opens with Buster riding his horse, Dan, through some picturesque canyon, singing and playing guitar in brilliant white cowboy wear, his face made up in the thickest pancake makeup Nelson had ever worn.
“It’s the look Joel and Ethan wanted,” he says. “That’s the aesthetic of these movies. That’s what was so extravagantly silly about those movies: this Western guy out on the terrain, but he’s perfectly clean, and the makeup’s almost foppish, and he’s playing a guitar on a horse. It’s just ridiculous.”
Kazan, who plays a hesitant young woman who suddenly finds herself alone and unprepared on a wagon train to Oregon, says she, too, jumped at the chance to work with the Coen brothers for the first time. (This is her second wagon train movie, though, after “Meek’s Cutoff” in 2011. “I look great in a bonnet — got a face for it,” she jokes.)
“You wait for that email or that call to come in,” she says. “Then to read the part and have it be this incredibly richly drawn, real person. She seemed so real to me on the page. Her fate seemed so important to me, like, I worried for her and wanted the best for her, the way I would feel about a friend.”
Unlike some roles where she has to work to find its heart, this one fit from the start.
“I can count them on one hand, roles that you read and go, ‘No, that’s the middle of the target for me.’ “
Where Nelson’s chapter is more a comedic musical, Kazan’s is a romantic drama. A love interest forms, the shy young woman starts to find her strength, Native American warriors attack, and — well, it wouldn’t be fair to give away the story of Alice, her beau Billy (played by Bill Heck, with whom she’d previously played a married couple in the play “Angels In America”), and a noisy little terrier named President Pierce, would it?
Where Nelson’s story was shot in New Mexico, most of Kazan’s was filmed in western Nebraska, on remote ranchlands that made it easy to slip into character.
“You look around and you can’t see any sign of civilization,” she says. “Your cellphone doesn’t work. There’s just nothing as far as the eye can see except for grass, and you’re looking at a bunch of Conestoga wagons.
“It makes you feel like you have time traveled,” Kazan says. “It was a big help imaginatively.”
Both she and Nelson talked effusively of how wonderful it was to work with Joel and Ethan Coen.
“I’d say that their direction starts in their writing,” Kazan says. “I think they are, with Ben Hecht and Billy Wilder, some of the all-time great screenwriters.
“I never had a conversation with them about, ‘Who is this woman, where is she from, what is she like?’ All the information I really needed was on the page.”
Nelson described the brothers as formalists — their visual compositions are precise — who are also self-aware about the medium of movies.
“Their movies, every single one of them, are always addressing the art of filmmaking,” he says.
Unlike the auteur filmmakers of the ‘70s, directors such as Terrence Malick or John Cassavetes, the Coens embrace the structures of early cinematic forms, such as film noir, the inspiration for their debut, “Blood Simple,” and other films that followed, Nelson says.
“They brought that formality back in a very self-conscious way, and that, to me, is what really distinguishes what they do,” he says. “Then you throw in a kind of Old Testament philosophical take on man and man’s place in the world, which is also, by the way, very noir.
“Their protagonist is always a step behind and their attempts to control the world in which they live are ultimately futile,” Nelson says of Buster Scruggs, Kazan’s Alice and practically any other Coen brothers character ever. “And the more they try to control their world, the more out of hand everything gets.
“And then eventually there’s some sort of usually awful deliverance at the end. That’s what and who I think they are.”