Ethan Coen Takes on Jerry Lee Lewis
He thought he was done making movies. Now, he and his wife-collaborator, Tricia Cooke, are back with the story of the Killer
Ethan coen wasn’t exactly a Jerry Lee Lewis scholar, or even a fan. Sure, the Oscar-winning filmmaker knew “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On” and “Great Balls of Fire.” He knew about Lewis marrying his 13-year-old cousin in 1958 and the ensuing scandal — but that was about it. Coen had also, by his own admission, “left the movie business.” Then, he and his wife, film editor Tricia Cooke, found themselves several weeks into a lockdown in the spring of 2020. “I think [the mentality] was: We’d make a movie about almost anything right now,” Coen says.
It was around that point that they got a call from music producer T-Bone Burnett, proposing a Lewis doc. Two years later, Coen and Cooke’s Jerry Lee Lewis: Trouble in Mind, due for release through A24 this year, presents a portrait of the Killer in his own words. Told solely through archival clips, TV appearances, and concert footage, the movie liberally skips around through his life, with an emphasis on the second phase of Lewis’ career as a country & western artist. You get a sense of who the man banging the keys and kicking away stools back in the day was: crazed, righteous, untamed, talented as hell.
“We didn’t want to do . . . the voice-of-God, history-of-rock movie,” Coen says. “The more you see aging rock stars talk about what a great influence he is while sitting in front of a bland background, the more depressing it is.” Adds Cooke: “We’re both fans of ‘Let the artist do their own talking.’ And because we had access to so much footage — because Jerry Lee has been performing for decades — it was easy to piece that together.”