THE OFF-ROADERS
AFTER DECADES OF MAKING CLASSIC FILMS WITH HIS BROTHER, ETHAN COEN HAS TEAMED UP WITH HIS WIFE TRICIA COOKE FOR WILD CRIME-CAPER DRIVE-AWAY DOLLS
WORDS KELEN CHARA
ILLUSTRATION CAT SIMS
There was quite a lot of research and development involved in the penises,” says Ethan Coen of one key element, a collection of dildos, in Drive-Away Dolls. “The prop person, Gay Perello, auditioned some penises for us. She had to get signed releases from the models. Everything gets lawyered to death, believe it or not. Because somebody might sue you, presumably saying, ‘You used my penis-cast without my permission.’ I don’t know what the reasoning is; at some point your mind shuts down. But at any rate, there was exhaustive discussion of size, shapes and colours of penises.”
“And how they were arranged,” adds his co-writer and, says Coen, effectively co-director, Tricia Cooke. “At one point we had four across and one on top.”
“It’s got to be a row of penises. It’s no fun if it’s not a row,” says Coen, definitively. “There is a right answer to how the penises are arranged. It’s not even a matter of opinion.”
Coen and Cooke, husband and wife and co-workers for over 30 years (she edited several of your favourite Coen brothers films), found themselves grappling with many such details in order to create a vivid world for their latest, a 1990s-set lesbian road-trip comedy — the first feature [his 2022 documentary Jerry Lee Lewis: Trouble In Mind aside] Coen has made without his brother Joel.
Cooke came up with the idea for what was then called ‘Drive-Away Dykes’ in a bar on the Lower East Side of New York some 20 years ago, and she and Coen wrote the script together. They came close to getting it made with Gas Food Lodging’s Allison Anders directing in 2007, but when that fell apart they put the script in a drawer and moved on. Meanwhile, in 2020, Coen “excused myself from the movie business for a while”, as he puts it, burned out after a couple of difficult productions. During the pandemic, however, he and Cooke enjoyed working on the Jerry Lee Lewis documentary so much that they started to look for something else to make together. It was time to dig out and brush off that old script.