Any fan of Joel and Ethan Coen’s films will recognize the comedic voice in the new comedy Drive-Away Dolls. While only one of the sibling filmmakers was involved in the making of the movie (Ethan Coen, in collaboration with wife/co-writer Tricia Cooke), the patter and sensibilities bring to mind the excellence of Raising Arizona, O Brother, Where Art Thou? and Intolerable Cruelty.
But did the stars of Drive-Away Dolls actually use those movies as a reference? As I learned earlier this month, Geraldine Viswanathan, Margaret Qualley and Beanie Feldstein each had very different approaches to the Coen filmography in the making of the new film. Viswanathan, for example, did a full-on deep dive into their work, evidently watching everything from Blood Simple to The Ballad Of Buster Scruggs.
I watched all of the Coen movies while preparing to shoot, which actually was amazing, 'cause there's really no misses. They're all hits. But it also was intimidating because it's such an impressive canon of movies. Raising Arizona felt like tonally kind of a reference or kind of... It felt most similar to that world to me.
Featuring similar zaniness to the 1987 comedy starring Nicolas Cage and Holly Hunter (as I noted in my CinemaBlend review), Drive-Away Dolls centers on a pair of friends, Marian (Geraldine Viswanathan) and Jamie (Margaret Qualley), who decide to take a ride down to Tallahassee together after Jamie gets caught cheating on her girlfriend (Beanie Feldstein) and is kicked out of her apartment. The girls get a ride to Florida via a drive away service, but what they don’t know is that their car contains mysterious contraband in the trunk that is sought after by some dangerous individuals.
As you’ll see in the video above, I made a comparison between Margaret Qualley’s Jamie and George Clooney’s character from O Brother, Where Art Thou? (both characters have similar rapid fire delivery and charm), but she told me that she didn’t specifically watch any Coen brothers movies to prepare for her performance:
I feel like watching a Coen movie... it's just the best, you might as well... but I don't know. To prepare? So much in the script, right? It's its own thing. It's all kind of on the page.
In her response to the question, Beanie Feldstein took things one step further. She apparently has a personal “rule” that stops her from diving into the filmographies of people she is about to work with as she is preparing for a role. She had previously seen a number of Coen movies, but she didn’t do any rewatching, and instead let the material from the script stand for itself. Said Feldstein,
I have a universal rule that I do not watch anything more than I've already seen when I'm about to work with someone. So, of course I had seen so much of his canon, or even with these two, like I've seen so much of their work, but I get too nervous to watch more right beforehand… But as you both said, the writing that Trisha and Ethan did on the script, you could hear it as you were reading it. The tone and the musicality of the syntax of the way that they wrote the lines. It all played out in your head. You could feel it as you were reading it. And that's the best version of a script.
Also starring Pedro Pascal, Matt Damon, and 2024 Oscar Nominee Colman Domingo, Drive-Away Dolls made its premiere at the box office this past weekend and is now playing in theaters everywhere.
