Acclaimed director duo Joel and Ethan Coen have made it clear that they never conceived their new feature The Ballad of Buster Scruggs as a TV or web series.
Acclaimed director duo Joel and Ethan Coen have made it clear that they never conceived their new feature The Ballad of Buster Scruggs as a TV or web series.
In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, the director duo, popularly known as the Coen Brothers, said they were clear from the day one that the project, a western anthology drama consisting six different stories, will be presented in the film format.
"There was a discussion about what the format should be, but it was always the intention that they be seen together. There's been all this stuff in the press about how it was originally a TV series and we restructured it.
"No, we had a script. The script is exactly what we gave Annapurna and exactly what we shot. That never changed," Joel Coen said.
Ethan said they never took the script to any other studio because "we knew that a studio would never finance this".
Joel said after they presented the script to Annapurna Pictures, the studio went to Netflix and made a deal, which they were not averse to because today the streaming giant is ready to invest in diverse and unique stories.
"They're the people who are investing in these kinds of movies now. I mean, there's a lot of discussion around the way the movies are shown, whether or not they have theatrical releases or just go up on the platform. And we both have opinions about that, and it's an important discussion.
"But I think the more fundamental thing is that they're the people who are stepping up and spending money on movies that aren't Marvel comic movies or big action franchise movies and that type of thing, which is pretty much the business of the studios now. We can't argue with that," he said.
The Coen Brothers, however, admitted that they feel "conflicted like everybody" when it comes to the debate around films being watched on streaming services and in theatres.
"In a strange way, Hollywood itself is as responsible for that as anyone else, at least amongst filmmakers. Because what they do is they give you all these DVDs of the movies that come out and instead of going to the movie theatres, lazy people like us just plug them into our machines," said Joel.
He said going forward, there needs to be a balance of both the mediums. "What you want is a mix of both, and it would be great if this was where it lands eventually. In terms of the actual labour you put into making a movie the hours and days and years you spend struggling over details and the sound and the way it looks and the whole thing that really is appreciated in a different way on a big screen," Joel said.
"There also is something really fundamental about having the chance to see movies in a community of strangers, not just your friends in your living room. You don't want that to go away. So in that respect, no, I wouldn't be happy if the only way you could see movies was on your television," he added.
The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, featuring Tim Blake Nelson, Liam Neeson, James Franco and Zoe Kazan, is available to stream on Netflix starting Friday.
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