Oscar-winning filmmaker Ethan Coen has teamed up with wife Tricia Cooke for their latest release, a self-described ‘lesbian B-movie’ and follow up to their 2024 road film Drive-Away Dolls.
As with that film, which focused on two gay best friends on an East Coast road trip of the US via lesbian bars, queerness is a key theme in Honey Don’t!, which brings back The Substance’s Margaret Qualley again in an unrelated lead role as private investigator Honey O’Donahue, working on a case stemming from a car accident in Bakersfield, California.
She’s joined in supporting roles by Aubrey Plaza, Charlie Day, Billy Eichner and Chris Evans as a charismatic cult leader.
Coen is best known for his collaboration with brother Joel on films including Raising Arizona, The Big Lebowski and Inside Llewyn Davis; they’ve also amassed an impressive 16 Oscar nominations – and four wins – between them on the likes of Fargo, No Country for Old Men and True Grit.
Cooke – who married Coen in 1993 – has also worked on several Coen Brothers’ films as an editor, starting with Miller’s Crossing in 1990.
But in penning her second fictional feature film alongside husband Coen, it was Cooke in the driver’s seat and she who wanted to promote queer representation as a major part of the story.
How Ethan Coen and Tricia Cooke’s ‘non-traditional’ marriage inspired queer film
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‘It wasn’t important to me, but it was to her!’ says Coen when we discuss the LGBTQ+ identity of Honey Don’t at Cannes Film Festival in May, where the movie is receiving its world premiere.
‘Yes,’ answers Cooke, who identifies as a lesbian, with a smile. ‘I started writing because we want – or I wanted – to make queer genre movies. I wouldn’t have had any interest in writing [a] heterosexual detective story or road movie at that time.’
‘I just sort of went along with the ride,’ chimes in Coen. ‘We enjoyed writing the two scripts together and I had done all those movies with my brother and, you know, heterosexual is fine – but enough!’
The two are in a ‘very non-traditional’ relationship as Cooke previously described it, sharing two children together but also each having separate partners.
Cooke had previously co-written with Coen (and co-directed with Carrie Schrader) the 2008 short Don’t Mess with Texas about two cocky lesbians who get into a spot of bother at a roadside diner in the state.
Her move over from editing to writing was a decision borne from wanting to spend more time together (Drive-Away Dolls, originally Drive-Away Dykes, was actually penned over 20 years before it went into production).
‘It’s something that I could do with Ethan at home – I wasn’t cutting with them any longer. And so it was a way for us to work together and spend more time, creative time, on the weekends or in the evenings.’
For her it was a ‘natural transition’ from editing as she had written before with friends and at film school; she had also stepped back from editing when the Coens started using Final Cut and to focus on their children as they grew up.
From Coen Brothers to Coen Husband and Wife: A Hollywood family
I’m stuck by the family’s keenness to work on film projects together. Is that the best way to do it?
‘I’ve never not done that, so I don’t know what the alternative is. But yeah, in both cases it’s great,’ answers Coen, before referencing the fact that brother Joel is also now collaborating with his wife, the actress Frances McDormand, after she produced his solo directorial debut The Tragedy of Macbeth – also starring opposite Denzel Washington as Lady Macbeth.
They laugh over the suggestion that they could have inspired his brother and McDormand to work together more behind the scenes – ‘I don’t think he needed inspiration but maybe!’ smiles Coen – before Cooke reveals the family collaborations are expanding through the generations as well.
‘I just wrote a script with my daughter – it’s easy because you also have a shorthand,’ she says as Coen points out: ‘And you’ve had ample practice arguing!’
It sounds like the Coen-Coen-Cooke-McDormand Hollywood dynasty is expanding though, more power family than power couple(s).
‘It would have been easier 30 years ago to make Honey Don’t!’
But despite their experience and accolades, the answer is emphatic when I ask if it’s harder to make films now.
‘Yes, with a big exclamation point!’ responds Coen. ‘It’s certainly harder than when I started, the whole economic climate, the whole movie industry is different. If it’s not a kind of – whatever you want to call it – Marvel movie or something, that they think has a sort of a brand appeal, built-in brand, it’s very difficult to get a movie financed now.’
‘And to get enough days to shoot the movie,’ Cooke adds.
They seem especially well placed to answer this as the Coen Brothers have really been ‘the brand’ themselves – they don’t work with blockbuster budgets, they hop across all types of genres – but their quality filmmaking, dark humour and tendency towards subversion and parody are their hallmarks.
Coen is clear to credit Focus Features as having been ‘great’ when we discuss any challenges in making Drive-Away Dolls and Honey Don’t! in particular.
‘It would have been easier 30 years ago, but the script didn’t exist 30 years ago. Like I said, the climate is different. We managed, so I can’t complain, it’s just a different environment for movies.’
We told her she would play Humphrey Bogart, and she went, “Yeah man, I’m down for that!”
In his eyes he agrees that there’s a ‘big gap in the middle that didn’t used to be there’ when it comes to the type of films more often funded these days, which appear to be on the extreme ends of the scale, stretching from Christopher Nolan’s upcoming The Odyssey (which has an estimated production budget of $250million (£184m)) to Sean Baker’s Oscar-winning Anora – which was made for just $6m (£4.4m).
With Honey Don’t!, Coen and Cooke are playing in the neo-noir genre, where Bakersfield has a very 70s vibe, but Qualley (real-life daughter of Andie MacDowell) as gumshoe detective Honey has a real feel of the whip-smart, fast-talking 1940s detective – but a woman, and a lesbian.
‘We told her she would play Humphrey Bogart, and she went, “Yeah man, I’m down for that!”’ shares Coen.
‘We wanted Honey the strong detective who could take on all the action and who was making all the decisions and falling for the wrong women – that was important. We thought that would be fun to do, to change the genders up in the traditional detective genre,’ adds Cooke.
‘And with Margaret, she has the classic Hollywood look that she seemed really perfect for Honey – she looked like she would be in a Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall movie.’
Her co-star Evans is also clearly savouring his part too as the despicable Reverend Drew Devlin, owner of far too many weapons and a 50 Shades of Grey-type playroom in his church office, where he is constantly caught in multiple compromising positions.
‘He needed no help subverting his reputation, he enjoyed it thoroughly!’ laughs Coen of Evans taking a big step away from his squeaky-clean Marvel movie stardom as Captain America.
‘He’s happy to play an ass and he does it with such relish. We didn’t help, he’s just fun to watch!’
Honey Don’t! is in UK and US cinemas now.
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