After his brother Joel Coen went out on his own to direct a movie, last year’s Oscar-nominated The Tragedy of Macbeth, Ethan Coen is also planning a solo trip.
Ethan Coen, half of the acclaimed sibling partnership known simply as the Coen brothers, has teamed up with Focus Features and Working Title for the feature project, which is currently untitled.
Coen will direct the film, which is eyeing a shoot this summer, and wrote the script with his wife, Tricia Cooke. The two are also producing with Robert Graf and Working Title principals Tim Bevan and Eric Fellner.
Focus and Working Title are keeping mum on the project, but sources indicate that the untitled feature is a lesbian road trip project that Coen and Cooke initially wrote in the mid-2000s.
The Russ Meyer-inspired action sex comedy was initially to have been directed by Allison Anders, who made the 1992 indie hit Gas Food Lodging. The story centers on a party girl who takes a trip from Philadelphia to Miami with her buttoned-up friend. Along the way they cruise the bars and encounter, among other obstacles, a severed head in a hatbox, a bitter ex-girlfriend, a mystery briefcase and an evil senator.
“The sensibility is exploitive but innocent,” Coen told the Los Angeles Times in January 2007, adding that he was going for the tone of early ’70s exploitation romps he saw as a teenager, only with more sincerity. Selma Blair, Holly Hunter, Christina Applegate and Chloe Sevigny were among those attached to star at various early points.
Coen was just producing at that time, but now, 15 years later, it looks like he’s got gas in the tank and is ready to take the wheel himself, with the script having evolved since then.
The Coen brothers have been making movies together — writing, directing and producing — since the 1980s. They shared Oscars for Fargo and No Country for Old Men, and the last movie they worked on together was 2018’s The Ballad of Buster Scruggs.
Source: Hollywood
