What does one do when they sit down with Joel and Ethan Coen? Ask them about beloved older characters and see if they’ll ever revisit them.
For years there’s been talk of John Turturro revisiting his hilarious, convicted pedophile bowling character Jesus from “The Big Lebowski” in a spin-off film.
Evidently Turturro pitched the idea to the Coens and they liked it. But speaking with MTV at TIFF promoting their upcoming film, “A Serious Man,” the brothers pooh-poohed the idea.
“We don’t see it yet,” Ethan Coen said, while Joel added ‘Lebowski’ is a major work for the fans, but not necessarily themselves. “That movie has more of an enduring fascination for other people than it does for us.”
Apparently Turturro wants it to be called, “100 Minutes of Jesus,” and desperately wants to make the picture. It’s all about the Coens warming up to the idea, but it doesn’t sound like it’s going to happen. “Oh, he’s serious. He’s on board,” Ethan said. “He’s very serious,” Joel added.
We can just see the pointless Internet campaigns and petitions starting now. Of course those would never do a thing to move the idiosyncratic filmmaking duo. And don’t plead for another filmmaker to do it either, that would be heresy.
However, the brothers did apparently talk up a sequel to “Barton Fink,” which also starred John Turturro as a New York intellectual playwright who comes to Hollywood and has to soil his talents by writing a Wallace Beery wrestling picture. Bizarre, nightmarish events including a loud boorish neighbor (John Goodman) keep distracting from his task. The odd, dark picture also uncharacteristically dominated the Cannes Film Festival that year in 1991 winning the Palme d’Or prize (Best Picture), Best Director (Joel Coen) and Best Actor (Turturro).
Apparently they want to call it, “Old Fink.” “We did talk to [John] Turturro about doing ‘Old Fink,'” Ethan told MTV. “We want John to be old enough to do it.”
Our first reaction to this news is that the Coens are pulling MTV’s leg, but apparently they were sincere and even had a basic plotline. “[It’s] another 1967 movie [much like “A Serious Man”]. It’s the summer of love and [Fink is] teaching at Berkeley. He ratted on a lot of his friends to the House Un-American Activities committee. We told Turturro this is one sequel we’d actually like to make but not until he was actually old enough to play the part,” Joel said. “He’s getting there.”
Leave it to the Coens to perversely choose to do a sequel to a film that only dogged cinephiles love (“Barton Fink” made next to nothing when it was released and was considered a bomb) and feel disinterested about a character that, while fun, is adored by a whole group of people that are generally tourists as far as cinema is concerned. There’s something we love about their attitude. It seems purposely contrarian on the outside, but dig deeper and it’s surely them just marching to the beat of their own peculiar rhythm.