Fred Melamed, last seen playing the incredibly earnest Sy Ableman in A Serious Man, has confirmed in an interview with Empire magazine that the Coen brothers may have a role for him in their future adaptation of Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union. In said interview in the April 2010 issue of the magazine, when asked how he landed the role of Sy he said;

“I know the Coens a little bit as I went to school with Joel’s wife, Frances McDormand. I actually auditioned for a role in Barton Fink, the pushy movie executive, but Michael Lerner got it. Then they offered me a part in The Hudsucker Proxy, a character wearing only a baby diaper. Luckily, I wasn’t available. Finally, we made it work. And they told me there may be a part for me in The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, when they make that.”

I would love Melamed to become one of the Coen Family.

IFC.com have a very brief but, unusually for junket-style interviews, VERY INTERESTING interview with Joel and Ethan Coen. The interview took place during the Toronto International Film Festival where A Serious Man had it’s world premiere. It was particularly nice to read that The Yiddish Policemen’s Union is still on (or at least that’s how it seems). Enjoy…

Between this film and your upcoming adaptation of Michael Chabon’s “The Yiddish Policeman’s Union,” you’ve been steeped in Judaica for the past couple years. What sparked the renewed interest?

Joel Coen: “The Yiddish Policemen’s Union” was a bit of a coincidence, actually, coming on the heels of this.

Ethan Coen: It just fell into our laps. The producer Scott Rudin had bought the rights to the book and asked us to adapt it, write a screenplay. We just read the book and liked it. But we had already written this, it was before we shot this that we agreed to do the script for that.

As someone who spent some time at a Hebrew school, I know that can be an experience some would never want to revisit.

JC: We have a little perspective on it now because we’ve been away from it for so many years, so it seemed more interesting or funny or exotic or something to revisit now that…

EC: It must be one of those things there are seven stages of…

JC: Of denial…

EC: With flight…

JC: [laughs] Yes, denial, acceptance…

EC: And one of those later stages.

JC: Rage. [laughs]

EC: Nobody goes to Hebrew school and doesn’t feel rage at some point. [laughs]

Was it the right time for this film because you have the perspective for it, or because as filmmakers you have the clout to tell this particular story the way you’d want to tell it?

JC: I think all of those things are part of it. We’re a little older. The clout to make it? That one maybe not, but maybe. We might not have considered it early on just because it would’ve seemed so iffy. On the other hand…

EC: Yeah, you’ve got to be kind of established to have done this movie. It’s really true.

JC: Although “Barton Fink” was pretty weird at the time. But we had already done a number of movies at that point, too. ["A Serious Man"] would’ve been hard to do as a first or second movie, unless you were willing to go much lower budget than we were.

Given your background, it’s easy to infer this is a personal story for you, but now that the final product’s emerged, do you now feel it’s more personal than any of your other work?

JC: Only in the respect that the story is set in a context and a place and a time that we’re very personally connected to because it [was] where we grew up. Going back to Minnesota and making the movie there, trying to recreate that place 30, 40 years ago — that felt differentthan what we’ve done before, but it doesn’t feel that much more personal in other ways.

EC: But that’s not nothing. How the movie looks is a big part of how you feel about it. It does give you something that the other movies don’t have.

If my math is right, Joel’s bar mitzvah would’ve taken place around the same time as Danny Gopnik’s in the film. Was the bar mitzvah in the film any way a recreation, perhaps without being under the influence at the time?

JC: Neither of us were stoned during our bar mitzvah. That was actually a synagogue near where we grew up, the one we shot in, but we weren’t bar mitzvahed there.

EC: We’d been in it, friends had been bar mitzvahed there. It wasn’t our shul.

JC: We were bar mitzvahed in a similar kind of ceremony.

EC: But neither of us were stoned. [laughs] Although maybe it’s just heightened. Your bar mitzvah is weird.

JC: Yeah, it was surreal.

EC: You get up in front of all those people and read the torah. It’s all odd. [laughs]

JC: In our synagogue, there wasn’t a Rabbi Marshak that you went and talked to, but friends of ours went to a synagogue that had a similar kind of ritual. So it’s drawn both from personal experience and what we knew from other people and friends and places.

After making this film, do you feel like it’s more pressure to be a filmmaker or a Jew?

EC: It’s tough being a Jew. [laughs]

JC: Yeah, right now, we’re feeling both.

EC: Bob Hope said to Charlton Heston after he met him on the lot, and [Heston] was bitching about how he’d spend three hours in makeup to be Moses, “Yeah, it’s tough being a Jew.”

Thanks to Lachlan for sending it in.

In a brief interview with the Chigago Tribune novellist Michael Chabon had this to say about the Coen brothers adaptation of his novel…

Q What’s moving forward most quickly is a Coen brothers’ adaptation of “The Yiddish Policemen’s Union,” right?

A Right. I’m a huge Coen brothers fan. I love their movies. It’s an event when there’s a new Coen brothers movie coming out. I can’t wait to see it. The fact that it’s something I wrote is just gravy. They seem perfect for it. As soon as I heard they were considering it, they sounded like the ideal choice for the material.

I couldn’t agree more about this being right up the Coen’s alley and I really, REALLY hope they get to it as soon as True Grit is finished.

Thanks to Will for mailing this in. 

In a bizarre twist it looks like the zombie article at the Daily Mail from a year ago could have risen from the grave for a good reason. Variety are reporting that the Coen brothers are indeed set to re-make True Grit next. It has apparenlty stepped ahead of “The Yiddish Policemen’s Union” in the pecking order.

Good news is that they plan to stick more closely to the plot of the original Charles Portis novel focusing on the story of a 14 year-old girl rather than follow the plot of the John Wayne movie. 

Bad news is- I was really looking forward to ”The Yiddish Policemen’s Union” because the novel is great and right up the Coen’s alley so to speak.

So, the Coens set to do a Western… could be interesting. Now I must read the book…

Thanks to Calvin and Erenik for tipping me off.

Click this link right here to be whisked electonically off to a 12 question/slideshow interview with the Coen brothers mainly discussing Burn After Reading. They also big up (in a jokey way) Michael Stuhlbarg, recently announced star of the now shooting A Serious Man. It’s a very quick, but interesting read.

I was a little disappointed with question #11…

11. You recently signed up for the adaptation of ‘Yiddish Policemen’s Union.’ What can you tell me about that?

Joel: Well, the rights are owned by Scott Rudin, who we made ‘No Country’ with. And we had a really good experience working with him on that, and he had this Michael Chabon book and he asked us if we were interested in doing the adaptation of it. So where we’re at with it now is the same place we were when we did the adaptation of ‘No Country,’ which is that we’re writing the screenplay, but I don’t know whether or not we’re going to make the movie. It’s possible. It’s possible not.

I will be absolutely gutted if Joel and Ethan do not end up writing AND directing The Yiddish Policemen’s Union. I think it is perfect for them and is such a great novel. Fingers crossed!

Thanks to Andie for emailing this one in.

If you have not yet read Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union I urge you to. Not only is a great, great book but it is also to be made into a movie by Joel and Ethan Coen. So, you know, get to it!

Anyway congratualtions are due to Mr. Chabon as the novel scooped the Best Novel gong at this year’s Hugo Awards. The Hugo Awards have been given annually since 1955 and are science-fiction’s most prestigous awards. Now, if you’d have asked me to categorise this book I would NOT have chosen Sci-fi. I must have missed the alien invasion part…

My copy of Empire (July 2008) arrived today and the first article in it (after the reader’s letter page) is a four-pager on the Coen’s next movie, Burn After Reading. It confirmed the UK release date of October 17th and also contains five new images which I will scan in and post on YKFK in the next few days. Here is the text from said article lovingly transcribed by yours truly…

“After the (relative) seriousness of No Country For Old Men, it seems the Coens are back to more traditional turf for their next. It’s a thriller that’s kind of a comedy (or the other way around) born of one of their own brainstorming sessions (and not a famous novel), where the characters go by such typically syllable-torturing Coen-esque monikers as Harry Pfarrer, Linda Litzke and Chad Feldheimer.

“It’s in the vein of Fargo and Lebowski,” delights Eric Fellner from Working Title, completing his sixth film with the brothers. “Somebody comes across something they shouldn’t, they completely misinterpret what they’ve got, and because they are fairly stupid, everything spirals horribly out of control. Mayhem and dead bodies ensue.”

More precisely, it is a spy caper about boozy CIA operative Ozzie Cox (John Malkovich), so incensed at being fired he writes some inflammatory memoirs, the disc of which he accidentally leaves in a gym. It is discovered by less-than-intellectual instructor Chad Feldheimer (Brad Pitt), who attempts to blackmail Ozzie, while his boss Linda Litzke (Frances McDormand) meets smooth-talking Harry Pfarrer (George Clooneey) via online dating. He’s the CIA lug assigned to clear the whole matter up, who also ends up sleeping with Katie Cox (Tilda Swinton), estranged wife of Ozzie.

“I’m a guy that goes around killing people,” says Clooney, who would happily play a corpse for the Coens. “It looks really fun. This will be my third idiot – the Coens call it my trilogy of idiots.”

Shooting with typical zest (taking only 50 days) between No Country’s debut in Cannes 2007 and its rapturous US release last autumn, the New York boys stuck fairly close to home: Brooklyn Heights and Washington, DC are the main locations. And despite regular cinematographer Roger Deakins missing his first gig since Barton Fink (due to prior commitments) – Emmanuel Lubezki (Children Of Men) replaces him - the production ran as smoothly as ever.

“They are so brilliant, Joel and Ethan, they just know what they want,” continues Fellner. “Most of the techs and craftsmen have all worked with Joel and Ethan many times. There is never a panic on set. You are never running out of time.”

However, the film, which will open this year’s Venice Film Festival (it wasn’t ready for Cannes 2008), finds its makers at something of a crossroads. Does the Oscar victory and box-office success of No Country For Old Men (a best ever $160 million worldwide) mean they are now a mainstream act and no longer the clever-cloging wiseacres only deciphearable by their army of delirious fans?

“That is the issue – how do you sell the Coens?” agrees Fellner. “Our experience at Working Title is that the point where we’re made mistakes is when we’ve not sold the film to the real audience. You have to start with the real audience and then go bolder. With some of their recent films made with studios (Intolerable Cruelty and The Ladykillers were both studio-based films not produced by Working Title) , that could be where they went wrong: looking for too big an audience. This is quite mainstream, but not too mainstream.”

The Coens have been very busy of late. They will soon start another comedy, A Serious Man (also with Working Title), which Ethan has claimed will be ever-so slightly autobiographical: “It’s about a family of four in the Midwest, in 1967, and one of the kids is about to be Bar Mitzvahed. Horrible things happen…” After which they will get going on an adaptation of Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, a couldn’t-be-more-Coens noir pastiche set in a reimagined Jewish state in Alaska. Meanwhile, Ethan has also found time to write a trilogy of short plays currenlty being staged together off-Broadway under the title Almost An Evening, produced with the help of Coens’ regular composor, Carter Burwell. The plays, one of which involves two opposing versions of God having a scrap, are helpfully described as Camus-meets-Kafka-meets-the Marx Brothers. Definitely not too mainstream.”

So there you have it. I found this article to put my mind at ease about their two next projects, both of which I’m looking forward to temendously, especially The Yiddish Policemen’s Union which, like the article says, is perfectly suited to the Coen brothers. If you haven’t read the book yet, I cannot recommend it enough.

No Country For Old Men producer Scott Rudin was interviewed by the Guardian newspaper here in the UK on February the 8th and dropped this little nugget of information; apparenlty “He has already started working on the next Coen brothers film, an adaptation of The Yiddish Policemen’s Union by Michael Chabon.” Interesting? Anyone read it? I’m gonna!

Nate, over at Chabon website, sugarbombs.com, has had it personally confirmed by Chabon himself so it must be legit information!

Thanks also to Jonathan for mailing in with the link..