Choosing this first feature is so obvious it's almost redundant. But watching it again I'm struck by how much I've taken this film for granted... "Blood Simple" is as complete & bold a cinematic vision as any of Joel & Ethan's subsequent films. The opening voiceover is writing as beautiful & specific as ANYTHING the brothers have delivered these fifteen years since (in my opinion better than the voiceover in "The Big Lebowski," or "The Hudsucker Proxy")...It's as if the Coen Brothers emerged on the independent film scene as a mature visual storytelling force without any fumbling first steps. To revisit this now, embarking on my first feature, is as overwhelming as it is unnerving....
Up until the release of "Blood Simple" the names of Joel and Ethan Coen were known to few outside the context of assistant editing for "The Evil Dead" director Sam Raimi. I lack hard details, but apparently both brothers had an early interest in cinema - as children working for neighbors in order to save money for a Super8 camera that they went on to make a slew of films, not only remakes of favorites but also a host of original titles like "Henry Kissinger - Man on the Go," "Lumberjacks of the North" and "The Banana Film." It was Joel who went to NYU to study film, and it was he who worked in industrial and music video, until joining Sam Raimi's post-production team opened new doors of opportunity to broader horizons.
As Matt Murray puts it in his review, "Blood Simple" is a "near-perfect example of what good planning can get you." Clearly the film is an exercise in clinical execution - nothing about this film feels accidental or haphazard. According to DVD release notes, Sam Raimi advised the brothers to raise $1.2M to shoot the film on their own terms - following Raimi's lead the brothers wrote the script and shot an elaborate trailer to use on their year-long struggle to successfully find investors.
And maybe this pre-production story is not so unusual or unexpected, and it's certainly not why I felt compelled to write about "Blood Simple." What struck me about this film is just how staggeringly CINEMATIC this film is. Without any preamble, Joel and Ethan serve up this measured and methodical genre thriller with a visual vitality that transcends budget, genre and their first-feature status... The pacing of the scene where John Gentz's adulterous bartender discovers the corpse of cuckolded bar-owner Dan Hedaya, and the subsequent drive into the stark, black open country to dispose of the body... or M. Emmet Walsh's climactic confrontation with Frances McDormand... for me bring to mind the storyboarded diligence of Hitchcock's cropdusting sequence from "North by Northwest" and apartment scenes from "Dial M for Murder."
Watching this film with my own feature debut firmly in mind, I'm confronted by how the cinematic flair of the Coen Bros first feature is precisely the kind of filmmaking I got into this business for in the first place. Through careful camera placement and stylish editing, the Coen Bros build a world for the audience as specific and idiosyncratic as any film they've made since. Their's is not a "slice of life" so much as the "slice of cake" Hitchcock always said his own filmmaking was about.
Being reminded of all this has given me another set of creative options... even creative imperatives... for approaching the production of "Single Malt." I can't speak for anyone else, but I catch myself falling into the same mental trap time and again - that digital video isn't cinematic... And I don't even know where that assumption comes from.
It certainly doesn't have to be the case.
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