Brothers Ethan and Joel Coen have made 18 movies together, starting with 1984’s Blood Simple to 2018’s The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, creating an iconic filmography of black comedy masterpieces. 

Then, without warning or explanation, they split up. Joel made The Tragedy of Macbeth (2021), an austere, black-and-white Shakespeare adaptation that felt as far away from a Coen Brothers movie as possible. Ethan’s first solo project, in contrast, was Drive-Away Dolls, the story of two lesbian friends (Geraldine Viswanathan and Margaret Qualley) on the run from dim-bulb thugs after a McGuffinian bag of loot. The queer spin on the Coen-esque crime caper comedy comes in large part from Coen’s co-writer, Tricia Cooke, his longtime editor and wife of 32 years. Cooke is lesbian; the couple have an unconventional marriage where both have separate partners outside their marriage. Coen and Cooke have followed up Drive-Away Dolls with Honey Don’t!, a nutty lesbian spin on a Raymond Carver film noir, with Qualley as small-town PI Honey O’Donahue, Aubrey Plaza as her butch buddy MG and Chris Evans as a super-shady evangelist preacher.

Honey Don’t! will have its world premiere out of competition in Cannes on Friday. Focus Features is bowing the film in the U.S. on Aug. 22. The filmmakers spoke to The Hollywood Reporter about their “queer big dumb movie,” their desire to bring back punctuation in movie titles and Ethan’s next film (with Joel!).

So this is the second film in — what are you calling it — your lesbian B movie trilogy?

Ethan Coen It may be accurate that we’ve called it that. Time will tell whether it actually is that, I mean, whether it comes to pass. We said trilogy because it’s dumb if you say you are doing two of them, but there are no definite plans to do a third. Call it whatever you want.

Call it a duology then. What was the start of this whole project?

Tricia Cooke I don’t know. I think we both really like genre movies, B movies, and we were at a point in our lives where we had kids, and Ethan was doing a lot of work on his own, and so the way that we spend time together was just by writing. We wrote Drive-Away Dykes [aka Drive-Away Dolls] first, in the early 2000s, and after we’d written one, we’re like, “Well, we should write another, but it should be a detective movie.” And we just kind of went from there. It was just a way for us to spend time together. I certainly never thought anything would come of them except us writing them and the kids finding them one day and being like: “Oh, this is what Mom and Dad did in their spare time.”

Coen I would answer differently. I would have said we saw an underserved market. But whatever, both are correct.

What do you mean by “underserved market”?

Coen Gay, lesbian genre movies. They’re not a familiar thing, certainly not this kind. You know, the lesbian detective movie. You don’t see a lot of those.

Cooke These genre B movies, they’re all very straight, or primarily straight. So we thought: Let’s turn them on their head a little. Because a lot of queer cinema, especially lesbian cinema, tends to get a little heavy sometimes. We just wanted to do something that was kind of fun and carefree and didn’t take itself too seriously.

Coen There’s also an opportunity to offend people. I’m Jewish, and Joel and I have had some Jewish characters in our movies that offended Jews. And Trish being gay, it opened up a whole new avenue. We could offend gay people.

Cooke He said that, not me.

With this film, like Drive-Away Dolls, you can see echoes of your earlier films, the crime caper comedies like Blood Simple and Raising Arizona. Tricia, where do you see your fingerprints? What makes this different from a “Coen Brothers” movie?

Cooke Well, it’s a queer movie. I add the gayness to it. Being a lesbian, I bring that to the writing process, a kind of understanding of that world. In Drive-Away Dykes, that kind of lesbian bar world. And in this movie, just the dynamics between Honey and MG, a kind of butch femme understanding of those characters. Whenever there’s something sensitive, it’s usually because I’ve wanted to put it in there.

Coen And whenever there’s something crass, that was me.

This film is entertainment, but is just the fact of doing a queer movie at this time a kind of political statement? Does it land differently now, in the midst of the second Trump administration?

Cooke You know, I’ve thought about that, and I’m not sure anymore. It feels like there’s been a real culture shift in our country since Trump was elected. On one hand, it’s supposed to be a big dumb movie, which certainly fits into the MAGA world. But it’s a queer big dumb movie, so there might be pushback. Maybe that’s supposed to be off the record.

Coen No, I like that. It’s
confusing. “Queer big dumb movie” says it all.

Cooke I mean, it’s got a lot of sex. There’s a little commentary around the reverend character [played by Chris Evans] and the kind of cultlike world that exists there, which is a little Trump-like, but not so much.

Coen I know why you’re asking. It’s an interesting question. I just feel like I don’t know. People’s identities are so entrenched at this point that nobody’s going to push it over, not really. But again, maybe that’s easy for me to say.

How does your own personal relationship feed into your work? You guys are in an unconventional marriage, where one is straight, one is queer, both with other partners. How you think your your relationship has shaped the work that you guys do together?

Coen I’ll give you the really honest answer: I don’t know. We’re not really self-reflective people. I don’t really know how our identities affect what we do. Certainly it has to, but we don’t think about it.

Cooke Maybe that’s because we do have such an unconventional relationship, even unconventional in the queer world, right? So poking a little fun at the queer world is maybe my way of saying I’m an outsider in all those worlds — in the straight world, in the queer world. It’s just the nature of our relationship.

About poking fun, what do you think these films bring to queer cinema that’s new?

Coen Well, like I mentioned before with some of the Jewish characters I’ve done in a few instances, they don’t always have to have dignity. The tiresome thing is when the minority person has to be some avatar of goodness. That’s just crappy for drama. It’s anti good movie.

Cooke We don’t put [our queer characters] on a pedestal. We just let them be as crass or dirty or bad as anyone would be.

Will there be a third film in the trilogy?

Cooke Well, we have a title: Go, Beavers!

Coen With a comma and an exclamation point. We like titles with punctuation marks in them. Honey Don’t! has the exclamation point. We made Hail, Caesar! with a comma and an exclamation point. Oh Brother, Where Art Thou? had a comma and a question mark. There’s not enough punctuation in titles. That’s the main problem with movies nowadays, in my opinion.

Cooke We’ve got about a third of it written, but we’re both doing other things. Ethan’s written a new movie with Joel and I’m writing something with my daughter right now.

So Ethan, you’re going to make another movie with your brother?

Coen Oh yeah. I assume we will. We’ve written something. My god, it’s at least a year ago now we wrote something to do together. And we have an old thing that we’ve written. And maybe we’ll write something new. But Joel is about to start something, so we kind of got out of sync. But yeah, the answer is yes. We just have to sort of get in sync again, when that happens.

What are you most proud of about this film?

Coen The title sequence.

Cooke That was what we said in the press notes. Then I reflected, and I thought, you know, I’m proud that we’re able to bring these gay and lesbian characters to life. But in terms of the way it looks, the
title sequence was really fun because we were very hands-on with that, and it’s a guerrilla kind of filmmaking in a way that the rest of the movie is not.

Coen Not only have Tricia and I not done it before, but I haven’t done it before with Joel, either. It was just fun to do. It’s hard to describe, but it was fun to do. I also want to add about the lesbian characters and this being for an underserved audience. It is, but at the same time, it’s not just for that market. The sex scenes are kind of hot, whether you’re a woman or not.

Cooke There are lots of different types of sex scenes, not just between the two title characters. There’s just lots of sex in it.

Coen And not to spoil anything, but the straight sex is ridiculous.