No close-ups and flies: Joel and Ethan Coen on why Buster Scruggs takes the western out of its comfort zone

One morning Tim Blake Nelson heard a knock at the door of his apartment in the Upper West Side of Manhattan. It was his neighbour Joel Coen, the elder of the two film-making brothers, clutching 20 pages of freshly typed script.

Nelson had played the escaped convict Delmar O’Donnell in the Coens’ musical crime caper O Brother, Where Art Thou?, and now Joel had him in mind for another role: a singing cowboy called Buster Scruggs, whose perfect pitch and affable demeanour belie his psychotic proficiency in a shoot-out.

“Joel said, ‘We’re going to make this and you’re going to be Buster, but it’s going to be an anthology film, so we’ve just got to come up with some more stories and eventually we’ll have a movie here,’” Nelson recalls. So he read the pages, felt the fizz of anticipation, then tucked them into a drawer, “because I didn’t want to perseverate on it in the way that actors can, where you can’t think about doing anything else until you get to do what you’ve just read,” he says.

It was just as well: the above encounter took place in 2002; a decade and a half would pass before the brothers had written seven further tales.

The resulting film feels nothing if not well mulled. Across six stories (the seventh and eighth were cut at the scriptwriting stage), The Ballad of Buster Scruggs is both a fine showcase for the western’s dizzying range, and a chance for the Coens – now 18 features into their conjoined career – to stretch themselves in every direction at once. When the film went into production at Netflix, early reports mistakenly described it as a television series overseen by a range of directors, which the Coens would write and produce.

A statement released this summer cleared up the matter: “We’ve always loved anthology movies, especially those films made in Italy in the Sixties which set side-by-side the work of different directors on a common theme,” they said. “Having written an anthology of western stories we attempted to do the same, hoping to enlist the best directors working today. It was our great fortune that they both agreed to participate.”

Their aim, Joel tells me now, was to “stray a little further out of our comfort zone” than they were taken by 2010’s True Grit, their only previous pure-bred western, and one of their more conventional films. In Buster Scruggs, every base is covered, from al dente spaghetti stand-offs to sweeping wagon train romance, and sinister stagecoach rides through blanketing mist.

The fact that the individual tales would be presented as chapters of the same book was crucial: the book itself is the first thing we see, a fraying old tome with beautiful plate illustrations by Gregory Hill, the Coens’ graphic designer since No Country For Old Men in 2007. As a framing device, Ethan describes it as “the opposite of Fargo, which we told everyone was a true story but wasn’t. These are explicitly presented as fictions in a book that doesn’t actually exist. So really this time we’re lying twice over.” 

One story, “All Gold Canyon”, stars the American singer-songwriter Tom Waits – whom Joel describes as an “old friend [who] got what we were up to immediately” – as a grizzled prospector, and was adapted from the Jack London short story of the same name. Another, “The Gal Who Got Rattled”, was loosely inspired by the work of Arthur Henry Gooden, a prolific early-20th-century writer of western pulp fiction.

Each segment has its own distinct style, language, and backdrop: the shoot ranged across Nebraska and New Mexico in the summer and winter of last year, and took in all terrains and weathers. The opening sequence, in which Buster rides past rainbow-coloured mesas and buttes, was shot on the 21,000-acre ranch once owned by the artist Georgia O’Keeffe.

“As we kept writing, it became a conscious thing to look at everywhere the genre had been and everywhere it could go,” explains Ethan, the younger Coen, from a hotel sofa in London. 

But back in 2002, that was not how the project began its life. In fact, it was the thought of working in the extinct singing cowboy genre – in its day, an unflaggingly wholesome Hollywood staple that made stars of Gene Autry and Roy Rogers, but has since dated horrifically – which piqued the brothers’ interest.

“We had always been aware of them, but only as a curio,” says Joel, 63, from an armchair across the room. “We weren’t into them as such, but as children we saw Roy Rogers on television a lot, and that was a big part of it.” He likens it to the fascination he and Ethan had for wrestling pictures – another major pre-war film craze now consigned to history – while writing their 1991 Palme d’Or-winner Barton Fink: “We knew they had been a big deal in the Thirties too, but their appeal was no longer all that apparent. So we wrote them into our film for fun.”

“Then in our first week on set, we found ourselves having to shoot some wrestling picture sequences ourselves, and had no idea what we were doing,” chips in Ethan. 

“So you have to be careful,” Joel frowns.

By the time the shoot began, the Coens had already dipped a toe into the singing cowboy trough. Their 2016 Hollywood satire Hail, Caesar! featured Alden Ehrenreich, then soon to become the new Han Solo, as Hobie Doyle – a blue-eyed, white-hatted serenader whose bosses try to mould him into a serious romantic lead, with limited success. Ethan says they enjoyed writing Ehrenreich’s character so much, they have considered bringing Hobie back for a second film. “We still could,” Joel suggests. “Alden’s young enough. Still time for that.”

Their own preference since childhood has been for Sergio Leone. “We grew up watching a lot of crappy Sixties Dean Martin westerns, but Once Upon a Time in the West was the eye-opener,” Joel says. “And the early westerns Clint Eastwood went on to direct – High Plains Drifter, Pale Rider – seemed to pick up that torch.” 

Nelson agrees: for the 54-year-old actor, the western is a “queer and quintessentially American phenomenon,” with its fixation on westward expansion and the easy availability of firearms, and its celebration of the rugged loner type. The Leone films were likewise a formative influence. “They were always on where I grew up in Oklahoma, and I became obsessed,” he says.

But not so for the younger members of Buster Scruggs’ cast – including 29-year-old Harry Melling, who played Dudley Dursley in the Harry Potter films, and co-stars with Liam Neeson in "Meal Ticket”, the third tale on the Scruggs docket.

“I saw Once Upon a Time in the West too young – I just remember lots of close-ups and flies,” he says. 

Melling plays a limbless sideshow attraction, known only as The Artist, who is carted from town to town by Neeson’s Impresario, and recites famous speeches and poems to ever-dwindling crowds. In the final cut, his character has no dialogue apart from his act: there was originally one line, “more meat”, said as Neeson spoons stew into his mouth, but the Coens had a change of heart after it had been filmed, and scheduled a day of reshoots to remove it.

A more talkative presence is Alice Longabough, an Oregon-bound wallflower played by Zoe Kazan, and the eponymous “Gal Who Got Rattled” from story number five. Kazan, 35, had already appeared in a trail western: the bleak-as-stone Meek’s Cutoff, directed by Kelly Reichardt, from 2010. “So I imported a lot of the research from that,” she says. There was also the Eighties educational video game The Oregon Trail, which had been a fixture of her childhood. “Loved that,” she grins. “Loved the dysentery, loved shooting bears.”

It was women’s dependency on their menfolk that struck Kazan most about the era – “When Alice’s cage door opens she’s like a bird that doesn’t know how to leave,” she says – but she is loath to read a present-day moral into her story.

“I think the film is about mortality and storytelling,” she says, “and how those two forces are diametrically opposed.”

In fact, all three actors in the room recall puzzling over what Buster Scruggs “meant” after its premiere at the Venice Film Festival in September. For Melling, the western’s recent comeback – thanks in part to both the Coens and Quentin Tarantino, whose Django Unchained did blockbuster business in 2013 – feels like a reaction to a new hard-bittenness in modern life. “We are making films with solo figures making their way through huge, wilderness landscapes, which I think is definitely a response to our times,” he says. “So much of life is baffling now – a sense we no longer know what we’re all doing. And I think the western canvas is such a useful one on which to explore that.” 

For Nelson, meanwhile, the film is “like watching the western working out where it is these days,” with its different stories and styles jostling against one another in a kind of internal debate.

Can the brothers themselves shed some light? Do they see a particular relevance in Buster Scruggs to our own historical moment? They look at one another across the room.

“Ehhh,” says Ethan.

“No,” says Joel.

The Ballad of Buster Scruggs is in select cinemas now, and will be on Netflix from November 16