By Ray Pride Pride@moviecitynews.com
Behind the trailer for the Coens' A Serious Man
The closing crawl of credits is a tribute to Stanley Kubrick’s pluperfect single-take mood-setter for The Shining? Scott Macaulay has that and other instructive bits behind the making of the swell one-minute-forty short at Film in Focus. Mark Woollen of Mark Woollen and Associates cut the trailer, and also was responsible for the haunting Little Children coming attractions, also discussed at the link. “Myles Bender, Senior Vice President of Creative Advertising, Focus Features, oversaw the creative direction and remembers his first meeting with the Coens to discuss the concept. “They wanted something ‘different,’” Bender says, remembering the Coens asking, “‘Can you find one scene from the movie for our trailer and not do the traditional trailer structure?’ And then one of them said, ‘Maybe just show the guy getting his head bashed in for 30 seconds.’ I took that suggestion a little more seriously than they expected me to!” The directive to “find one scene” recalled for both Bender and Woollen what Bender calls “one of the best teaser trailers ever made, the one for The Shining, which consists of a single shot in which blood pours out of the elevator. It encompassed everything you needed to know about that film.” Also remembering another favorite trailer—M. Night Shamalayan’s Unbreakable, which is structured around a single scene of Bruce Willis waking up in a doctors’ office after a train crash—Bender sat down with Woollen with the idea of extracting a resonant moment from the film that would convey the idea “that this is a movie for people who love Coen Brothers films.” He says he didn’t worry too much about explicating the film’s narrative because “it was more important for us to convey the vibe, ‘the essence of Coen-ness,’ than the premise.” [More at the link.]