Saïd Sayrafiezadeh on Debt, Cults, and Our Inner Algorithms
The narrator of your story “ Minimum Payment Due ” is mired in debt and, from the outset, trying to
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Few things are more comedically satisfying than an odd-couple pairing. Oscar and Felix, Lucy and Ethel, Tom Wambsgans and Cousin Greg: if the tensions are plentiful, so are the laffs. In “Drive-Away Dolls,” the new caper from the married couple Ethan Coen and Tricia Cooke, we have Jamie (Margaret Qualley) and Marian (Geraldine Viswanathan), two lesbian friends, in 1999, who can’t avoid rubbing each other the wrong way. Jamie is a Texan live wire, all twang and sexual bravado, and Marian is a guarded Henry James reader in a pussy-bow blouse. When Jamie’s girlfriend, Sukie (Beanie Feldstein), tosses her out of the house for cheating, Jamie joins Marian on a trip from Philadelphia to Tallahassee, and the two find themselves in the midst of a complicated scheme involving a severed head, assorted dildos, a crooked conservative senator, and a mysterious briefcase. “Ethan thinks I’m like Jamie,” Cooke said on a Zoom call the other day, from a wooden-raftered Airbnb in Albuquerque, where the couple are shooting another movie. “I’m a glass-half-full person. Ethan can kind of spiral into—” “I’m like Marian,” Coen interjected. He had a close-cropped salt-and-pepper beard and wore black-rimmed glasses. “I’m the worrier.” He sighed. “Sometimes I get infuriated with Trish for not worrying!” “I admit I can be a little cavalier,” Cooke conceded. She had on black-rimmed glasses like her husband’s, and her brown hair fell straight down her back. “Me, on the other hand, all I’ve got are my fears!” Coen said. When casting “Drive-Away Dolls,” the couple quickly found their Marian in Viswanathan. It was harder to find a Jamie—“someone who is charismatic and reckless but then can turn sweet very easily,” Cooke said. Qualley was a last-minute addition. “Before you find the person, it’s an enormous locus of anxiety for me,” Coen said. He considered “No Country for Old Men,” the Oscar-winning movie, from 2007, that he made with his brother, Joel, and said, “The most anxious part of my life was until we cast Josh Brolin, and that was just three weeks before we had to start shooting. I was, like, […]
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The narrator of your story “ Minimum Payment Due ” is mired in debt and, from the outset, trying to
Hanif Kureishi You have been back in your London home for several months now, after a year in different hospitals,
