About The Cast And Characters
Tom Hanks launched his career by making comedy films. But in recent years, the Oscar®-winning actor has turned his attention to more dramatic roles, including “Catch Me If You Can,” “Saving Private Ryan,” “Road to Perdition,” “Cast Away,” “The Green Mile,” and many others. Why now the return to the first out-and-out comedy that he’s done in more than a decade?
“Working with Joel and Ethan Coen is like winning the lottery,” says Hanks. “When they finish doing whatever it is they do when they’re writing their screenplays, you have the complete package. I got the screenplay, and I was only halfway through when I said, ‘I’m there.’”
The “complete package” includes a larger-than life character that allowed Hanks to amplify his performance to hysterical effect. “The Dorr character is steeped in the classics and full of himself,” laughs Ethan.
“He’s the mastermind,” laughs Joel, “to use that word very… loosely. He is by common consent, the smart one of the group. Then again, everything is relative.”
The “experts” that Dorr assembles to execute his plan is an odd assortment of characters. “He’s given very poor human material to work with,” concedes Ethan. Hanks sees his character as the “ultimate criminal mastermind of a very small and almost petite little crime.”
His confidence and his ability to keep one step ahead of the questions are masterful. “Professor Dorr is nothing if not logical and he can supply whatever logic is needed at a given moment,” says Hanks of his character’s ability to squeeze out of any tight situation with eloquence and style.
While Dorr is the idea man, the brains of the operation, sooner or later, “if you’re going to play in the mud you’re going to get dirty,” Hanks admits. “So if there’s a problem upstairs that is in the way, then you have to draw straws. That problem has to be gotten rid of. Thus the title of the movie.”
Playing Dorr’s “inside man” at the casino, Gawain MacSam, is Marlon Wayans. “He’s the kid who gets a job at the casino they’re going to rob, to case the place,” says Ethan. “He likes to listen to loud hip-hop music and represents everything Mrs. Munson detests. He’s the younger generation but with more street sensibility than the sleepy Mississippi culture we find him in.”
Wayans sees his character as “the guy in the crew with the chip on his shoulder. He’s the inside man and he takes pride in being the inside man until he finds out being the inside man means he’s a janitor in the casino.
“He’s got a lot of issues,” continues Wayans about his character, “and he doesn’t have a lot of big words in his vocabulary so he substitutes them with cursing.” “I’ve never cursed this much,” laughs Wayans. “My God, I feel like Richard Pryor.”
As far as his teammates are concerned, Gawain thinks the General is cool – “I don’t mess with The General too much,” says Wayans of the characters’ dynamic. That said, the relationship with another member of the gang is an entirely different story. “And then there’s Pancake,” says Wayans. “Don’t let me get started on him. I don’t like him.”
Referred to by Dorr as “a jack of all trades but a master of none,” Pancake puts himself and the gang in jeopardy with his knowledge of explosives. Simmons says of his character, “He’s outgoing, open minded, friendly and I think accepted as such initially but after awhile, for whatever reason, he begins to grate on people.”
“We were really lucky with those guys,” explains Joel about the casting of Wayans as Gawain and Simmons as Pancake. “The relationship between Gawain and Pancake, which is an important relationship in the movie, is like a bad marriage. Marlon and J.K. play it perfect – it’s really funny.”
With Hanks in the starring role as Dorr and motormouth Wayans as his right hand man, Joel and Ethan Coen required an actress who could hold her own against the criminal, uh, masterminds. In fact, the role of Marva Munson was a linchpin from the very beginning.
“Right off the bat, Marva is a little tougher on the surface than Katie Johnson’s Mrs. Wilberforce,” says Joel in describing the differences between this character and the original. “But as the film goes along, you discover her sweetness.”
Though Mrs. Munson may seem at times a very innocent and sweet little lady, she’s no pushover. “She’s the rock that they all beat their heads against futilely,” explains Ethan. “She knows what’s right and she’s never given to doubt or self-doubt or any kind of doubt.”
Mrs. Munson is played by Irma P. Hall. After auditioning for Joel and Ethan early on, Irma was sure she didn’t get the part. “I only read a couple of lines and then we started talking,” recalls Hall of the audition process. “And I said to myself, they don’t even want to hear me read. I can forget this.”
“We did torture Irma a little bit, unfairly,” admits Joel. “In fact she was the first person we saw for the part and she was so good and so impressive but we thought are we going to cast the first person we see? So we went through the ridiculous exercise of seeing lots of people. But Irma had the part from the beginning even though she didn’t know it and we didn’t realize it.”
“The relationship between Tom and Irma in the movie is extraordinarily funny,” Joel continues.
“We were really lucky with Irma,” concludes Ethan about her strengths as an actress. “She sort of goes toe to toe with Tom and beats him over the head. Kind of like Ruth Buzzi with her purse, in a figurative way.”
Irma, like her co-star Tom Hanks, responded immediately to the screenplay. “It’s so well-written,” she concurs. “The humor comes out of real people. Each character is so well defined and you care about them— you care what happens to them. And it’s an American story. You really get the sense of that. It’s rooted somewhere.”
About her own character, Irma says, “Having spent the first seven years of my life in the South, I knew people like her. Just nice little ladies who had doilies on everything.”
Though the Coens had no qualms about casting Hall, there was one area of her repertoire for which the filmmakers – and other actors – were unprepared. “Let me tell you,” says Joel in recalling the scene, “Irma’s an incredibly talented actor but pulling punches for the screen is not one of her foremost talents.
“We’ve done lots of punches and hitting and fight scenes in movies, but Irma hauled off and walloped Marlon for real,” says Joel. “To Marlon’s credit, there are very few actors who a) would sit still for that and b) on take 2 wouldn’t flinch, anticipating that they might be walloped again.”
“At one point, she hit me, and she slapped the character out me,” laughs Wayans. “I was knee deep in my character and was thinking, ‘Hey, Irma? Can we talk about this? We’re friends, right?’”
“The really amusing thing after the whole thing was over,” recalls Joel, “Irma went up to Ethan and was bragging about the fact that she’d been trained in stage combat.”
“It was news to Marlon,” quips Ethan.
Dorr and his cohorts also bring up familiar memories from the actress’s past. “When I was teaching school,” recalls Irma, “I taught a lot of mischievous little boys. That’s my character’s attitude toward the professor and his friends –they’re just mischievous little boys.”
Dorr’s team of “experts,” such as it is, is made up of individuals who answered his ad in the “Memphis Scimitar.” As Hanks speculates on the response, “I wonder how many people he truly interviewed. Could it be he only had this group of four.”
“We conceived one character as being a sort of retired South Vietnamese tunnel rat, now the proprietor and presumable owner of a donut shop somewhere in Southern California,” explains Joel about the idea behind The General.
Played by Tzi Ma, The General is a mysterious character with a distinct fastidious look. “We decided that the General has the ability to dance around dust, so he’s always miraculously clean,” says Ma.
“You hear his name once – Win Phon Duc – and you never hear it again,” continues Ma. About his character’s stony silence and knowing looks, he explains, “The General really is a man of few words, so when he does speak, it’s a lot more meaningful.”
Words may not come out of his mouth too often but cigarettes do. The first time he meets Mrs. Munson, says Ma, “She tells him that there’s no smoking in her house. So every time she comes to the cellar he flips the cigarette into his mouth – lit, of course.”
Another character, Lump is “the staple of these kinds of movies—the hooligan, the muscle.” “He’s a college football player in Mississippi,” continues Joel.
“Lump is a lover. He’s not a fighter,” laughs Hurst about his character’s good nature. “Lump is just trying to get along with everybody. To be honest, he's digging a hole, but I don't think he knows where they're going.”
Despite the circumstances they place themselves in, it’s difficult to see Dorr and his henchmen as evil. “You can tell that these boys don’t think of themselves as crooks,” explains Irma. “They’re just trying to make a living.”
“I don’t see this as being a movie with any bad guys,” remarks Joel. “Maybe the fact that it’s a broad comedy is responsible for that.”
“Also, they try so hard,” adds Ethan. “Your heart kind of goes out to them.”
“They’re all fundamentally good people, but yeah,” laughs Joel, “they’re all knuckleheads.”
In addition to the human characters, there are several other unusual characters in this caper comedy including a cat and a portrait painting. “Pickles the cat is the observer,” says Joel of Mrs. Munson’s pet.
“And also the agent of the final classical return to order,” adds Ethan.
“Othar is the character we never see except in his portrait over the mantelpiece,” explains Ethan. “Mrs. Munson is a widow and Othar is her late husband whom we refer to again and again but only in his portrait.”
“From his portrait, it looks like he’s been gone since sometime during the Eisenhower administration,” Hanks says. “He’s been shut in this room, looking down on the world since then.”
About The Production
Reuniting with Joel and Ethan Coen for “The Ladykillers” is a stable of professionals who have worked in their expert capacities on many of their films. Cinematographer Roger Deakins (8 films with the Coens), production designer Dennis Gassner (6 films), costume designer Mary Zophres (7 films), stunt coordinator Jery Hewitt (9 films), and special effects coordinator Peter Chesney (7 films) are all Coen brothers regulars.
Academy Award® winner Gassner finds the collaboration a great treat. “It’s been an incredible pleasure to be asked back. Their projects are always such incredible sanctuaries, because of the impeccable organization that they always put into their movies.” Gassner was especially excited to work on another film set a South, as imagined by the Coens.
“Because it takes place in the South,” he says about the tone and mood being conveyed in his work, “it has a wonderful timeless quality.”
One of the main challenges that Gassner faced was to build a bridge that figures prominently in the film’s climax. “We obviously couldn’t build a whole bridge on stage,” Gassner says, “but we could build part of a bridge, then have the rest as a CGI element in our Mississippi location. That said, it needed to be at least partly real – it would set it in a real place and give it a romantic
quality. It was great fun to design – it’s based on a bridge in Oregon that my family would drive over when I was a young boy.”
For costume designer Mary Zophres, the timeless quality was achieved by combining different periods from the 20th century while keeping in mind that the characters live in a small town in Mississippi. “Even though they have something from the past,” says Mary about the look of her characters, “they also have something very contemporary about their clothing.”
“Joel and Ethan’s films are the most interesting projects,” says Zophres. “For a costume designer to have great characters to dress and a whole world to create, that’s the jackpot. Their scripts are incredibly evocative – when I read it, I imagine the costumes.”
For the character of Dorr, says Zophres, “It’s described that he’s in a cream suit and there’s references to Edgar Allen Poe, but actually the first person I thought of was Mark Twain.”
This translated into “a three piece suit, slightly oversized and a quirky bowtie,” explains Zophres. Dorr also wears a cape. “I think everybody would agree that there’s a storybook quality to this movie,” continues Zophres, “a heightened sense of reality. So in that context, the cape totally works.”
Mrs. Munson, too, made an immediate impression on Zophres. “I remember thinking that she’s got to have big bazooms and floral dresses,” she recalls. That said, Mrs. Munson’s ample bosom does not come by her naturally. As Zophres explains, “Irma is not the size you see in her character so we have built a sculpture almost. It’s definitely a work of art.”
About her character’s look, Irma Hall says, “I wear dainty clothes and I fix my house up dainty and I have dainty little earrings.”
While Mrs. Munson and her church lady friends are dressed in demure classic florals and plaids vaguely reminiscent of the 30s, Dorr’s henchmen have jumped ahead several decades. The General and Garth Pancake both have not updated their wardrobes since the 1970s, with the former donning leisure suits and the latter showing a preference for short shorts. Gawain, on the other hand, brings a modern sensibility and 21stcentury
threads.
Though “The Ladykillers” is a comedy, and as such, does not require the extensive stunt or effects work of some of their other films, stunt coordinator Jery Hewitt and effects coordinator Peter Chesney still had jobs to do. “Our big action sequence, such as it is, is the tunnel explosion,” says Ethan.
“Pancake blows himself out of the tunnel while he’s digging,” explains Chesney. “We had to launch him out. But it’s not a normal explosion; it’s more about comedic gymnastics with an explosion following him.”
This required careful timing with big air cannons that can chase the stuntman with effects and catapult him with a very specific trajectory. “The stuntman gets up to maybe 20 mph so he has a smooth take-off and he can control what he does after he leaves the mouth of the tunnel,” explains Chesney.
“This is not just throwing a guy across the room. It’s a performance,” insists Chesney. “There’s a big difference.”
Not as technically demanding but equally interesting was the football sequence, with stunt camera work involving cinematographer Roger Deakins. Says stunt coordinator Jery Hewitt, “We were worried about Roger. We had 21 huge, burly guys who are used to crashing into each other. Roger went in there with a delicate – and very expensive – hand-held camera.”
“After a few rehearsals you could see he was enjoying the heck out of it,” continues Hewitt. “It’s not football to its truest form, but it was so unique because the whole thing is done in the helmet.”
Cinematographer Roger Deakins, a longtime collaborator with Joel and Ethan, has worked on eight of their films. In fact, says Joel, “We can’t imagine doing a movie without Roger.”
Tom Hanks found working with the legendary Deakins a thrill. “I look back on the nature of the cinematographers, the cameramen I’ve worked with and I think for moviephiles it means a lot to add Roger Deakins to the list I’ve worked with,” say s Hanks. “This is a big deal. This is a huge deal.” Working alongside the Coens’ longstanding team is animal trainer Cristie Miele. “There’s
a lot of animal action in the movie,” says Ethan referring to not only Pickles the cat and the raven on the bridge but also Pancake’s signature scene. “There’s also probably a cinematic first, we have a dog in a gas mask.”
“That was great,” adds Joel. “Christie went off and trained an English bull dog to play dead.” “We had to teach the dog to faint so that Pancake can give the dog ‘the kiss of life.’ It’s quite funny,” says Miele.
As far as Pickles the cat was concerned, the filmmakers weren’t sure what to expect. “They’re notoriously hard to train,” says Joel. “But Christie did some pretty remarkable things.”
Pickles was played by a number of identical cats each with a different behavior. “Cats can be trained to perform on cue,” explains Miele. “The key is to have a team. We have ten cats in our team and for each scene we prepare three different cats.”
There was one more new member of the production team, one necessitated by this particular screenplay: Prof. Dorr and his band of thieves are supposed to be practicing their baroque music on classical instruments. All the instruments and cases were made by renowned master guitar maker Danny Ferrington. “These are not necessarily things I would make,” explains Ferrington, “but when Ethan and Joel went to the
Metropolitan Museum of Art to look at these things they were kind of scratching their heads, saying, ‘Where are we going to get a theobo? Where are we going to find a harpolyre?’”
“As it turns out, gathering together authentic period instruments is pretty difficult,” explains Ethan. “People who have them don’t tend to want to lend them to movie companies.”
“Danny just basically made them all,” he continues. “Some he built from the ground up, and some were sort of ‘Frankenstein’ instruments, made from elements of different existing instruments. Tom’s character has a violin, the head stock of which is a Raven, which is appropriate to his character.”
The violin is fairly commonplace but some of the other instruments are a mystery to their supposed owners. Says Marlon about his stringed instrument, “I don't even know what instrument it is. It’s just, it's like the bass, but it’s like before Bootsy Collins introduced the slap funk to it.”
“It’s some sort of brass instrument that looks vaguely like a Doctor Seuss French Horn,” says JK Simmons about his instrument. “It’s embarrassing that I don’t know the name because I have a degree in music.”
“They’re accurate and comic at the same time,” says Simmons. “I haven’t become very accomplished on it but fortunately we’re not called upon to be.”
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