Autumn Highlights - Two heads are better than one

From the Coen brothers to 007, Todd Rundgren to Tennessee Williams, with a sparring match in Glasgow, a major retrospective and a run of memoirs – it's a whole new season in the arts.

"SOMETHING JUST WENT HORRIbly wrong," says Joel Coen, and his brother Ethan laughs hysterically.

The duo are discussing this year's Oscars, where their film No Country For Old Men won four Academy Awards. Did it change their outlook on the film industry? Not at all, apparently.

"It was very amusing to us," says Ethan Coen.

"Went right into the 'Life is strange' file," adds Joel.

The Coens' "life is strange" file must be overflowing by now. For more than two decades, they have made popular movies – some loved by critics, some loathed – by following a simple formula: typically, a slightly down-on-his luck protagonist driven by a single motivating belief ("The Dude abides"; "I'm a writer") gets involved in a low-level criminal plot involving kidnapping or extortion, setting off a chain reaction of complications and reversals. More often than not, somebody gets shot in the face.

Their steady progress as film-makers contradicts the prescribed path for independent (or at least independent-minded) directors in Hollywood: make a few small-budget movies, maybe in a genre like film noir, then climb the Hollywood pay scale until, like Bryan Singer or Christopher Nolan, you're given the big-budget summer extravaganza. What keeps film-makers on the Coen path – other than money – is the ability to make the kind of films they want. The Coens have been able to navigate their way all along, without once setting foot on a Batman soundstage.

"We've never navigated anything," Ethan says. "We've been lucky." It's not luck, however, that the two have been working in lockstep for their whole Hollywood careers. Sometimes Ethan, 50, is credited as the writer, and sometimes Joel, 53, as director. But in reality both conceive the film, write the screenplay and direct, and edit under the joint pseudonym Roderick Jaynes.

That may work wonderfully on the set, where actors call them the Two-Headed Director. In an interview, however, the Coens are tough- going. Like many close brothers they have developed an almost impregnable wall of in-jokes and verbal shorthand broken up by inexplicable fits of laughter, shared references and inaudible patches when they speak over each other in a race to the next punch line.

Their new movie, Burn After Reading, is set in Washington. Frances McDormand, Joel's wife, plays Linda Litzke, a wide-eyed employee of Hardbodies Fitness gym, whose signature line, "I'm trying to reinvent myself", underscores her belief that four expensive plastic surgeries will help her meet a better class of man on internet dating sites.

Through a series of strained coincidences, Linda receives a computer disk containing a draft memoir by Osbourne Cox (John Malkovich), an angry alcoholic relic of the CIA whose wife (Tilda Swinton) is having an affair with a federal marshal and ageing Lothario (George Clooney). Linda decides to trade the memoir for cash, aided by a dim personal trainer – Brad Pitt, showing again that he's a great character actor in a leading man's body.

With its coldly satirical tone, stylised dialogue and broadly drawn characters, Burn will feel like familiar territory for long-time fans. Is it a deliberate return to form, a step away from being Very Important Oscar-Winning Film-makers? "It was nothing like that," Ethan says. "To tell you the truth, we started writing down actors we wanted to work with."

One was Richard Jenkins, veteran of three Coen films, starting with The Man Who Wasn't There in 2001. "They're incredibly consistent, absolutely the same," says Jenkins. "I can't imagine them not being together, making a movie. I can't think of one without the other."

The Two-Headed Director is one way to think about the Coens. Another – to borrow a concept from the horror movies they grew up on – is that they share the same brain.

Ethan, whose first reaction to almost any question is to reject the premise out of hand with "No, that's not it" or "I don't remember", occupies the lower half, and Joel, who tends to pause, then provide a slightly more politic answer, occupies the other.

Together, they have little capacity for abstraction, and resist delving into the philosophy or the processes underpinning their films. Analysing their work, Joel says, "is just not something that interests us".

The sons of academics, they were raised in a very Jewish area of Minneapolis. But asking the Coens how growing up there affected their movies is like asking JRR Tolkien how much time he spent in Middle Earth before writing The Hobbit.

Their next film, which they're working on now, is based on their childhood but, beyond that, they give no answers to how their city, its social structure or the dialect they heard as relative outsiders affected their work. "Scandinavian. That about sums it up," Joel says.

They will at least admit to watching a lot of television. Now in their mid-fifties, they're part of the last generation of film-makers with a serendipitous relationship to old Hollywood, before VHS and infomercials, when being a cinephile meant watching whatever was on the late show. "There wasn't HBO or movies on demand. There wasn't a lot of choice," Joel says, adding that they watched "a lot of Hercules movies" and that they and George Clooney have wanted to make a Hercules movie for years.

"The local affiliate had the entire Joseph E Levine catalogue," Ethan says. "A lot of horror, but he also owned Fellini's movies, so occasionally, 8 ½ would be mixed in. All dubbed."

"Badly dubbed," Joel agrees. "Marcello sounded like Hugh Grant. Very stuttery."

In their teens they began to make their own movies on super 8mm film, starting with a short, Henry Kissinger, Man on the Go.

"It didn't have a strong narrative," Joel says. "It was really based on the fact that Ethan had a striking resemblance to Kissinger." This established a Coen brothers theme early: the desperate character looking for some kind of payoff.

After college – Princeton for Ethan, New York University for Joel – they had various film-editing jobs before making Blood Simple in 1984. Since then, they've moved with the deliberateness of an airport novelist, putting out a film at least once every two years. Even No Country, an adaptation, was sold on the basis of their script.

One explanation for their longevity is money – the lack of it. All told, the Coens have spent around $340m (£186m), the cost of a couple of summer blockbusters.



"To be quite honest, our movies have never broken any records in terms of box office," says Joel. "We've never operated at that level. We've never threatened the bottom line of any company that finances us. So they're happy to finance us, because the stakes are so low. Even our Hercules movie would not be terribly expensive."

Coen brothers films may be cheap, but they're not small. Long before No Country they built large frames for their films, then filled in their themes of morality, violence and the failure of communication using everyday vernacular, like the gangster slang of Miller's Crossing or the flat Minnesota accents of Fargo.

The opening scenes of Burn After Reading, inside CIA headquarters, make it appear that the Coens are flirting with another genre, in this case the paranoid thrillers of the 1970s, like Three Days of the Condor or The Parallax View. Then the film takes a sharp twist into a grey zone without any apparent moral order – or at least the kind embodied in No Country by Carla Jean Moss or in Fargo in the final speech given by Marge, the policewoman played by McDormand.

"No character offers that kind of perspective in Burn," Ethan says. Even Osbourne Cox's old superiors at the CIA (JK Simmons and David Rasche), who the brothers wanted to act as "a Greek chorus", seem bewildered and – like many real CIA agents, one suspects – just close the file rather than dwell on how things could go so wrong.

The Coens are big Hitchcock fans, and Burn After Reading has a MacGuffin (a device to move the plot along), in this case Cox's memoir. What's striking is that this MacGuffin, unlike the suitcase in No Country, is worthless. "Why in God's name would they think that's worth anything?" the analyst's wife says in the film. The choice was deliberate, says Ethan: "We liked that idea. There's nothing at the centre."

• Burn After Reading is released on 17 October.

RAY BRADBURY ON STAGE

AS THE nights draw in and Halloween approaches, it's the perfect time for a dip into Ray Bradbury's classic spine-tingling novel. Scottish theatre company Catherine Wheels, creators of the acclaimed Lifeboat and The Lion of Kabul, are joining the National Theatre of Scotland to tour the country with Something Wicked This Way Comes.

Jim Nightshade and Will Halloway live in Green Town, a small town in America's Midwest, not an exciting place to be turning 14. But when Cooger & Dark's carnival comes to town, sinister events unfold. This, it transpires, is no ordinary carnival. It features a carousel which makes you younger (or older) with each revolution, and a mirror maze which shows you lost versions of yourself. And for a certain fee, it will give you the thing you most desire.

"It's just a great adventure story," says director Gill Robertson, adding that the production will be suitable for everyone aged nine and above. "At the same time it is very dark and very sinister. It is about something wicked coming and things unravelling and being exposed. We're trying to highlight and not shy away from the darkness in the story."

Bradbury initially devised the story as a film treatment in the 1950s, in the hope that Gene Kelly would direct. When they failed to secure finance, he wrote it as a novel, which quickly became a cult hit, and followed it with his own stage adaptation.

Catherine Wheels plans to recreate this with a variety of theatrical effects, a dramatic new score by David Paul Jones, and a cast of eight actors including aerial artist Jennifer Paterson playing the mysterious, blind Dust Witch.

Robertson says: "It's not about having aerial work for the hell of it, it's all about her character and what she can do. The actors do everything and the audience have to use their imaginations. We want people to come to the theatre and be totally absorbed in this production."

She was inspired to make a bigger show after seeing epic family dramas at the National Theatre in London. "Shows such as Coram Boy completely blew me away. This is on a much bigger scale than Catherine Wheels would normally do, thanks to the involvement of the National Theatre of Scotland. Bradbury's novel is the perfect balance for adults and children."

• Something Wicked This Way Comes opens at Dundee Rep, 1-4 October, then tours until 1 November, with previews at Platform, Glasgow, 19 September, and the Byre Theatre, St Andrews, 27 September. For full tour dates, visit www.nationaltheatrescotland.com

BATTLE OF THE CELEBRITY MEMOIRS

IF YOU love books, the chances are you're going to feel a mite snobbish about celebrity memoirs.

Yet this autumn's publishing schedules are awash with more celebrity books than ever. In the OO7 corner, Sean Connery (Being a Scot) squares up to Roger Moore (My Word is My Bond), with the Englishman well ahead on points in the witty showbiz anecdotes stakes, while among chat show hosts, Michael Parkinson (inset) is up against Jonathan Ross.

Among national treasure thesps, it's a free-for-all. Normally, only a fool would bet against Stephen Fry's In America, a TV tie-in in which Britain's brainiest comedy actor visits all 51 states in his black minicab. But these aren't normal times, and sales of Robbie Coltrane's B-Road Britain aren't an encouraging precedent.

In October Fry will also be competing against motormouth Jeremy Clarkson, whose third volume of The World According to Clarkson: For Crying Out Loud! will be backed by a massive marketing campaign from Penguin – as well it should, given that the two previous books sold 2.5 million between them.

By that stage, though, the celeb market should already be at saturation point. This week alone Cliff ("more hit singles than Elvis and the Beatles") Richard publishes his autobiography, Sheila Hancock launches the follow-up to her bestselling The Two of Us and Mrs Wayne Rooney launches Coleen's Real Style. England expects great things from Bobby Charlton's My England Years; and Top Gear's Richard Hammond launches Back on the Wheel.

Next month Tony Curtis will be here to launch his second autobiography, and Girls Aloud will tour to launch their first one. And then there's Frank Skinner on comedy and turning 50, Dawn French on being married to Lenny Henry, Julie Walters with her long-awaited autobiography, Paul O'Grady on how he became Lily Savage and Alan Carr on, er, growing up in Northampton. One of these will almost certainly be the best-selling book this Christmas. For crying out loud indeed.

THE ARCHES VS THE TRON

THE ARCHES or the Tron? At least one theatre company who made a big splash at this year's Edinburgh Fringe is currently facing that dilemma, since both venues have offered to stage their award-winning show in Glasgow.

It'll be a tough decision, for audiences as well as companies. For years now, the Arches has been the venue of choice for experimental, up-and-coming theatre-makers. It's a cool, edgy venue with a liberal, open-minded audience, and its two flagship festivals, Arches Live! and the Arches Theatre Festival, are – outside the Fringe at least – the places in Scotland to try out new ideas and get noticed.

The success of the Arches is the legacy of Andy Arnold, who founded the venue almost two decades ago and remained its director until the beginning of this year when – much to everyone' s surprise – he became artistic director of the Tron. Arnold has quickly made his mark. This autumn's lively programme ranges from Tam Dean Burn's "digital agit-punk" night, The Manifesto Politikal Kabaret, to two children's Christmas shows, Mother Bruce and Little Rudi, and from Vox Motus's Edinburgh Fringe hit Slick to two shows directed by Arnold himself – Six Acts of Love by Dublin-based writer Ioanna Anderson and Suddenly Last Summer by Tennessee Williams (part of a city-wide Williams festival – see page 5). "I want to keep pushing the envelope, and exploring new possibilities," he says, "and in my book there's no better place to be doing that than the Tron, right here and now."

So where does that leave the Arches? In the hands of youthful new director Jackie Wylie (inset, by Arnold). Wylie's strong autumn programme also mixes edgy and accessible. There's a packed Arches Live! programme, a show about the life of Tennessee Williams starring Pauline Goldsmith and Grant Smeaton, a children's Christmas show, The Snow Queen, directed by Al Seed, and lots more.

Both Wylie and Arnold will probably deny they are competing, but they will surely be keeping a close eye on each other. That will raise everyone's game, which is good for us all, surely.

• Visit www.thearches.co.uk and www.tron.co.uk

ANOTHER MAJOR ART RETROSPECTIVE

THOSE seeking to claim that painting has had its day must first argue their way around Gerhard Richter,

a major retrospective of whose work, from 1963 until 2007, will be unveiled in Edinburgh this autumn. It comes fresh from China, where it was shown at the National Art Museum in Beijing in the run-up to the Olympics.

The Richter show is part of the Bank of Scotland totalART series, which began last year with Andy Warhol: A Celebration of Life and Death, and it is possible to draw some comparisons with the King of Pop Art. Like Warhol, Richter has painted extensively from photographic images over his 45-year career, and he shares a preoccupation with death. But his credentials as a painter set him apart. To NGS director-general John Leighton he's "the most important contemporary artist alive today".

Born in 1932 in Dresden, Richter grew up in the shadow of war. After a brief career painting murals for the GDR, he and his first wife fled to Dusseldorf in West Germany in 1961, to escape the Communist East.

Richter has always mistrusted ideology, and refuses to be drawn on the "ideas" behind his work. But this has not stopped him being political. He made a series of paintings based on photographs of the German terrorist Baader-Meinhof gang, and more recently created an artists' book about the war in Iraq.

The Edinburgh exhibition will include photorealist paintings, blurry images based on photographs, and resplendent large-scale abstracts.

Always respected, his works became highly sought-after following a major retrospective, Forty Years of Painting, at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2001, and they now fetch million-dollar prices at auction. At 76, he continues to paint at his studio in Cologne; one of his most recent works was a 113-square-metre stained glass window for the town's cathedral, unveiled last August.

• Gerhard Richter: Paintings From Private Collections is at the National Galleries of Scotland Complex, Edinburgh, 8 November until 4 January.

TV'S FANTASY TAKEOVER CONTINUES

IF YOU hopped in the Tardis, travelled back five years, and announced that in 2008 a revived Doctor Who would be one of the UK's most popular programmes, you'd be dismissed as a sad fantasist.

Yet one can hardly turn on a TV these days without being confronted by an army of CGI beasties, or actors fretting earnestly about rifts in the space/time continuum.

"It was sort of a puzzle that genre television disappeared for so long," says Primeval creator Adrian Hodges. "We just sort of forgot that it was popular stuff."

Hodges's new project is his reimagining of Survivors, the post-apocalyptic 1970s drama written by Daleks creator Terry Nation, screening on BBC1 next month. (Sky One, incidentally, is planning a remake of Nation's Blake's 7.) Set in a near future in which almost the entire population of the planet is wiped out by a virus, the remake is, like the original, aimed at an adult audience.

And with family audiences in mind, the BBC will attempt to emulate the success of Doctor Who this autumn with Merlin (above), an adventure series featuring the wizard as a young boy.

Fantasy TV hasn't been in such rude health since its 1970s heyday. If remakes of Sapphire and Steel or The Tomorrow People were announced tomorrow, no-one would bat an eyelid. I, for one, welcome our new fantasy overlords. Let's just pray ITV don't botch their forthcoming remake of The Prisoner. Some classics, perhaps, are better left untouched.

ULTIMATUM TIME FOR THE BLOND BOND

DANIEL CRAIG was an inspired choice for James Bond. Blonder, bloodier, more brutal, he's the best thing to happen to the 45-year-old franchise since Sean Connery. Nearly two years on from Casino Royale, however, is it OK now to say the film wasn't very good? The interminable card game, the appalling product placement (stand up Richard Branson), all those flat scenes of romantic anguish between Bond and Eva Green's Vesper Lynd – it wasn't exactly the smart character-driven reboot it was hyped as being.

Baby steps, though. Quantum of Solace might be the film to match Craig's edgier take on the character. Bond's notoriously conservative producers have opted for director Marc Forster, who took Halle Berry to Oscar glory in Monster's Ball. He isn't a natural fit but, as Bourne and Batman have shown, left-fielders can pay dividends: it's easier to teach a strong storyteller how to do action than teach a pyrotechnics whiz to tell a decent story.

That's paramount for Quantum of Solace. After all, this is the first Bond film that's a direct sequel. Kicking off mere minutes after Casino Royale's final scene, it finds Bond torn between duty and vengeance as he tracks down those responsible for Vesper's death. This time, the villain is tycoon Dominic Greene (Mathieu Amalric). Expect him to be revealed as part of the same Spectre-like syndicate as Casino Royale's Le Chiffre. Indeed, the rumour is that Craig's entire Bond run will involve an over-arching narrative about his battles with this organisation. That's new. It's also very Bourne Ultimatum – and considering that film exposed CR for the relic it was, QoS has its work cut out.

• Quantum of Solace is released on 31 October.

OTHER STUFF

FILM

Other than James Bond, October's highlights include Simon Pegg in How to Lose Friends and Alienate People, based on Toby Young's book, and a new version of TV favourite Brideshead Revisited. November brings us W, Oliver Stone's much talked-about George W Bush biopic, while December offers Keanu Reeves as an alien in a remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still.

MUSIC

Autumn brings albums for every taste, from an Elvis remix collection to a Tony Bennett Christmas album, as well as new outings from Bob Dylan, Grace Jones, Oasis, the Kaiser Chiefs, Mercury Rev, Mogwai, P!nk, Will Young, Snow Patrol and Travis – plus, for those who like to rock, Metallica and AC/DC.

BOOKS

Forget the hype about Sebastian Faulks's James Bond book earlier this year. John le Carré has always been unbeatable in spy fiction mode, and his 21st novel, A Most Wanted Man, looks a surefire winner. Watch out next month too for Simon Schama's The American Future: A History (Bodley Head) and Ali Smith's new short story collection The First Person and Other Stories (Hamish Hamilton).

TV

Has Heroes sorted out its second season script stumblings? Find out when it returns to BBC2 soon. Meanwhile, Jamie Oliver continues his healthy eating campaign with Ministry of Food and Charlie Brooker continues his misanthropy with Set, a zombie take on Big Brother.

THEATRE

Look out for Midsummer, an intriguing collaboration between playwright David Greig and indie singer-songwriter Gordon McIntyre, at the Traverse in October. November sees the Proclaimers musical Sunshine on Leith return to Dundee Rep, while Christmas offerings this year include The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe at the Lyceum and The Tiger Who Came to Tea at the Playhouse.

OPERA

Apart from bringing EIF show The Two Widows to Glasgow in October, Scottish Opera offers new touring productions of Verdi's La Traviata and Domenico Cimarosa's The Secret Marriage.