Coen brothers on #OscarsSoWhite: We write what we know â€“ Jews and Minnesotans

Asked about diversity in Hollywood last week, the Coen brothers defended to the Washington Post their history of making movies about Jews and Minnesotans.

The Oscars So White controversy, #OscarsSoWhite, may reflect a real problem, the film writing-directing-producing duo agreed: Money drives commercial movies, people who invest money want more of what has worked in the past and it's daunting for minorities to break into that cycle.

But the brothers balked at the notion that film creators bear personal responsibility for promoting diversity, arguing you write what you know.

"Take any particular actor or writer or filmmaker, and you go, 'Your movies should be more this or more that or more the other thing,'" Joel Coen said. "The only sane response is that you can only write what you can write. You can't sit down and say, 'I'm going to write something that follows the dictates of what the culture thinks should be happening, in terms of cultural diversity in storytelling.' To be honest with you, that's completely lunatic."

Ethan Coen added: "We actually write movies in which the characters are Jews or Minnesotans."

True enough. They've done Jews ("Barton Fink"), wannabe Jews ("The Big Lebowski"), Minnesotans ("Fargo") and Minnesotan Jews ("A Serious Man").

"You say, 'Look at the work.' And then they go, 'Well, this character is Jewish and is a bad guy.' Somehow in their minds, that's implying that in our minds the Jewish characters stand in for all Jews," Joel Coen said. "Like I say, you can only write what you can write. If the question is whether or not there should be more people involved in the process, with more diverse backgrounds, so that what they write reflects a greater amount of diversity -- that the business itself should be more open to people of different backgrounds, so that those stories come in -- that's a legitimate thing to talk about. The other thing is crazy."

"Hail, Caesar!" focuses on another community the Coen brothers have come to know -- the Hollywood film industry. The film focuses on the making of a film, also called "Hail, Caesar!" starring Kirk Douglas-like actor Baird Whitlock (George Clooney). Unsurprisingly, there are some Jews on set.

In an exquisite Jew-out-of-water scene, studio executive Eddie Mannix (Josh Brolin) convenes a group of clergy to review the "Hail, Caesar!" script and make sure it doesn't offend any religious sensibilities. There's a Roman Catholic priest, a Protestant minister, a Greek Orthodox priest -- and a rabbi.

The rabbi struggles at length to politely explain that however Jesus is portrayed in the film, Jews won't be offended because to Jews, the Christian messiah is simply the "Nazarene." The acutely funny five minutes encapsulate what it is to be a Jew in the Diaspora.

Can you imagine how up in arms the Spike Lees and Chris Rocks would be if they made satirical movies about blacks? In other words, there's nothing any non-black could do that would make these types happy.

In any case, the Coen brother's first film, and in my opinion one of their best (thanks primarily to the underrated M. Emmet Walsh's performance as the psychopathic private detective) was Blood Simple, which was about Texans rather than Minnesotans or Jews.

Oh yeah, Max. Oh yeah. Mafioso Nonno, who used to race Formula 1 cars and proved it on the autoroutes in Italy, scaring me to death, took us to restaurants by the sea in Anzio and just ordered things that weren’t on the menu. Everything was sensational. Things I didn’t think I would like, like the tiny tiny fried fish.

At his house he had an African cook but he did the specialty dishes. The fish buried in salt and grilled, then chopped out of the melted salt in the end was so good. He had his own vineyard and olive orchard so there was a three foot tall bottle under the counter filled with rich green homemade olive oil. Every lunch started with a tiny bit of pasta (not a heaping plateful, just a small delicious amount in a soup plate) with his pasta sauce, which was light pink, with a bit of fresh tomato plus cream in it etc. and then he would step out onto the patio where he had a little pepperoncini bush and take one, and chop it into his plate. I said I wanted one too, and he told me no. He thought I was like the Swiss, like his son. They can’t tolerate any spice. I insisted, yes, I’m from southern California, near Mexico, we eat spicy food. But being so blonde and white he didn’t believe me. When I got one and chopped it into my pasta and loved it, boy, did he have respect for me.

Even though I hadn’t killed anyone. Lol. (He probably didn’t kill anyone either, but I bet he defended a lot of people who had.)

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