NEWSWEEK: Do you fear that international audiences won’t get your movie? JOEL: It’s a little hard to translate, but on the other hand everyone can get the music. Good music doesn’t need translation. Some people will get it, some won’t.
At the Cannes premiere, the mostly French audience missed a lot of the humor. JOEL: It’s hard, because so much of it is about specific American things. All of our movies are American in a way.
You are American filmmakers who catalog Americana. Why? JOEL: I don’t think we could write about anything else–it’s where we live. A Hollywood movie executive would say, “There is a cop… a plot concept, and it could happen wherever, southern Chicago.” We are more likely to say, “It takes place in Chicago, and what’s the story?”
Do you go to those places beforehand and study them? ETHAN: It has nothing to do with reality.
