10 Screenwriting Tips from The Coen Brothers on how they wrote No Country for Old Men and Fargo

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Joel Coen and Ethan Coen, collectively referred to as the Coen brothers, are American screenwriters and filmmakers. Their films span many genres and styles, which they frequently subvert or parody. The brothers write, direct and produce their films jointly, and have edited almost all of them under the collective pseudonym Roderick Jaynes.
The brothers don't split up writing responsibilities - they "talk through" the dialogue and "work it out together," Joel coen explains. The process seems to be working for the brothers who wrote and directed Fargo, The Big Lebowski, O Brother Where Art Thou?, No Country for Old Men, A Serious Man and True Grit. Joel Coen wrote a screenplay and directed The Tragedy of Macbeth.
0:00 - Intro
1:28 - 01 - You don’t have to follow a structured template to write a good screenplay - just go off by what feels right, the structure is already internalized in you.
2:09 - 02 - Make violence necessary for the story and the characters, rather than gratuitous.
3:36 - 03 - If you’re being true to the real world, your screenplay needs to be capricious, even if that means killing off important characters and changing the trajectory of the plot suddenly to reveal what the story is really about.
6:01 - 04 - Writing period pieces makes for a much more transporting exoticized experience for the audience than writing a contemporary story.
8:11 - 05 - Adapt the plot from real life, and make up your own characters to fit into that story.
8:48 - 06 - Don’t try to have your own unique style just for the sake of it, instead think about what the right “language” is for each project individually and a style might naturally emerge from your taste being reflected in them.
10:28 - 07 - Start writing a character that you would like to see a certain actor play, and write your next story from that character, even if you don’t end up casting that actor.
11:14 - 08 - Find your own process of making movies that works, even if that means pre-thinking the entire movie in your head before shooting.
13:16 - 09 - Whatever genre you’re writing in, the writing process is always the same - at the end of the day, it’s about problem solving.
14:02 - 10 - Focus your screenwriting on the story and let the audience draw their own conclusions about the film’s social commentary if they would like.
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