With “Drive-Away Dolls, ”Ethan Coen and Tricia Cooke wanted to make a ‘proudly unimportant’ lesbian comedy

The married filmmakers explain why their new comedy, starring Margaret Qualley and Geraldine Viswanathan as road-tripping lesbians, took decades to make.

Drive-Away Dolls may be a movie about a road trip, but the film itself took a long, meandering journey to the screen.

Film editor Tricia Cooke first came up with the concept in the early-aughts, brainstorming ideas for a lesbian comedy over drinks with a friend. At the time, all she had was a title — Drive-Away Dykes — and she brought the idea to her husband, director Ethan Coen. Together, the pair sketched out ideas for a script, weaving a zany tale of crime, romance, and road-trip shenanigans, but despite their best efforts, they couldn’t get the film made. Now, more than 20 years later, Drive-Away Dolls is finally driving into theaters Feb. 23 — albeit with a slightly sanitized title.

Set in 1999, the film follows two lesbian friends — the uptight Marian (Geraldine Viswanathan) and her free-spirited friend Jamie (Margaret Qualley) — as they embark on a journey from Philadelphia to Tallahassee. When they borrow a car from a local drive-away service, the two women discover a mysterious briefcase hidden in the trunk, and before long, they’re swept into a convoluted conspiracy of hitmen, severed heads, and missing dildos. (Beanie Feldstein plays Jamie’s cop ex-girlfriend, and Pedro Pascal, Colman Domingo, and Matt Damon also star in delightfully unhinged supporting roles.)

Cooke and Coen have collaborated for years, and Cooke edited many of the films Ethan has directed with his brother Joel, including The Big Lebowski and O, Brother, Where Art Thou? (Cooke herself identifies as queer, but she and Coen remain married and co-parents to their children.) But Drive-Away Dolls is their first time shepherding a film together from beginning to end, and it’s the first narrative feature film Coen has directed without his brother.

Here, Cooke and Coen open up about their filmmaking partnership and why they want to see more “profoundly unimportant” lesbian movies.

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: Tricia, I know you came up with the title of this movie years ago in a bar with a friend. How did that grow and turn into this film?

TRICIA COOKE: After coming up with the title, I took it home to Ethan and told him, “[My friend] Mara and I came up with this great title for a film.” Ethan was as enthusiastic, and we both thought, “That would be a really fun movie to write.” I think it took us a couple of years to write it. We would just get together in our library area on the sofa and bat ideas around, talking about characters that we wanted to use. We didn’t really have an end when we started writing.

ETHAN COEN: I mean, that’s not unusual for me, working with Joel. We’re just kind of like: “Okay, here’s the beginning of a movie. What would happen next?” I don’t know if that’s how you’re supposed to do it, but that’s what we do.

COOKE: There was a drive-away company that I went to [in college]. It was in a strip mall. I was going to school in New York, and I’m from California, and I knew how I was going to get across the country, but I didn’t know how I was going to get back. There was a deal with some airline, where if you brought in a hundred dollars’ worth of receipts from some grocery store, you could get a really cheap airline ticket. So, I remember going to this grocery store and standing outside asking people if I could have their receipts, so I could get a cheap ticket to go back. But that’s another movie, I guess.

So, when did you go from “hey, this is a fun script we’ve been working on for a while” to “this movie is actually going to get made”?

COEN: It was kind of in two stages. We wrote the script and tried to get it made with a friend of ours, Allison Anders, directing it. This was 20 years ago, and it just didn’t happen. So, we set it aside. We only picked it up again a couple of years ago. Me and Trish were cutting a documentary together in the middle of COVID lockdown, and we thought, “Okay, that was fun making that documentary. What else can we do?” We went back to that script, and we rewrote it somewhat, and we sent it out there and got it made.

You two have said that you wanted to make a “silly” lesbian movie, especially when there are already so many “serious” or “important” lesbian movies. How did you want to find the right tone? 

COOKE: I think Jamie’s promiscuity kind of helped dictate what the tone would be. I wanted her to be someone who’s very sexual, and there’s no shame in her sexuality or her sexual prowess. We didn’t want that to be gross or creepy or predatory; we wanted it to be light. That kind of helped us establish: We have this woman who is very sexual, and it would make sense that her friend is really uptight and repressed. Then, what situation do we put them in? What would be fun to watch?

COEN: The tone you’re talking about is kind of implicit. It was the starting point. We were like, “Okay, Drive-Away Dykes. Clearly, that’s not an important movie. That’s a proudly unimportant movie.” It’s just a fun movie! That was kind of a given from the very beginning.

COOKE: It was important to me to make a movie that was a lesbian comedy because there aren’t many out there. I think it’s important that there are more queer comedies out there because we want to eat our popcorn and have fun at the movies, too. So, that was very important to me.

Tell me about casting Margaret Qualley and Geraldine Viswanathan as your two romantic leads. What was that casting process like?

COEN: They just came in to audition, and I don’t even know how to describe it. We saw in them what you see in the movie. In each case we went, “Okay, you’re great. What you’re doing really makes the scenes work. That’s it. That’s what we want.” I mean, there’s a lot of anxiety before you meet that person. You meet a lot of really good actors, and they’re not bad. It’s just that they’re something less than totally exciting. I don’t know what that “thing” is, but it was obvious in meeting each of them.

COOKE: With Geraldine, it’s such an uptight character, and she added a real warmth and humor to that, which was really palpable. We were drawn to that warmth. And Margaret is kind of a free spirit and a goofball. When we read with her, you could feel that, like, “Oh, there’s some Jamie energy.” That character is based on a close friend of mine, so it was very hard to find someone to play that character. And when Margaret finally came in, she had some of that energy. That was a relief.

I love Margaret’s heavy Southern accent in the film. What conversations did you have with her about that?

COEN: Well, she’s from North Carolina, so we were looking for something a little different from her natural [accent]. A little less deep South and a little more Texas. So, we told her to listen to Tommy Lee Jones and to Ann Richards. Ann Richards is just unbelievably funny and dry, and she has that whole Texas thing, so [Margaret] did that. And then weirdly, she listened to a lot of Tommy Lee Jones. [Laughs] You’ll have trouble seeing Tommy in that performance, but he’s way, way deep in there. As a matter of fact, Tommy was our first choice for the part. We offered it to him, but he was busy.

Oh man, I would have loved to see that version.

COEN: And then the funny thing is that Bill Camp plays Curly, and totally unprompted, he said, “I see my guy as being like Tommy Lee Jones.”

COOKE: He’s everywhere!

COEN: I thought, “Oh my God, he’s everywhere.” If Tommy Lee is doing scenes with Tommy Lee, there’s going to be a space-time rip in the universe, and we’re all going to get sucked in. No, you can’t do that.

I’m curious: You two have worked on so many films together and collaborated for so many years. What felt different about making Drive-Away Dolls together?

COEN: Well, the obvious thing is just making the whole movie together, as opposed to just writing together or cutting together. It’s the process that me and Joel had, where we start at the beginning and go all the way through the end.

COOKE: I was making choices like casting, set decoration, costumes, all of that. That was a new collaboration for us. It works in the same way as when we cut together or write together. We pretty much see eye to eye, but for me, it was fun as a newbie to really think through all the characters, the choices they would make, the costumes they would wear, all of that.

Up next, you’ll be reteaming with Margaret Qualley on another movie, Honey, Don’t. What excites you most about that project?

COEN: It’ll be good working with Margaret again. This is very different. It’s not the same character. It’s a different story, a kind of crime, private detective thing.

COOKE: It’s set in Bakersfield, and it’s inspired somewhat by The Long Goodbye and this movie Fat City. It’s also one of my favorite genres, the detective/film noir genre. And the cast is Margaret, Aubrey Plaza, and Chris Evans, and it seems like it’s going to be really fun to watch them work.

COEN: Pretty soon we’ll start leaping into a thousand boring meetings. [Laughs] I say boring meetings, but seriously, every movie has these new problems and puzzles that you have to solve, and it’s stimulating. It’s a new set of stimuli, you know what I mean? It’s a whole new set of problems, and they’re all interesting.

Well, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me!

COEN: Thank you! And this has inspired me: I now have this picture in my head of Tommy Lee Jones watching the movie and looking at Margaret’s performance and saying, as actors do, “I could have done it better.” [Laughs] It’s a good thought experiment, isn’t it? God damn.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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