Margaret Qualley, Geraldine Viswanathan are lesbians on the run in Ethan Coen's solo directorial debut
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The Coen brothers aren't finished making movies…on their own, at least.
The last movie that Joel and Ethan Coen directed together was 2018's Western anthology The Ballad of Buster Scruggs. Since then, they've gone their separate ways. Joel made his solo directorial debut in 2021 with The Tragedy of Macbeth. Ethan oversaw the documentary Jerry Lee Lewis: Trouble in Mind, which was composed entirely of archival footage and old interviews and screened at last year's Cannes Film Festival.
But Ethan's real solo directorial debut is called Drive-Away Dolls, the new trailer for which you can see below. He co-wrote the movie with his wife, Tricia Cooke — but to hear him tell it, this wasn't any more of a "solo" effort than his past collaborations with Joel.
"I missed him, but I had Trish, and we more or less directed the movie together," Ethan tells EW. "Weirdly, it was a very similar experience. We made the movie together, like Joel and me make movies together: We write them together, we storyboard them together, we shoot them together, we cut them together. I could be talking about either me and Trish or me and Joel. It's the same process."
Cooke has edited several of the Coens' past films (including Miller's Crossing, Fargo, and The Big Lebowski) but says that working on Drive-Away Dolls was "more work than I'm used to."
"I've worked with Ethan, on and off, for all of my adult life," Cooke says. "Writing together, cutting, and working with them as a script supervisor. So I knew how we would work together, and he's very generous and kind on set. This was my first experience producing and writing a movie and working with him to kind of direct it. He made me feel very comfortable."
Courtesy of Working Title / Focus Features Margaret Qualley and Geraldine Viswanathan in Ethan Coen's 'Drive-Away Dolls'
Drive-Away Dolls stars Margaret Qualley and Geraldine Viswanathan as lesbian friends (the former a rambunctious free spirit, the latter more buttoned-up) who embark on a road trip to Florida in search of a fresh start. But they only belatedly realize that their rental car accidentally has valuables stored in the trunk, causing violent criminals to chase after them.
Cooke and Ethan first came up with the idea in the mid-2000s but weren't able to find funding. The fact that the movie was able to materialize now is a testament to the wider range of stories about queer characters that are prevalent in modern pop culture.
"As a queer writer, it's exciting for me to make a lesbian film that is playful and innocent in a way, but also perverse and subversive," Cooke says. "Back then, the studios would go, 'Well, if you have gay characters, it's gotta be important.' Just doing a fun movie with gay characters somehow computes in a way now that it didn't then."
Wilson Webb / Working Title / Focus Features Geraldine Viswanathan, Margaret Qualley, and Beanie Feldstein in 'Drive-Away Dolls'
Drive-Away Dolls still maintains some traces of its origins, though — such as its setting.
"It's actually set when we originally wrote it at the turn of the millennium at the very end of 1999," Ethan says, adding that they "did heavily rewrite it" before filming. "But it does hearken back to the exploitation movies of the '70s. It's down and dirty."
"But not exploitative," Cooke adds. "We were really trying to make a B-movie, like a Russ Meyer type of movie: innocent yet sexy, and a little gritty."
In addition to Qualley and Viswanathan, the film also stars Beanie Feldstein (playing "an angry ex, and she's armed," Ethan teases), Pedro Pascal, Matt Damon, Bill Camp, and Colman Domingo. Drive-Away Dolls hits theaters on Sept. 22. Watch the trailer above and see the poster below.
Courtesy of Working Title / Focus Features
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