The Coen brothers' new film is a remake of 'The Ladykillers'. Joel Coen tells Michael Dwyer about the ups and downs of reworking a classic

The dictum that all political careers end in failure could apply equally to film directors. Even though some of them, such as Luis Buñuel, Ingmar Bergman, Robert Bresson and Eric Rohmer, have continued to produce great work after what would be retirement age in most professions, cinema history is littered with many more examples of directors who burnt bright in their early and mid-careers only to decline later, from Charles Chaplin to Orson Welles to Francis Ford Coppola.

Ever since they made their mark, 20 years ago, with their clever and stylish dark thriller Blood Simple, the writer-director team of brothers Joel and Ethan Coen appeared invulnerable to such a fate, commanding critical kudos and building a dedicated following with a series of original and imaginative films marked with their signature quirkiness: Raising Arizona, Miller's Crossing, Barton Fink, Fargo, The Big Lebowski, O Brother, Where Art Thou? and The Man Who Wasn't There.

The only hiccup was their lavishly self- indulgent 1994 screwball-comedy homage, The Hudsucker Proxy, and that, too, had its admirers. Last year, however, when the Coens produced their 10th feature, Intolerable Cruelty, it prompted accusations that they were selling out. I, for one, regarded it as the year's best comedy, but the Coens had committed the crime of making their most mainstream comedy to date.

Not only that: the movie also featured two Hollywood stars, George Clooney and Catherine Zeta-Jones, in roles that in earlier years most likely would have been offered to the independent-cinema stalwarts and Coen favourites John Turturro and Frances McDormand (who won the best-actress Oscar for Fargo and has been married to Joel Coen since they worked together on Blood Simple).

With their new film, The Ladykillers, the Coens have taken another gamble, turning from the venial sin of Intolerable Cruelty to the mortal sin of making a remake - and not just any old remake but a reworking of a classic Ealing comedy. The result is by no means vintage Coens, and nor is it a match for the original, but they have seized on the comic potential of the 1955 film, credibly transposing it to present-day Mississippi, lacing it with gospel music and infusing the film with their characteristic penchant for the offbeat.

An amusingly droll Tom Hanks plays a voluble con man who, posing as a professor of Latin and Greek, rents a room in the home of an elderly church-going widow (the splendidly deadpan Irma P. Hall), who lives next door to the casino office he plans to rob with his motley crew of minor criminals.

"It's a remake," says Joel Coen, unapologetically, when we meet in Cannes. "We weren't at all intimidated by remaking the movie. Maybe we should have been, but we weren't, although to be honest with you we weren't particularly interested in doing a remake." He explains that their friend and former lighting cameraman, Barry Sonnenfeld, now a director in his own right, was originally set to direct the remake of The Ladykillers, and he asked the Coens to write the screenplay.

"We felt we could do something with it, so we rewrote it for Barry," says Coen. "When, for various reasons, he decided to produce it but not direct it, the studio asked us to do it, and we said OK. I don't think it would have ever occurred to us in the abstract just to say, let's remake The Ladykillers. But once it was brought to us we decided to go with it. It sounded like fun."

He insists that he and his brother were undaunted by the classic status of the Ealing original, which was directed by Alexander Mackendrick and starred Alec Guinness, Peter Sellers, Herbert Lom and Katie Johnson. "We really didn't care about that," he says. "I really like the original movie, but I also felt that what we were doing was different enough. We were essentially taking the bones of the plot, transposing it to a different place and changing the characters. You know, in some perverse way, the more people bewailed the fact that we were mucking around with a classic, that only acted as a spur to us to continue with it. It actually egged us on."

So he felt no responsibility to the original? "None at all. In fact I got a letter from Alexander Mackendrick's widow when it was first announced that we were going to do this, and she actually sent me these line drawings he had done for the original. She wasn't concerned that we were remaking her husband's movie. She couldn't have cared less."

I facetiously suggest that the Coens probably have carte blanche, then, to remake Mackendrick's masterpiece, Sweet Smell Of Success, which starred Burt Lancaster and Tony Curtis, but he is not amused. "No, I don't think we'll do that," he says. It was important, he says, to stamp their own mark on the new version. "When we were looking at different things to do with it we thought it would be interesting to set it in the South. In the original Katie Johnson played the landlady as this English tea lady, and we tried to do something as different as possible, so we decided to make the landlady a black Southern Baptist. Her personality is very different, too. She's not a dotty lady, as the character was in the original. So from that we had the setting for the film, and everything else grew out of that."

In Hanks they have, once again, a major Hollywood star in the leading role. "We just sent him the script and he wanted to do it," Coen says. "The only complicating thing about the film was the schedule; for him to find the time to make it is great. He's one of those actors like George. They come on like any other actor. They're completely adaptable and without any movie-star stuff. It was very easy. We had a lot of fun writing his dialogue. Discovering how a character talks is the key to our understanding of a character and developing the role. Tom's character is the kind of man who will never use one word when he can use eight or nine words instead."

Coen jokes that the only character in the film who proved difficult was Pickles, the landlady's mischievous cat. "Cats are really, really hard to work with. We had 11 cats playing Pickles, and each of those cats was trained to do a single specific thing. One would sit still, one would run up a tree, one would carry a finger in its mouth."

He laughs off any implied criticism of the fact that he and Ethan have made two light comedies in a row. "It's not like we're going in any planned direction," he says. "If anything we're just wandering around in the windy darkness, without any idea of where we're going, and just bumping into the furniture. There's never been any conscious design in our career. Maybe there should have been, but there isn't. We just go from movie to movie, doing whatever appeals to us. Sometimes what we do is a reaction to what we've just done. Having made two comedies in a row now, we probably will do something very different next."

What is his response to the accusations that the Coens have gone mainstream? "I hope we're going mainstream. We've been trying to go mainstream for 20 years. I want this to be accepted as a mainstream movie. I wish our very first movie, Blood Simple, had been a mainstream success. Nothing would have made me happier. You can try, but you can't make it happen. As long as the movie is successful on its own terms we're happy with that.

"The more money you spend on a film, of course, the more there is a feeling of obligation to the people who gave you the money for the film to do well. But then we've never worked at the high-pressure end of the business, making movies that cost $175 million and have to make double that just to break even. Our films have always been reasonably budgeted, and mostly fairly low-budget, which gives us more freedom. This is a very low-budget film by Hollywood standards, for example." How low? "In the mid-thirties."

Even though Joel and Ethan Coen won a screenwriting Oscar for Fargo, and their films generally do solid if unspectacular business at the box office, they still have problems raising finance for some pet projects. Joel cites To The White Sea, their proposed film based on the 1993 novel by James Dickey. It was to star Brad Pitt as a B-29 bomber gunner shot down over Japan during the second World War, and although it came close to going into production the budget ultimately was not forthcoming. "It proved to be an impossible movie to finance," he says. "It's about the fire-bombing of Tokyo - very difficult subject matter and very expensive to do, and those two things stopped us getting adequate financing. We've given up on doing it. I don't think it will ever happen."

The Coens are working on a new screenplay, the nature of which Joel is unprepared to divulge at this early stage; nor will he indicate if it will mark a return to the style of their most acclaimed movies. With Joel turning 50 in November, and Ethan reaching 47 in September, their next moves are certain to generate a great deal of interest - and scrutiny.