In the dark comedy “Honey, no!” Private detective Honey O’Donahue (Margaret Qualley) investigates a suspicious death that takes her to a narcissistic reverend (Chris Evans) and her mysterious church.
The film, which debuts on August 22 and is starring Margaret Qualley in the main role, is the second installment of the married couple Ethan Coen and the trilogy centered on lesbian of Tricia Cooke. “Drive-Away Dolls” last year, an obscene road travel comedy starring Qualley, Geraldine Viswanathan and Beanie Feldstein, was the first.
At the beginning of her career, Cooke edited many of the films that her husband directed with her brother, Joel (the duo recognized often simply known as the “Coen brothers”), including “The Big Lebowski” and “Oh brother, where are you?” But for this movie he joined his spouse in the writers room. In addition to his films, his unique relationship has also appeared in the headlines: Cooke is a lesbian, Coen is heterosexual, they share two children and have been in a Platonic Union for more than 30 years.
Cooke said that in “Honey, no!” What her husband directed was her mission to make the lesbian protagonists visible within the genre Noir.
“Ethan and I are great fans of Noir. It was a genre that made sense to us, as, in a classic genre of movie B,” he told NBC News. But, he added, “I could not think of any black genre movie that was a lesbian or queer, theme.”
Cooke was also inspired by the butch-femme dynamics and wanted to “change gender standards” in “Honey, no!”
“Instead of being like the male detective, it would be great if the very feminine character were the detective, and the most Butch character was the fatal femme,” he said about his initial thinking process.
Honey’s closet is largely female, although the most avant -garde fashion icons, such as Lauren Bacall and Katharine Hepburn, served as an inspiration for their wardrobe, Cooke said. Although the location of the story, a city without coastline in southern California, presented some sartorial limitations.
“Honey is a detective in Bakersfield, so he couldn’t look so well. He couldn’t look so designed because we wanted him to feel realistic,” Cooke added.
The main character also uses his female tricks, charisma and floral dresses to disarm his opponents and catch them off guard for their benefit, so that he can hit them with their acute research skills. Its charm proves to succeed in obtaining information from those ranging from a reverend of Megachurch Viscoso (Evans) to an inexpressive policeman with whom he shares a smoking romance (Aubrey Plaza).
Cooke revealed that Plaza’s character, MG Falcone, initially intended to be more masculine, but was re -elaborate for the casting of best fit in place. Honey, Cooke added, was inspired by a friend of his who once achieved a sex store.
Similarly to “driving dolls”, “Honey, no!” Hug the sexuality of women. Honey and MG share a vibrant chemistry, or, as Cooke refers to it, “a classical attraction of femme-butch.”
“We definitely wanted him to feel sexy. We wanted there to be a lot of sex in the movie. They all have it,” he said.
While “everyone has it”, the tone is different in the narrative. Cooke said Reverend’s sex scenes were destined to be a bit ridiculous, while the scenes between Honey and MG were destined to be sexy, with the first of their smoking scenes inspired by the “basic instinct.”
“We wanted them to feel sexual tension from the beginning, as if it were a great spark in their two lives,” Cooke said. “We simply try to write things that felt like, ‘ok, this makes sense. They are really together.'”
As for the location of the film, Cooke, who grew up in southern California, said she and Coen wanted to deviate from the typically shady environments of the Noir movies and use the Bakersfield backdrop of Bakersfield bathed in the sun.
“We think it would be interesting. In addition, there is a desolation, not for the city, but only the landscape there, that it felt good for that type of history,” he said.
But while the opening of the film was filmed in Bakersfield, most of the film was filmed in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where the brothers Coen filmed “True Grit” and “There is no country for old.” Cooke pointed out that part of the Albuquerque background land, like its mountains, had to be edited.
With “Honey Don’t” about to reach theaters, Cooke and Coen are now working on the latest installment of their Saic trilogy: “Go Beavers”. Cooke said the script is in its early stages and it is “a crew team that meets for its meeting, and one begins to die by one.” However, Cooke said, he is not a fan of horror and hopes to direct the story in a different direction, one that is specifically inspired by the 1971 Austral Outback Survival film of “Walkabout”.
“That movie is Whoa, psychedelic. What is life?” Cooke said. “It has a little more deep, so we are thinking of taking it in that direction.”
