‘Honey Don't!' noir brings Ethan Coen's inventive violence to Cannes

Business Recorder

25-05-2025

CANNES: Ethan Coen, one half of the renowned Coen brothers, had to get even more creative when imagining how to kill off characters for 'Honey Don't!,' his new spin on 1940s LA noir starring Margaret Qualley.
'It's a challenge because we got a lot of good minds out there thinking about it all the time. So it's hard to come up with new ways,' the director told Reuters at the Cannes Film Festival.
'It sounds strange to say, but you want to make the violence fun, not just some like weird sadistic thing for some reason,' he added ahead of Friday evening's premiere.
The Coen brothers are known for their notional plot lines juxtaposed with shock violence in films such as 'Fargo' and 'No Country for Old Men,' both of which earned them Oscar awards.
In just one example, as seen in the 'Honey Don't!' trailer, a man has a fork violently rammed into the bottom of his chin.
'Somehow I think it (violence) kind of transcends sadism by virtue of its inventiveness,' added Coen, who said he was aiming to capture the feel of friend and fellow director Sam Raimi's early films, which includes cult horror classic 'Evil Dead.'
Qualley stars as the Bakersfield, California-based sharp-tongued and seductive private investigator Honey O'Donahue, who gets tangled up with a cult while looking into a woman's death.
'Captain America' actor Chris Evans plays a crooked preacher, while Aubrey Plaza of 'The White Lotus' is Qualley's romantic interest and Charlie Day a homicide detective.
'We wanted to make a film noir that had a lesbian lead character' because there aren't many of those, especially compared with the number of ones with heterosexual characters, Tricia Cooke, Coen's co-writer and wife, told Reuters.
Coen and Cooke said they immediately felt it was the right choice to cast Qualley, initially for their similar lesbian cross-country road trip caper 'Drive-Away Dolls' that marked Ethan Coen's first solo film without his brother Joel.
'We thought after we met her, well, she'll be good for 'Drive-Away Dolls,' but she'll be great for this other script we had written even then,' Coen added.
Shooting sex scenes between Qualley and Plaza was not a challenge, as they both really liked each other, said Coen.
They decided to set the film in Bakersfield, which is less well-off than Los Angeles, as part of the revamp of the genre.
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LA has been patented by crime fiction writer Raymond Chandler, and that is its own kind of detective story, said Coen.
'We wanted to do it and not glamorous LA, but very much California, the inland desert,' added Coen, with the idea being to capture the bleakness that inhabits those locations.
'Honey Don't!,' which received lukewarm reviews from critics at Variety, and The Hollywood Reporter, is set to hit U.S. theatres on August 22.