"'The Ladykillers' may kill you," says two-time Academy Award^®-winner Tom Hanks, who teams up with Academy Award^®-winning filmmakers Joel Coen & Ethan Coen for their hilarious new comedy, "The Ladykillers." "Everybody out there is looking for an unpredictable film. This should be it."

"We're very lucky to have Tom Hanks in this film," notes Joel Coen. "It occurred to us that Tom, who is someone we've wanted to work with in the past, but not really knowing in what capacity, would be really interesting in this part. The fact that he hasn't made a comedy in a while made it even more special for us."

"I'm not quite sure how we knew that Tom would be just right for the part - Dorr is very different than anything he's done in the past," says Ethan Coen. "But as it turned out, I think we were right. His comic timing is perfect; He's as funny as he's ever been."

It also helped that the part is a good one - with shades of the role made famous by Alec Guinness. The 1955 version of "The Ladykillers" starred Guinness as the mastermind (of sorts) whose caper plot goes bust when the unwitting old lady from whom they rent a room catches on. "Doing 'The Ladykillers' is like interpreting 'Richard III,'" says Hanks.

"A generation from now, everybody will be doing it. 'The Ladykillers on Mars,'" jokes Ethan.

"We really liked the original movie," explains Ethan. "It's a strong story premise. It just has good bones. We ripped out the spine of it, kept that and threw out everything else. The specifics of the characters and the setting are all quite different from the original."

"The idea of setting 'The Ladykillers' in the South and making the old lady be a southern Baptist church lady was the original starting off point for us," explains Joel.

"Their taste is unique," says Tom Hanks of the writer-directors. "They somehow latch onto odd ideas that they find entertaining. But since they both have an incredible sense of storytelling, their story ends up completely different from any other movie out there, but also just as entertaining to audiences as it is to them."

Besides the title and the basic premise, the 1955 film of "The Ladykillers" is connected to the Coen brothers for another reason. "Interestingly enough," reveals Joel, "the original 'Ladykillers' was the source of a line in our very first movie, 'Blood Simple.' When the detective shoots the bar owner, he says, 'Who looks stupid now?' - one of the classic lines at the end of 'The Ladykillers,' when the thug pulls the trigger on the empty gun."

"It's kind of a classic bonehead gag," says Ethan. "It all kind of fit somehow and comes full circle."

the cast and the characters
"Working with Joel and Ethan Coen is like winning the lottery," says Hanks. "When they finish doing whatever it is they do when they're writing their screenplays, you have the complete package. I got the screenplay, and I was only halfway through when I said, 'I'm there.'"

The "complete package" includes a larger-than-life character that allowed Hanks to amplify his performance to hysterical effect. "The Dorr character is steeped in the classics and full of himself," laughs Ethan.

"He's the mastermind," laughs Joel, "to use that word very… loosely. He is by common consent, the smart one of the group. Then again, everything is relative."

The "experts" that Dorr assembles to execute his plan is an odd assortment of characters. "He's given very poor human material to work with," concedes Ethan.

Hanks sees his character as the "ultimate criminal mastermind of a very small and almost petite little crime."

His confidence and his ability to keep one step ahead of the questions are masterful. "Professor Dorr is nothing if not logical and he can supply whatever logic is needed at a given moment," says Hanks of his character's ability to squeeze out of any tight situation with eloquence and style.

While Dorr is the idea man, the brains of the operation, sooner or later, "if you're going to play in the mud you're going to get dirty," Hanks admits. "So if there's a problem upstairs that is in the way, then you have to draw straws. That problem has to be gotten rid of. Thus the title of the movie."

Playing Dorr's "inside man" at the casino, Gawain MacSam, is Marlon Wayans. "He's the kid who gets a job at the casino they're going to rob, to case the place," says Ethan. "He likes to listen to loud hip-hop music and represents everything Mrs. Munson detests. He's the younger generation but with more street sensibility than the sleepy Mississippi culture we find him in."

Wayans sees his character as "the guy in the crew with the chip on his shoulder. He's the inside man and he takes pride in being the inside man until he finds out being the inside man means he's a janitor in the casino.

"He's got a lot of issues," continues Wayans about his character, "and he doesn't have a lot of big words in his vocabulary so he substitutes them with cursing. I've never cursed this much," laughs Wayans. "My God, I feel like Richard Pryor."

filming ladykillers
Reuniting with Joel and Ethan Coen for "The Ladykillers" is a stable of professionals who have worked in their expert capacities on many of their films. Cinematographer Roger Deakins (8 films with the Coens), production designer Dennis Gassner (6 films), costume designer Mary Zophres (7 films), stunt coordinator Jery Hewitt (9 films), and special effects coordinator Peter Chesney (7 films) are all Coen brothers regulars.

Academy Award®-winner Gassner finds the collaboration a great treat. "It's been an incredible pleasure to be asked back. Their projects are always such incredible sanctuaries, because of the impeccable organization that they always put into their movies."

Gassner was especially excited to work on another film set a South, as imagined by the Coens. "Because it takes place in the South," he says about the tone and mood being conveyed in his work, "it has a wonderful timeless quality."

One of the main challenges that Gassner faced was to build a bridge that figures prominently in the film's climax. "We obviously couldn't build a whole bridge on stage," Gassner says, "but we could build part of a bridge, then have the rest as a CGI element in our Mississippi location. That said, it needed to be at least partly real - it would set it in a real place and give it a romantic quality. It was great fun to design - it's based on a bridge in Oregon that my family would drive over when I was a young boy."

Though "The Ladykillers" is a comedy, and as such, does not require the extensive stunt or effects work of some of their other films, stunt coordinator Jery Hewitt and effects coordinator Peter Chesney still had jobs to do.

"Our big action sequence, such as it is, is the tunnel explosion," says Ethan.

"Pancake blows himself out of the tunnel while he's digging," explains Chesney. "We had to launch him out. But it's not a normal explosion; it's more about comedic gymnastics with an explosion following him."

This required careful timing with big air cannons that can chase the stuntman with effects and catapult him with a very specific trajectory. "The stuntman gets up to maybe 20 mph so he has a smooth take-off and he can control what he does after he leaves the mouth of the tunnel," explains Chesney.

"This is not just throwing a guy across the room. It's a performance," insists Chesney. "There's a big difference."

Not as technically demanding but equally interesting was the football sequence, with stunt camera work involving cinematographer Roger Deakins.

Says stunt coordinator Jery Hewitt, "We were worried about Roger. We had 21 huge, burly guys who are used to crashing into each other. Roger went in there with a delicate - and very expensive - hand-held camera."

"After a few rehearsals you could see he was enjoying the heck out of it," continues Hewitt. "It's not football to its truest form, but it was so unique because the whole thing is done in the helmet."
Cinematographer Roger Deakins, a longtime collaborator with Joel and Ethan, has worked on eight of their films. In fact, says Joel, "We can't imagine doing a movie without Roger."

Tom Hanks found working with the legendary Deakins a thrill. "I look back on the nature of the cinematographers, the cameramen I've worked with and I think for moviephiles it means a lot to add Roger Deakins to the list I've worked with," says Hanks. "This is a big deal. This is a huge deal."

Working alongside the Coens' longstanding team is animal trainer Cristie Miele. "There's a lot of animal action in the movie," says Ethan referring to not only Pickles the cat and the raven on the bridge but also Pancake's signature scene. "There's also probably a cinematic first, we have a dog in a gas mask."

"That was great," adds Joel. "Christie went off and trained an English bull dog to play dead."
"We had to teach the dog to faint so that Pancake can give the dog 'the kiss of life,' It's quite funny," says Miele.

As far as Pickles the cat was concerned, the filmmakers weren't sure what to expect. "They're notoriously hard to train," says Joel. "But Christie did some pretty remarkable things."

Pickles was played a number of identical cats each with a different behavior. "Cats can be trained to perform on cue," explains Miele. "The key is to have a team. We have ten cats in our team and for each scene we prepare three different cats."

There was one more new member of the production team, one necessitated by this particular screenplay: Prof. Dorr and his band of thieves are supposed to be practicing their baroque music on classical instruments. All the instruments and cases were made by renowned master guitar maker Danny Ferrington. "These are not necessarily things I would make," explains Ferrington, "but when Ethan and Joel went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art to look at these things they were kind of scratching their heads, saying, 'Where are we going to get a theobo? Where are we going to find a harpolyre?'"

"As it turns out, gathering together authentic period instruments is pretty difficult," explains Ethan. "People who have them don't tend to want to lend them to movie companies."
Danny just basically made them all," he continues. "Some he built from the ground up, and some were sort of 'Frankenstein' instruments, made from elements of different existing instruments. Tom's character has a violin, the head stock of which is a Raven, which is appropriate to his character."

The violin is fairly commonplace but some of the other instruments are a mystery to their supposed owners. Says Marlon about his stringed instrument, "I don't even know what instrument it is. It's just, it's like the bass, but it's like before Bootsy Collins introduced the slap funk to it."

"It's some sort of brass instrument that looks vaguely like a Doctor Seuss French Horn," says JK Simmons about his instrument. "It's embarrassing that I don't know the name because I have a degree in music."

"They're accurate and comic at the same time," says Simmons. "I haven't become very accomplished on it but fortunately we're not called upon to be."

about the music
Though it turns out that the thieves hiding out in Mrs. Munson's root cellar are less interested in the music of the rococo than in robbing the Bandit Queen, Joel and Ethan Coen have, as usual, made music an important element in their film. Gospel music is a main focus of the soundtrack, but is by no means the only element. "'The Ladykillers' features combination of gospel music, hip hop music, and baroque chamber music. That's actually one of the things that's been very interesting about this project," says Joel Coen.

"In this film, as in 'O Brother, Where Art Thou?,' Joel and Ethan have made the music an essential part of the telling the story," says executive music producer T Bone Burnett, a three-time collaborator with the Coen brothers. Music has always been an important part of the Coen brothers' films, from a murder cleaned up to the tune of "It's the Same Old Song" in "Blood Simple" to the wild yodels of "Raising Arizona" to the wild and comic dream sequence in "The Big Lebowski" to the archive-busting sounds of a century of folk music collected for "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" That film inspired a soundtrack album that sparked a new interest in folk music, selling an astounding 7 million units as it became one of the best-selling soundtracks in history.

In "The Ladykillers," Joel and Ethan Coen reunite with Burnett, who previously produced the music for "Lebowski" and "O Brother," as they find a song score that is both classic and modern, featuring timeless gospel tunes dating back to the 1930s as well as new hip-hop music from the Grammy-nominated artist Nappy Roots.

"I've heard all my life that rock and roll was born from gospel music, but it wasn't until I went back and listened to the whole canon of gospel from the last century that I realized it actually was," laughs Burnett. "Listening back, you can hear, in one form or another, almost every rock and roll song ever sung. So we've gone back and rediscovered for ourselves some of the great gospel music that people have left behind - The Soul Stirrers, Bill Landford and the Landfordaires, Blind Willie Johnson, Claude Jeter and The Swan Silvertones."

The main theme from the film is the classic song "Trouble of This World," which, Burnett notes, "is a traditional song, maybe a couple of hundred years old. The first recording we heard of it was by a group called Bill Landford and the Landfordaires, recorded in the late 1930s. We keep coming back to it - in fact, at one point, in a long medley, it moves from a Baroque version of the tune into a gospel version, into a hip-hop version, and then back into gospel and back into Baroque."

"Trouble is one of the main themes of the movie," says Burnett. "All of the protagonists - or antagonists - end up flying against this rock that is Mrs. Munson. The trouble is realized in their attempts to control fate, whereas she's a churchgoing woman who puts her fate… elsewhere." One might say that when the gospel tunes press our anti-heroes to "go back to God," they take the message literally.

The hip-hop is performed by Nappy Roots, whose version of "Trouble of This World" is subtitled "Coming Home." "Nappy Roots fit well because they are Southern. This story is very Southern, and they're a group that brought us a lot of variation. They were collaborative. They added a lot."