Ethan graduated in philosophy at Princeton. Joel attended cinema courses at New York University, starting work as a film editor of low-budget films for which the two brothers often wrote the screenplays. For Sam Raimi, director with whom Joel worked on The Evil Dead (1981), they wrote the screenplay for Crimewave (1985), in which terror goes hand-in-hand with farce and musical. In the meantime, they decided to write another screenplay, written by both; Joel would be the director, Ethan the producer, even though the two roles would frequently be swapped during the project. The film was Blood Simple (1984), an atypical noir, full of film citations and references to the literature of Edgar Allan Poe and James Cain, as well as to the theatre of Shepard. After the presentation at the Marché in Cannes, this first work by the Coens immediately aroused the interest of the industry and it was presented at several international festivals, including the Sundance Film Festival, where it won the Jury Prize. Three years later, they produced Raising Arizona (1987), an eccentric comedy about a strange couple (Nicolas Cage in the role of a chronic robber of minimarkets and Holly Hunter in that of a former police officer) who, unable to have a child of their own, decide to kidnap one. In 1990, the brothers offered a fresh and ironic view of film genres with Miller’s Crossing, a film (set in 1929) that did away with the codes of gangster films, blending them with those of comedy.

In the 1991 Cannes Film Festival, they won the Palme d’or (film) and two other awards (director and male star), with Barton Fink, a masterpiece about the misadventures of a Hollywood screenwriter (John Turturro) undergoing a creative crisis. The film obtained three Oscar nominations. The Hudsucker Proxy (1994), their next film, presented in Cannes, was rich with cinematographic allusions (to the social comedy of the 1930s and the sophisticated comedy of the 1940s); this told the grotesque and surreal story of a naive and inexperienced young man (Tim Robbins), put at the head of a multinational company with the intention of making it bankrupt. Their style of making a film was, for many, embodied in 1996’s Fargo (prizes for directing at Cannes, Oscars for their original screenplay and female star - Frances McDormand, Joel’s wife and a veritable real muse for both directors), falling somewhere between a film noir and a thriller with a long trail of blood, but also seasoned with a black, irresistible humour. Success came again in 1998 with The Big Lebowski, in competition at the Berlin Festival, a brilliant parody of the hard-boiled genre. At Cannes in 2000, the Coens presented O Brother, Where Art Thou?, a free and original borrowing from The Odyssey to depict a new ruthless parable of all that was the American dream. The film was nominated for two Oscars. The following year, they won the prize for best director at Cannes with The Man Who Wasn’t There, a black-and-white noir about the America of the 1940s, starring Billy Bob Thornton.

In 2003, out of competition at the 60th Venice Film Festival, they presented the amusing sentimental comedy Intolerable Cruelty, in which the couple (George Clooney and Catherine Zeta Jones) is openly inspired by the Spencer Tracy/Katharine Hepburn couple. The following year, The Ladykillers offered a remake of the 1955 comedy directed by Alexander Mackendrick, and became an opportunity once again to provide an ironic view of the South via its musical culture, as the Coens had done in O Brother, Where Art Thou?. In recent years, they have produced the politically incorrect comedy by Terry Zwigoff, Bad Santa (2003); and co-produced a musical by John Turturro, Romance & Cigarettes (2005), in competition at the 62nd Venice Film Festival.

In 2007, they took apart the Western in their own inimitable manner with No Country for Old Men, a film shown at Cannes that then triumphed at the Oscars, winning 4 awards (best film, best director, best adapted screenplay and best supporting actor).

For the world premiere of their new film Burn After Reading, Joel and Ethan Coen have chosen the Venice International Film Festival.