O Brother, Where Art Thou?

To the Editors:

It’s true that last year I said in an interview that Ethan Coen didn’t want to make movies anymore. I’ve been quoted many times now, including by James Shapiro [“Shakespeare Noir,” NYR, January 13], so I’d like to take a moment to clarify what I meant.

Ethan’s directed eighteen feature films over thirty-five years. If one’s been walking for eighteen miles and says, “I don’t want to walk anymore,” it would not mean “I don’t want to walk ever again.” It was in this spirit that I described what I thought was Ethan’s self-evident interest in doing other things, such as his play A Play Is a Poem, which was about to come to New York (but was interrupted by the pandemic).

Carter Burwell
Amagansett, New York