Joel and Ethan Coen are responsible for some of the more unusual and intelligent movies of the past 25 years.

Since their filmmaking began in 1984 with Blood Simple, the brothers from Minnesota have written and directed such films as Miller’s Crossing, Raising Arizona, Fargo, The Big Lebowski, Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?, No Country For Old Men and Burn After Reading.

Their new movie, A Serious Man, is a very black comedy about an overwhelmed Jewish academic in Minnesota. His wife is leaving him, his kids are useless, his weird brother is living in his house and his neighbour is encroaching on his property. What is a serious man to do?

A Serious Man, which opened in Toronto yesterday, seems to be set in the time and place of the Coen’s childhood, but both brothers hasten to say that the film is not autobiographical. Says Ethan, 52, “I wouldn’t even go so far as to say it was inspired by experiences in our youth. It’s all a made-up story. It was inspired by where we grew up, just in terms of setting. It’s where and when we were kids — it takes place in a mid-western Jewish community in 1967 — and there was a lot of pleasure just in recreating the period. What happens to the characters, that’s all fiction.”

Joel, 54, says, “These are fictional characters in a specific religious community. Part of what was interesting to us, in terms of recreating the context in which we grew up, was the religious community aspect because it was a big part of our upbringing.” That community, he goes on to explain, was St. Louis Park, “just after that migration of Jews from Minneapolis into the suburbs. The Jewish communitiy in St. Louis Park was not the dominant ethnicity, but it was a big community. We didn’t grow up with any anti-semitism. We were in the middle of a large Jewish community that felt very natural and non threatening.”

So the teenage boy in A Serious Man who smokes dope before his Bar Mitzvah has no relationship to reality?

“Neither of us was stoned at our bar mitzvah. Great idea, though. Wish we’d thought of it at the time,” says Ethan, laughing.

So who did smoke dope in Minnesota in 1967?

“Everybody,” states Joel. “Minnesota is a big university town. People talk about the lag time in cultural things happening in mid-western towns, but where you have universities, all those things arrived about the same time. Maybe a little bit after New York and L.A. but not long after. And our father, as you know, taught at the university, so we did hang around at the U.”

Both Coen parents were academics; their dad taught economics at university and their mother taught art history.

(Meanwhile, all this talk about the past and Minnesota is catnip to Al Milgrom, who runs the Minneapolis/St. Paul International Film Festival and who is present during this interview. Ethan Coen says to him, “I was there when you brought in Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin, they had made this movie called Tout Va Bien. Do you remember that? Because they were so full of s---. That was a formative experience.” Talking to the Coen Brothers is always fascinating but somewhat disjointed. The exigencies of genius, etc.)

Rumored as the Coen Brothers’ next movie is a remake of True Grit. How, asks a male reporter, will they get people to forget the John Wayne original?

“We managed to forget it,” says Ethan.

“It’s not a very good movie, really,” adds Joel. “The novel is really fantastic. It’s a Charles Portis book. I think it’s a mediocre movie from a great book , so we’re going to go and, oooh, I don’t know. F--- it up all over again, maybe.”