Home Again: Coens Filming in Minnesota

Will the Coen brothers ever return to their native Minnesota to film another movie? Yeah sure, you betcha! Joel and Ethan Coen haven't made a movie in Minnesota since their 1996 Oscar-winning "Fargo," but come March they plan to roll cameras for "A Serious Man," set in their home town of St. Louis Park, a Minneapolis suburb.

The brothers helped scout locations this summer, said Lucinda Winter, executive director of the Minnesota Film and TV Board.

"They looked in Richfield, Brooklyn Center, maybe Hopkins neighborhoods that would match the one they grew up in," she said. The film is about a Jewish college professor during the 1960s. According to the online entertainment journal FilmJerk.com, the main character is bedeviled by children who lift his wallet, a wife who wants a divorce, an intense grad student and a hot neighbor who sunbathes in the nude. With all of that, "he starts to question the value of life."

It's not autobiographical but is based on the Coen brothers' experiences here, said Bob Graf, one of the film's executive producers and also a native Minnesotan.

Graf said it's important to capture the uniqueness of Twin Cities suburbs.

"It's just plain different," Graf said Friday from New York.

Source: www.cinema-pedia.com