They never did an straight adoption like Tarantino did, but almost every Coen bros movie uses the same tropes as many Leonard novels:
- Incompetent criminals (organized crime and / or desperate ordinary people) drive story
- Kidnapping or ransom
- Things go south, bad guys ruin themselves when things get too complicated
- Attention to natural dialog and story progression over grand metaphor or symbolism
In terms of the Coen bros / Cormac McCarthy comparison also mentioned, I'd say they were drawn to that one McCarthy novel because it fits all the same tropes.
McCarthy can be super metaphorical and poetic, but there's an extreme simplicity to his work at the same time, especially in No Country for Old Men.
Isn't "attention to natural dialog" one of the things Leonard says in this piece people should avoid? "Avoiding regional patois" is hardly something you can say about Coen films, some of which seem to exist entirely to showcase one particular patois or the other.
> "Avoiding regional patois" is hardly something you can say about Coen films,
His advice to "use regional dialect, patois, sparingly" seems very specifically not to be about avoiding characters who speak in such a dialect, but instead to be about the mechanism in which the use of regional patois is conveyed in writing ("Once you start spelling words in dialogue phonetically and loading the page with apostrophes, you won't be able to stop"), which, as the end product isn't the written word, is pretty much indistinguishable in the output of a movie, so the advice is probably not all that relevant to the medium (whether it would apply to writing screenplays is an interesting question, but again not really something that manifests on screen.)
And what about the claim that the Coens are thematically in debt to Leonard because they make movies about criminals undone by the complexity of crime? Look, for instance, at The Ladykillers, the Coen movie that most exemplifies this theme --- and a remake of a movie that predates Leonard's bibliography.
You can find any number of pieces on Coen influences; their diversity is supposedly a Coen strength. Blood Simple and Miller's Crossing, for example, owe much more to Dashiell Hammett.
Elmore Leonard is surely an influence (and, in particular, to Ethan Coen's published writing), but I don't think it's their most important. Surely, we'd have Coen movies without Leonard.
I don't know that you can say that about Tarantino.
O Brother is The Odyssey set in the south; Blood Meridian is the ur-Western, and isn't based on an epic poem of any sort. (As a nit, I'd also say O Brother is set in the Depression-era South).
I didn't claim Blood Meridian was based on a poem. But I do consider it an odyssey, set in the South (Eastern Texas), and during the Jim Crow era. And last I checked, the Jim Crow era encompassed the 1930s, especially in the South.
By odyssey I mean:
1. a long wandering or voyage usually marked by many changes of fortune
2. an intellectual or spiritual wandering or quest
Blood Meridian is set before Jim Crow, and all across the American Southwest.
It's also just tonally about as far as you could possibly get from O Brother. If it was a comedy, it would be American Psycho. If Fargo was just people being fed into the wood chipper, it would be the comedic counterpoint to Blood Meridian.
One McCarthy influence I've seen many times in Cohen films is their exploration of nihilism. You could say aspects of Leonard's characters are nihilistic, but Leonard's worlds are rarely (if ever) so.
I think you're attributing to McCarthy something better attributed to film noir, which is one of the Coen's most obvious and remarked-on overt reference points.
- Incompetent criminals (organized crime and / or desperate ordinary people) drive story - Kidnapping or ransom - Things go south, bad guys ruin themselves when things get too complicated - Attention to natural dialog and story progression over grand metaphor or symbolism
In terms of the Coen bros / Cormac McCarthy comparison also mentioned, I'd say they were drawn to that one McCarthy novel because it fits all the same tropes.
McCarthy can be super metaphorical and poetic, but there's an extreme simplicity to his work at the same time, especially in No Country for Old Men.