Joel and Ethan Coen have this reputation as inscrutable, unknowable pranksters who make complex, unreadable movies, refuse to engage with serious questions and don’t suffer fools.

I only spent twenty minutes with them in a round-table situation at TIFF last month, but as far as I can tell, only the last thing is true — as you may glean from the opening of my interview with the brothers, which runs in the new issue of NOW.

Also in today’s paper, you’ll find my festival interviews with Michael Stuhlbarg, the star of the Coens’ wonderful new comedy, and Michael Sheen, who inhabits yet another celebrated Englishman in Tom Hooper’s “The Damned United”. It’s like September all over again!