Joel and Ethan Coen, on the set of ‘‘Burn After Reading,’’ stick to a low-budget formula despite Oscar success.

By BRUCE HEADLAM

“Something just went horribly wrong,” he said.
The sound of hysterical laughter is heard.
That line of dialogue and the stage direction that follows could have plausibly been found in many of the 13 major movies created by the Coen brothers: black comedies like “Blood Simple,” “Barton Fink” or “Fargo” where invariably something does go horribly wrong.
Here, however, the speaker is Joel Coen, and the laughter is provided by Ethan, his younger brother (by three years). They were responding to the question of whether their big night at the Academy Awards last February - four Oscars for “No Country for Old Men,” including best picture - changed the brothers’ outlook on the film industry, or their place in it, or in any way represented a high point of their 24-year career as darlings of arthouse cinema.
Apparently not. According to the Coens, who spoke by phone from their hometown, Minneapolis, where they are currently shooting their next movie, the Oscars were barely an interruption.
“It was very amusing to us,” Ethan said.
“Went right into the ‘Life is strange’ file,” Joel said.
The Coens’ “Life is strange” file must be overflowing by now. For more than two decades they have made popular movies - some loved by critics, some loathed - by following a simple formula: Typically, a slightly down-on-his-luck protagonist driven by a single motivating belief (like “I’m a writer”) gets involved in a low-level criminal plot involving kidnapping or extortion, setting off a chain reaction of complications and reversals. And more often than not, somebody gets shot in the face.
Sometimes Ethan, 50, is credited as the writer, and sometimes Joel, 53, as director. But in reality both conceive the film, write the screenplay and direct, and edit under the joint pseudonym Roderick Jaynes.
Their new movie, “Burn After Reading,” is set in Washington . Frances Mc- Dormand, Joel’s wife, plays Linda Litzke, a literally wide-eyed employee of Hardbodies Fitness gym . Through a series of strained coincidences, Linda receives a computer disk containing a draft of a memoir written by Osbourne Cox (John Malkovich), an angry alcoholic relic of the C.I.A. whose wife (Tilda Swinton) is having an affair with a federal marshal and aging Lothario (George Clooney). Linda decides to trade the memoir for cash, aided by a dimwitted personal trainer played by Brad Pitt, showing again that he’s a great character actor in a leading man’s body.
With its coldly satirical tone, stylized dialogue and broadly drawn characters, “Burn” will feel like familiar territory for longtime fans, a return to Coen Country for Odd Men. Is “Burn” a deliberate return to form, a step away from being Very Important Oscar-Winning Filmmakers?
“It was nothing like that,” Ethan said. “To tell you the truth, we started writing down actors we wanted to work with.”
Together the Coens have little capacity for abstraction or intellectualism, and they resist delving into the philosophy or the processes underpinning their films. Analyzing their work, Joel says, “is just not something that interests us.”
Since “Blood Simple” in 1984, the Coens have put out a film at least once every two years. One explanation for their longevity is money - the lack of it. All told, the Coens have spent an estimated $340 million, the cost of just a couple of summer blockbusters.
Joel said: “To be quite honest our movies have never broken any records in terms of box office. We’ve never operated at that level. We’ve never threatened the bottom line of any company that finances us. So they’re happy to finance us, because the stakes are so low.”
Coen brothers films may be cheap, but they’re not small.Long before “No Country” they built large frames for their films, then filled in their themes of morality, violence and the failure of communication using everyday vernacular, like the gangster slang of “Miller’s Crossing” or the flat Minnesota accents of “Fargo.”
The Coens are big Hitchcock fans, and “Burn After Reading” has a MacGuffin (the device to move the plot along), in this case Cox’s memoir. What’s striking is that this MacGuffin, unlike the suitcase in “No Country,” is worthless. “Why in God’s name would they think that’s worth anything-” the analyst’s wife says in the film.
Ethan said the choice was deliberate: “We liked that idea. There’s nothing at the center.”