Words matter. These are the best Joel Coen Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
When we do a movie with the studios, they wouldn’t be asking us to do it, I don’t think, if it was a movie they wanted to get into themselves. What you see is what you get with us, so they let us do what we want to do.
We create monsters and then we can’t control them.
Usually, I don’t want to sit down and listen to the director gas on about his movie. I just can’t actually imagine myself sitting down and having that much to say.
I guess it beats throwing trash for a living.
And when you see it the first time you put the film together, the roughest cut, is when you want to go home and open up your veins and get in a warm tub and just go away. And then it gradually, maybe, works its way back, somewhere toward that spot you were at before.
I always admired Stanley Kubrick for the fact that he managed to beat the system somehow. I think he kind of had it all figured out.
It’s almost like a genre rule: Don’t Open The Box.
The point at which we worked with some of these actors, they weren’t really stars yet. Nicolas Cage was not a big star when we did Raising Arizona. A lot of these people were also virtually unknown, too, when we worked with them first.
I think when you watch the dailies, the film that you shoot every day, you’re very excited by it and very optimistic about how it’s going to work.
I guess everything having to do with your background has some influence on how you tell stories but it’s hard to parse how growing up in a Jewish community in Minnesota really affected it.
When you do a writing job for a studio, one of the things you want to do is satisfy the expectations of your employer. That’s a little bit different than when you sit down and write something to satisfy yourself, because then you’re the employer.
Maybe our telling of the story wasn’t as clear as it should have been, but I don’t think that’s true. In terms of understanding the story, it comes across.
I couldn’t have been happier with the relationship we had with Disney, it couldn’t have been easier.
Other kinds of movie stars, it’s a different thing, they bring their persona to the part and that’s what people like to see, and they are not really transforming in terms of their character.
Barton Fink got written very quickly, in about three weeks. I don’t know what that means.
Our mother was a very religious and observant Jew, our father less so. She was kind of driving the religious education, so for us it was more a burden and an obligation when we were kids at that age.
People that have been interested in our work for awhile… those are the last people you want to disappoint.
These things are hard to pin down. We work on a script a bit, then work on a different one.
We don’t have any rules about how we depict violence, or how much violence is in a movie. It’s a calibration on a case-by-case basis.
I’d be perfectly happy never to have to answer anything again about how I work with Ethan, or whether we have arguments, or… you know what I mean? I’ve been answering those questions for 20 years. I suppose it’s interesting to people.
We have an uncanny ability to make birds do what we want them to do. In Blood Simple there’s a shot from the bumper of a car and it’s going up this road and a huge flock of birds takes off at the perfect moment.
If the material is challenging, it forces you to challenge yourself when handling it.
