Words matter. These are the best Ethan Coen Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
Is this business any worse than any other business? It’s not especially bad.
Sergio Leone has this weird western opera thing.
Barton Fink is just too self-important as an artist to get much sympathy.
We loved the language in Cormac McCarthy’s ‘No Country,’ which is really about the region, while in ‘True Grit’ it’s more about period: people did speak more formally and floridly.
We used to watch the muscle movies on Saturday matinees, such as ‘Hercules Unchained.’ Then we’d go outside and do a remake of it.
Being non-commercial is never an ambition. Movies come together at different points for fortuitous reasons. You do them as you get the opportunity, as opposed to doing them when you choose to or design to.
People are always curious about brothers working together.
I don’t know we have a method. We show up at the office. Is that a method? That’s about the extent to which it’s been formalized, asystematised. We show up at the office and talk, talk a scene through.
We haven’t had to defend anything to anybody.
We wouldn’t have done it if we didn’t think we could have fun with it.
I have never had feeling in my toes. My uncle, Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf, once told me in confidence he had the same syndrome, leading me to believe it is genetic.
When you’re younger, you kind of assume you’ll be fine at whatever. Then you get older, and you’re either unsuccessful and you wonder why, or you’re successful and you wonder why.
It’s very weird when people you know are in ‘Star Wars.’
There’s something strange – not in a bad way – about going back to where you grew up or recreating where you grew up. It’s strange and stimulating.
It’s important to tell the story you’re telling in the right way, which might involve black people or people of whatever heritage or ethnicity – or it might not.
With ‘The Big Lebowski,’ we were really consciously thinking about doing a Raymond Chandler story, as much as it’s about L.A.
A writer, by definition, is pathetic.
Whenever you’re specific with ethnicity or religion, people find reason to take offence.
We don’t outline, so we don’t have prospective tasks to divide up. It’s just, we start at the beginning and talk the first scene through, write it up, proceed to the next.
As kids, we did see the Disney movies and the kids’ adventure stories of the day.
Like any kind of writing, there are good days and frustrating days. But even frustrating days can be rewarding sometimes.
When the movie’s done, you talk about either the score or source music over a particular scene, what might work. You just throw a piece of music over the scene, and we both listen to it.
‘I Love You, Man’ was kind of funny.
Oscars just ain’t gonna do it for me anymore. I need the Nobel Peace Prize. The Oscars have worn off, man.
It’s always tempting to cast someone you enjoy being with. You’ve got to hang out with these people for a number of months.
Mainstream movies used to be more adventurous because people went to them.
Don’t bang your head against the wall about what you can’t do.
We’ve always actually been remarkably commercially successful. Not in terms of making huge amounts of money, which we rarely do, but in terms of not losing money and making modest amounts of money. We’re actually strangely consistent in that respect.
‘Barton Fink’ owed something to Roman Polanski. As a director, he always goes beyond the obvious narrative drift.
You don’t go around thinking about how characters in a movie, in the stories you make up, relate to people in general.
It’s tough being a Jew.
Sometimes you can just hear the actor in the language.
That cowboy look – the hat and the bandana – that’s not a fashion statement. That clothing is purely practical.
We’re not big on taste. And actually, if you don’t pander to undue sensitivities, then it ends up usually not being much of a problem.
The mountain music… is compelling music in its own right, harking back to a time when music was a part of everyday life and not something performed by celebrities.
Two heads are better than none.
You don’t have to have a true story to make a true story movie.
Midwestern Jews is a different community, is a different thing than New York Jews, L.A. Jews. It’s just different. It’s the whole Midwestern thing.
I mean, Joel talks to the actors more than I do and I probably do production stuff a little more than he does.
Dave Van Ronk is not an obscure figure. He’s the biggest figure on an obscure scene, playing a kind of niche music that we knew and liked.
