Joel Coen Direct Quotations

Maybe there should be less of a mystique around making movies. I just don't think that there's any real mystery there.

It's almost like a genre rule: Don't Open The Box.

The architecture of a story can be a little bit different if it's a true story.

These things are hard to pin down. We work on a script a bit, then work on a different one.

Barton Fink got written very quickly, in about three weeks. I don't know what that means.

You see a moral in them? Do we have morals?

The question is: Where would it get you if something that's a little bit ambiguous in the movie is made clear? It doesn't get you anywhere.

It's a funny thing because you look at the careers of other filmmakers, and you see them sort of slow down, and you realize, maybe this becomes harder to do as you get older. That's sort of a cautionary thing. I hope it doesn't happen to me.

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.

Some people come out going, I don't get it. And I don't quite know what they're trying to get, what they're struggling for. We have had the reaction where people leave the movie sort of uncomfortable and befuddled. Although that wasn't our intention.

You're doing it to make the character as specific as possible, so that it's a specific individual that you're talking about, not that whole class of people.

We've been remarkably lucky in that we've been free to make the movies we've wanted to make the way we've wanted to make them. They've all been made for a price.

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.

People that have been interested in our work for awhile... those are the last people you want to disappoint.

If the material is challenging, it forces you to challenge yourself when handling it.

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.

Billy Bob and Fran are very well known actors, but aren't the kind of movie stars in the sense that George Clooney and Brad Pitt are.

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 guess there's a certain amount of poking fun at certain characters, but that's because there is something amusing about them or about the way they behave, so I guess you can say that that's poking fun at the character. But the character is your own invention, so who cares?

We create monsters and then we can't control them.

You love all your characters, even the ridiculous ones. You have to on some level; they're your weird creations in some kind of way. I don't even know how you approach the process of conceiving the characters if in a sense you hated them. It's just absurd.

I guess it beats throwing trash for a living.

I've never really understood that. It's a funny thing; people sometimes accuse us of condescending to our characters somehow-that to me is kind of inexplicable.

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.

I couldn't have been happier with the relationship we had with Disney, it couldn't have been easier.

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.

No, we don't have an obsession with kidnapping. We just follow the story wherever it leads us, and if it leads us to kidnapping, well there we are!

The characters are the result of two things-first, we elaborate them into fairly well-defined people through their dialogue, then they happen all over again, when the actor interprets them.

You want to keep it fresh and you hopefully can keep doing new stuff that's going to continue to stimulate and keep people interested.

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.

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.

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.