Joel Coen Quotes

35 quotes in 520 categories

• If the material is challenging, it forces you to challenge yourself when handling it.
• People that have been interested in our work for awhile... those are the last people you want to disappoint.
• 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…
• I guess it beats throwing trash for a living.
• These things are hard to pin down. We work on a script a bit, then work on a different one.
• 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…
• You see a moral in them? Do we have morals?
• 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…
• 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…
• Barton Fink got written very quickly, in about three weeks. I don't know what that means.
• I couldn't have been happier with the relationship we had with Disney, it couldn't have been easier.
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• 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.
• 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…
• It's almost like a genre rule: Don't Open The Box.
• 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…
• Maybe there should be less of a mystique around making movies. I just don't think that there's any real mystery there.

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