Quotes By Joel Coen
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.
Joel Coen
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.
Joel Coen
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.
Joel Coen
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.
Joel Coen
I couldn't have been happier with the relationship we had with Disney, it couldn't have been easier.
Joel Coen
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.
Joel Coen
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?
Joel Coen
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.
Joel Coen
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.
Joel Coen
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.
Joel Coen
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.
Joel Coen
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.
Joel Coen
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.
Joel Coen
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.
Joel Coen
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.
Joel Coen
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.
Joel Coen
Sometimes, in certain stories, I think we know at the outset essentially what the tone is going to be, or it becomes important that we're groping toward some kind of story with a certain kind of tone that we both get somehow. But I don't think how that's combined with other elements is ever in any way overtly discussed.
Joel Coen
Maybe there should be less of a mystique around making movies. I just don't think that there's any real mystery there.
Joel Coen
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.
Joel Coen
These things are hard to pin down. We work on a script a bit, then work on a different one.
Joel Coen
People that have been interested in our work for awhile... those are the last people you want to disappoint.
Joel Coen