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

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

I guess it beats throwing trash for a living.
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

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.
Joel Coen

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.
Joel Coen

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

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

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

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.
Joel Coen

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

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

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

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.
Joel Coen

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