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

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

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

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.
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

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.
Joel Coen

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.
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

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