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.
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.
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'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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
