Joel Coen quotes | Thousands Of Quotes

Search for quotes

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

Want

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

Joel Coen

Control

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

Rules

Violence

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.

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

Movies

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

Want

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.

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

Love

Sense

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.

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.

I guess it beats throwing trash for a living.

Joel Coen

Living

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.

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

Fact

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.

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.