A biography for Joel Coenhasn’t been written yet.
“People that have been interested in our work for awhile... those are the last people you want to disappoint.”
“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.”
“The architecture of a story can be a little bit different if it's a true story.”
“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.”
“These things are hard to pin down. We work on a script a bit, then work on a different one.”
“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.”
“We create monsters and then we can't control them.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Barton Fink got written very quickly, in about three weeks. I don't know what that means.”
“If the material is challenging, it forces you to challenge yourself when handling it.”