I think some superstars feel they get trapped in their established screen persona over and over again. That's what they get hired to do.
— Ethan Coen
You don't go around thinking about how characters in a movie, in the stories you make up, relate to people in general.
Oscars just ain't gonna do it for me anymore. I need the Nobel Peace Prize. The Oscars have worn off, man.
People are always curious about brothers working together.
With 'The Big Lebowski,' we were really consciously thinking about doing a Raymond Chandler story, as much as it's about L.A.
It's very weird when people you know are in 'Star Wars.'
That's interesting: people deriving their identities from their music.
In 'True Grit,' we had a vulture, a trained vulture... that was a pain and that was - even by vulture standards - probably a stupid vulture, and that was frustrating.
'Barton Fink' owed something to Roman Polanski. As a director, he always goes beyond the obvious narrative drift.
We used to watch the muscle movies on Saturday matinees, such as 'Hercules Unchained.' Then we'd go outside and do a remake of it.
What is striking in Minnesota is the invisible horizon line. On a grey day, when there's snow on the ground, the sky and the ground are one tone. Everyone appears to be hanging in mid-air.
'The Big Lebowski' was something we wrote for Jeff Bridges, and we set it aside for a couple of years because he wasn't available.
When you're younger, you kind of assume you'll be fine at whatever. Then you get older, and you're either unsuccessful and you wonder why, or you're successful and you wonder why.
We loved the language in Cormac McCarthy's 'No Country,' which is really about the region, while in 'True Grit' it's more about period: people did speak more formally and floridly.
There's something strange - not in a bad way - about going back to where you grew up or recreating where you grew up. It's strange and stimulating.
Dave Van Ronk is not an obscure figure. He's the biggest figure on an obscure scene, playing a kind of niche music that we knew and liked.
It's more interesting for me as an audience member to see a movie about a loser.
It's always tempting to cast someone you enjoy being with. You've got to hang out with these people for a number of months.
As kids, we did see the Disney movies and the kids' adventure stories of the day.
We do worry that we might be making something we've made before. It's important that we make something we've never made before.
A writer, by definition, is pathetic.
All we think about is how to keep the audience engaged, and normally we're big on plot because that's the easy way to do it.
It's hard to get away from being old. I still talk about the TV set.
We don't outline, so we don't have prospective tasks to divide up. It's just, we start at the beginning and talk the first scene through, write it up, proceed to the next.
We've always actually been remarkably commercially successful. Not in terms of making huge amounts of money, which we rarely do, but in terms of not losing money and making modest amounts of money. We're actually strangely consistent in that respect.
We're not big on taste. And actually, if you don't pander to undue sensitivities, then it ends up usually not being much of a problem.
Two heads are better than none.
Sergio Leone has this weird western opera thing.
Midwestern Jews is a different community, is a different thing than New York Jews, L.A. Jews. It's just different. It's the whole Midwestern thing.
You don't have to have a true story to make a true story movie.
That cowboy look - the hat and the bandana - that's not a fashion statement. That clothing is purely practical.
Whenever you're specific with ethnicity or religion, people find reason to take offence.
People respond to real problems from the heart.
Dave Van Ronk, for those who don't know him - probably most don't know - was a folk singer. He's kind of the biggest person on the scene in 1961 in the folk revival in Greenwich Village, biggest person on the scene until Bob Dylan showed up.
We go to the office every day when we're writing - or supposed to be writing. It's not always productive, and there's a lot of procrastinating, just staring at the wall, like any other writing. But we just make ourselves go to the office every day for more or less the whole day.
Don't bang your head against the wall about what you can't do.
Is this business any worse than any other business? It's not especially bad.
It's important to tell the story you're telling in the right way, which might involve black people or people of whatever heritage or ethnicity - or it might not.
Barton Fink is just too self-important as an artist to get much sympathy.
Mainstream movies used to be more adventurous because people went to them.
I don't know we have a method. We show up at the office. Is that a method? That's about the extent to which it's been formalized, asystematised. We show up at the office and talk, talk a scene through.
'I Love You, Man' was kind of funny.
Sometimes you can just hear the actor in the language.
There is some pleasure in doing a movie and problem solving on a specific movie and getting a movie made, but once they are done, we don't look at them again, much less relate one to another.
It was never an ambition to grow up and win an Academy Award, so when it happens, you go, 'Weird!'
'Once Upon a Time in the West' is a great movie.
Whatever faith you have, you have that crisis: what am I doing?
Of course, 'True Grit' is a Western, but we never considered our film a classical Western and honestly never thought about genre at all. We didn't talk about John Ford or Sergio Leone, even though we like their films. Really, we were driven only by our enthusiasm for Charles Portis's book.
It's tough being a Jew.
It's not that I don't like TV. It's alien to me. I haven't watched a television show in decades.
