Joel Coen quotes
Born
November 29, 1954.
Occupation
Screenwriter, director.
Joel Coen is an American director and screenwriter.
Movies
Burn After Reading (2008)
Fargo (1996)
No Country for Old Men (2007)
O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000)
The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (2018)
The Big Lebowski (1998)
If the material is challenging, it forces you to challenge yourself when handling it.
– Joel Coen
I guess it beats throwing trash for a living.
– 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
These things are hard to pin down. We work on a script a bit, then work on a different one.
– Joel Coen
It’s almost like a genre rule: Don’t Open The Box.
– Joel Coen
We create monsters and then we can’t control them.
– Joel Coen
People that have been interested in our work for awhile… those are the last people you want to disappoint.
– 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
The architecture of a story can be a little bit different if it’s a true story.
– Joel Coen
I couldn’t have been happier with the relationship we had with Disney, it couldn’t have been easier.
– 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
Barton Fink got written very quickly, in about three weeks. I don’t know what that means.
– Joel Coen
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
You see a moral in them? Do we have morals?
– 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
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
Maybe there should be less of a mystique around making movies. I just don’t think that there’s any real mystery there.
– Joel Coen
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.
– Joel Coen