Joel Daniel Coen Quotes

• 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 Daniel Coen

• You see a moral in them? Do we have morals?

  Joel Daniel 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 Daniel Coen

• 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.

  Joel Daniel Coen

• 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 Daniel 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 Daniel Coen

• 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.

  Joel Daniel Coen

• 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 Daniel Coen

• We create monsters and then we can’t control them.

   

  Joel Daniel 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 Daniel Coen

• These things are hard to pin down. We work on a script a bit, then work on a different one.

  Joel Daniel 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 Daniel Coen

• 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.

  Joel Daniel Coen

• 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.

  Joel Daniel Coen

• The architecture of a story can be a little bit different if it’s a true story.

  Joel Daniel Coen

• Sometimes, in certain stories, I think we know at the outset essentially what the tone is going to be, or it becomes important that we’re groping toward some kind of story with a certain kind of tone that we both get somehow. But I don’t think how that’s combined with other elements is ever in any way overtly discussed.

  Joel Daniel Coen

• 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.

  Joel Daniel Coen

• People that have been interested in our work for awhile… those are the last people you want to disappoint.

  Joel Daniel Coen

• 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.

  Joel Daniel Coen

• 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.

  Joel Daniel Coen

Joel Daniel Coen (34)

Birth:	29th November, 1954
Nationality:	American
Profession:	Film Director, Screenwriter

About

Joel Daniel Coen was born in St. Louis Park, Minnesota, United States. He is an American film director and screenwriter. He directed several films include: Blood Simple, Raising Arizona, Miller's Crossing, Barton Fink, The Hudsucker Proxy, Fargo, The Big Lebowski, O Brother, Where Art Thou?, The Man Who Wasn't There, Intolerable Cruelty, The Ladykillers, No Country for Old Men (Won- Academy Award for Best Director 2008), Burn After Reading, A Serious Man, True Grit, Inside Llewyn Davis, and Hail, Caesar!. He has written several films include: Crimewave, Fargo (Won- Academy Award for Best Screenplay 1997), No Country for Old Men (Won- Academy Award for Best Screenplay- adapted 2008), Gambit, Unbroken, Bridge of Spies, and Suburbicon.

Related Authors

• John McTiernan
• Barry Levinson
• Amy Heckerling
• Albert Lewin
• Pen Densham
• John Malkovich
• Vincente Minnelli
• Elia Kazan
• D. W. Griffith
• Marilyn Manson

Advertisement

Today's Anniversary - 18th April

Births

• 1864 - Richard Harding Davis
• 1970 - Saad Hariri
• 1882 - Leopold Stokowski
• 1902 - Wynn Bullock
• 1941 - Michael D. Higgins

Deaths

• 1964 - Ben Hecht
• 2002 - Thor Heyerdahl
• 1955 - Eugen Herrigel
• 1888 - Roscoe Conkling
• 1963 - Margaret Sackville