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.
The architecture of a story can be a little bit different if it's a true story.
It's a fool that looks for logic in the chambers of the human heart.
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 yo...
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.
I've never really understood that. It's a funny thing; people sometimes accuse us of condescending to our characters somehow-that to me is kind of inexplicable.
It's a funny thing because you look at the careers of other filmmakers, and you see them sort of slow down, and you realize, maybe this becomes harder to do as you get older. That's sort of a cautionary thing. I hope it doesn't happen to me.
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 a...
I guess there's a certain amount of poking fun at certain characters, but that's because there is something amusing about them or about the way they behave, so I guess you can say that that's poking fun at the character. But the character is your own...
We create monsters and then we can't control them.
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.
If the material is challenging, it forces you to challenge yourself when handling it.
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.
I guess it beats throwing trash for a living.
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.
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.
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.
It's almost like a genre rule: Don't Open The Box.
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.
Barton Fink got written very quickly, in about three weeks. I don't know what that means.
