Joel Coen
Joel Coen
Joel David Coenand Ethan Jesse Coen, collectively referred to as the Coen brothers, are American filmmakers. Their films span many genres and styles, which they frequently subvert or parody. Their films include Blood Simple, Raising Arizona, Miller's Crossing, Barton Fink, The Hudsucker Proxy, Fargo, The Big Lebowski, O Brother, Where Art Thou?, No Country for Old Men, Burn After Reading, True Grit, and Hail, Caesar!...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionDirector
Date of Birth29 November 1954
CountryUnited States of America
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.
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.
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.
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.
We were walking a fine line, making it a sort of challenge for audiences to figure out what's going on without clues except what you're listening to, but at the same time, we wanted to make sure we didn't leave the audience completely at sea. I'm still not sure which bucket we finally tipped it into.
I guess everything having to do with your background has some influence on how you tell stories but it's hard to parse how growing up in a Jewish community in Minnesota really affected it.
Billy Bob and Fran are very well known actors, but aren't the kind of movie stars in the sense that George Clooney and Brad Pitt are.
I'd be perfectly happy never to have to answer anything again about how I work with Ethan, or whether we have arguments, or... you know what I mean? I've been answering those questions for 20 years. I suppose it's interesting to people.
I couldn't have been happier with the relationship we had with Disney, it couldn't have been easier.
No, we don't have an obsession with kidnapping. We just follow the story wherever it leads us, and if it leads us to kidnapping, well there we are!
It was sort of imagining him in the context of a (Raymond) Chandler kind of story that got us started on the script.
You want to keep it fresh and you hopefully can keep doing new stuff that's going to continue to stimulate and keep people interested.
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.
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.