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
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.
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.
People that have been interested in our work for awhile... those are the last people you want to disappoint.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It was sort of imagining him in the context of a (Raymond) Chandler kind of story that got us started on the script.