We create monsters and then we can't control them.
I couldn't have been happier with the relationship we had with Disney, it couldn't have been easier.
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.
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.
It's almost like a genre rule: Don't Open The Box.
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.
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.
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 you were at before.
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.
People that have been interested in our work for awhile... those are the last people you want to disappoint.
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.
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.
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.
I guess it beats throwing trash for a living.
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.
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.
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.
The architecture of a story can be a little bit different if it's a true story.
Maybe there should be less of a mystique around making movies. I just don't think that there's any real mystery there.
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 invention, so who cares?
