Top 60 Ethan Coen Quotes December 19, 2020 by Krista Aniston Leave a Comment “People are always curious about brothers working together.”― Ethan Coen“In ‘True Grit,’ we had a vulture, a trained vulture… that was a pain and that was – even by vulture standards – probably a stupid vulture, and that was frustrating.”― Ethan Coen“All we think about is how to keep the audience engaged, and normally we’re big on plot because that’s the easy way to do it.”― Ethan Coen“We tend to do period stuff because it helps make it one step removed from boring everyday reality.”― Ethan Coen“The mountain music… is compelling music in its own right, harking back to a time when music was a part of everyday life and not something performed by celebrities.”― Ethan Coen“That cowboy look – the hat and the bandana – that’s not a fashion statement. That clothing is purely practical.”― Ethan Coen“Of course, ‘True Grit’ is a Western, but we never considered our film a classical Western and honestly never thought about genre at all. We didn’t talk about John Ford or Sergio Leone, even though we like their films. Really, we were driven only by our enthusiasm for Charles Portis’s book.”― Ethan Coen“We don’t outline, so we don’t have prospective tasks to divide up. It’s just, we start at the beginning and talk the first scene through, write it up, proceed to the next.”― Ethan Coen“We do worry that we might be making something we’ve made before. It’s important that we make something we’ve never made before.”― Ethan Coen“You don’t have to have a true story to make a true story movie.”― Ethan Coen“What is striking in Minnesota is the invisible horizon line. On a grey day, when there’s snow on the ground, the sky and the ground are one tone. Everyone appears to be hanging in mid-air.”― Ethan Coen“I mean, Joel talks to the actors more than I do and I probably do production stuff a little more than he does.”― Ethan Coen“We haven’t had to defend anything to anybody.”― Ethan Coen“We wouldn’t have done it if we didn’t think we could have fun with it.”― Ethan Coen“Being non-commercial is never an ambition. Movies come together at different points for fortuitous reasons. You do them as you get the opportunity, as opposed to doing them when you choose to or design to.”― Ethan Coen“When the movie’s done, you talk about either the score or source music over a particular scene, what might work. You just throw a piece of music over the scene, and we both listen to it.”― Ethan Coen“There aren’t reasons why you like this song or this piece of music, or don’t like it. It’s just, it’s either right or wrong, you know?”― Ethan Coen“Like any kind of writing, there are good days and frustrating days. But even frustrating days can be rewarding sometimes.”― Ethan Coen“I have never had feeling in my toes. My uncle, Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf, once told me in confidence he had the same syndrome, leading me to believe it is genetic.”― Ethan Coen“Dave Van Ronk, for those who don’t know him – probably most don’t know – was a folk singer. He’s kind of the biggest person on the scene in 1961 in the folk revival in Greenwich Village, biggest person on the scene until Bob Dylan showed up.”― Ethan Coen“It’s more interesting for me as an audience member to see a movie about a loser.”― Ethan Coen“It’s not that I don’t like TV. It’s alien to me. I haven’t watched a television show in decades.”― Ethan Coen“People respond to real problems from the heart.”― Ethan Coen“Dave Van Ronk is not an obscure figure. He’s the biggest figure on an obscure scene, playing a kind of niche music that we knew and liked.”― Ethan Coen“It’s tough being a Jew.”― Ethan Coen“Whenever you’re specific with ethnicity or religion, people find reason to take offence.”― Ethan Coen“There’s something strange – not in a bad way – about going back to where you grew up or recreating where you grew up. It’s strange and stimulating.”― Ethan Coen“We loved the language in Cormac McCarthy’s ‘No Country,’ which is really about the region, while in ‘True Grit’ it’s more about period: people did speak more formally and floridly.”― Ethan Coen“Whatever faith you have, you have that crisis: what am I doing?”― Ethan Coen“When you’re younger, you kind of assume you’ll be fine at whatever. Then you get older, and you’re either unsuccessful and you wonder why, or you’re successful and you wonder why.”― Ethan Coen“’Once Upon a Time in the West’ is a great movie.”― Ethan Coen“Midwestern Jews is a different community, is a different thing than New York Jews, L.A. Jews. It’s just different. It’s the whole Midwestern thing.”― Ethan Coen“’The Big Lebowski’ was something we wrote for Jeff Bridges, and we set it aside for a couple of years because he wasn’t available.”― Ethan Coen“It was never an ambition to grow up and win an Academy Award, so when it happens, you go, ‘Weird!’”― Ethan Coen“Sergio Leone has this weird western opera thing.”― Ethan Coen“There is some pleasure in doing a movie and problem solving on a specific movie and getting a movie made, but once they are done, we don’t look at them again, much less relate one to another.”― Ethan Coen“Two heads are better than none.”― Ethan Coen“We used to watch the muscle movies on Saturday matinees, such as ‘Hercules Unchained.’ Then we’d go outside and do a remake of it.”― Ethan Coen“Sometimes you can just hear the actor in the language.”― Ethan Coen“We’re not big on taste. And actually, if you don’t pander to undue sensitivities, then it ends up usually not being much of a problem.”― Ethan Coen“’Barton Fink’ owed something to Roman Polanski. As a director, he always goes beyond the obvious narrative drift.”― Ethan Coen“’I Love You, Man’ was kind of funny.”― Ethan Coen“We’ve always actually been remarkably commercially successful. Not in terms of making huge amounts of money, which we rarely do, but in terms of not losing money and making modest amounts of money. We’re actually strangely consistent in that respect.”― Ethan Coen“I don’t know we have a method. We show up at the office. Is that a method? That’s about the extent to which it’s been formalized, asystematised. We show up at the office and talk, talk a scene through.”― Ethan Coen“That’s interesting: people deriving their identities from their music.”― Ethan Coen“Mainstream movies used to be more adventurous because people went to them.”― Ethan Coen“It’s hard to get away from being old. I still talk about the TV set.”― Ethan Coen“It’s very weird when people you know are in ‘Star Wars.’”― Ethan Coen“Barton Fink is just too self-important as an artist to get much sympathy.”― Ethan Coen“With ‘The Big Lebowski,’ we were really consciously thinking about doing a Raymond Chandler story, as much as it’s about L.A.”― Ethan Coen“It’s important to tell the story you’re telling in the right way, which might involve black people or people of whatever heritage or ethnicity – or it might not.”― Ethan Coen“A writer, by definition, is pathetic.”― Ethan Coen“Is this business any worse than any other business? It’s not especially bad.”― Ethan Coen“Oscars just ain’t gonna do it for me anymore. I need the Nobel Peace Prize. The Oscars have worn off, man.”― Ethan Coen“Don’t bang your head against the wall about what you can’t do.”― Ethan Coen“As kids, we did see the Disney movies and the kids’ adventure stories of the day.”― Ethan Coen“You don’t go around thinking about how characters in a movie, in the stories you make up, relate to people in general.”― Ethan Coen“We go to the office every day when we’re writing – or supposed to be writing. It’s not always productive, and there’s a lot of procrastinating, just staring at the wall, like any other writing. But we just make ourselves go to the office every day for more or less the whole day.”― Ethan Coen“It’s always tempting to cast someone you enjoy being with. You’ve got to hang out with these people for a number of months.”― Ethan Coen“I think some superstars feel they get trapped in their established screen persona over and over again. That’s what they get hired to do.”― Ethan Coen
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