70 Quotes by Ethan Coen

We wouldn't have done it if we didn't think we could have fun with it.

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.

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.

Radio actually works better. It helps to reduce the celebrity factor, where people can't get past the actor to separate the parts, especially when you have some actors doing multiple characters. In fact, some people we talked to actually told us that the play worked better for them when they closed their eyes in the theater.

There's a sort of politeness and a little bit of a distance or reserve that's characteristic of a lot of people in the area that's oddly punctuated by these horrible, heinous crimes that you hear about more frequently than you think.

Critics are usually kinder to cheaper movies than to those they perceive to be big Hollywood releases. They cut you a lot more slack if you spend less money, which makes no sense.

You don't cast the animal, per se. You have an animal trainer who looks for several of them. That is a different experience than dealing with actors. That is just difficult. It is what you expect from an animal on the set. You just run a lot of film and prompt it to do the right thing, but sit through it doing all the wrong things first. It's just unbelievably boring, frustrating and painstaking to shoot.

I was always interested in movies the way everyone is interested. That is, I liked to go to the movies

It's just an impulse, in some actors. You want to make the audience like you. That's the aim of the exercise.