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.

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.

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.

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 have an uncanny ability to make birds do what we want them to do. In Blood Simple there's a shot from the bumper of a car and it's going up this road and a huge flock of birds takes off at the perfect moment.

We've been remarkably lucky in that we've been free to make the movies we've wanted to make the way we've wanted to make them. They've all been made for a price.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

People that have been interested in our work for awhile... those are the last people you want to disappoint.

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?

Barton Fink got written very quickly, in about three weeks. I don't know what that means.

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.

I couldn't have been happier with the relationship we had with Disney, it couldn't have been easier.

I guess it beats throwing trash for a living.

I think when you watch the dailies, the film that you shoot every day, you're very excited by it and very optimistic about how it's going to work.

If the material is challenging, it forces you to challenge yourself when handling it.

It's almost like a genre rule: Don't Open The Box.