Joel Coen

Trivia

• Adopted a baby named Pedro.
• Used to receive sole credit as director for the Coen brothers movies', but has always directed films with his brother Ethan Coen (they also write and produce their films together). This was changed with The Ladykillers (2004), and now they both receive credit for directing and producing.
• Works so closely with his brother Ethan Coen that the two of them have been jokingly referred to as "The Two-Headed Director".
• Alumnus of Simon's Rock College, Great Barrington, Massachusetts, along with brother Ethan Coen. This is a fully-accredited college for students who typically enter at the age of 16 - before graduating high school.
• He and brother Ethan Coen have had final cut on all of their films since Blood Simple. (1984), their debut film.
• Ranked #88 in Premiere's 2003 annual Power 100 List with brother Ethan Coen. They had been ranked #92 in 2002.
• Brother-in-law of Tricia Cooke.
• Often has a scene that takes place in dark areas with a sense of dark humor. In The Big Lebowski (1998), The Dude talks to Jeffery Lebowski in a dark room with fire; In O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000), The Devil's henchmen capture Pete with thunder in the background; In Intolerable Cruelty (2003), Miles meets with Myerson in the dark room with only a glare of light showing Myerson's face; In Fargo (1996), Shep starts beating up Carl in a dim-lighted room.
• When an actor improvises a line on the set, he will almost invariably say something like, "That was great, but could you do it like it's written in the script?" Most Coen brothers films are the same (line for line) when released as they are on the page in the final draft of the script.
• Resides in New York City with his family.

Quotes

• "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."
• "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."
• "You see a moral in them? Do we have morals?"
• "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 have to have several things going on all the time... We're like everybody else in being kind of lazy and taking the path of least resistance and just making the best movie that can be made. But you always want to do something basically different from the last thing you did."
• "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."
• "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 we are writing for other people, as we did initially on these other movies, we don't usually write with specific actors in mind for specific characters because we don't know who they are going to cast in the part. It's just a little different if we are writing knowing that we will direct."
• "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."
• "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."