Joel Coen Quotes

I'll still make movies for studios, but my editing process will be much further removed from the studio system. Because I don't understand it. I don't understand the whole testing-numbers thing. It is not how I want to make movies. So if that's how they do it, then I don't think I want to do it.

My good films were independent and my bad films were not.

On the last couple of movies I made - big-budget Hollywood movies - I really missed being able to create my own material.

Independent film is film that has thought in it. There's no independent thought in studio films. It's collective thought.

I always say that AMC hires filmmakers, and they let them be filmmakers.

I'm always looking for a reason to say no when I'm approached about a big studio tentpole because your fear is will you be consumed into the anonymous machine, and it will suck out any specificity and point of view that you might hope to express.

When we did Wayne's World, it was 14 million dollars and they didn't bug us too much because they just thought it was some little movie that nobody was ever going to see. We showed them.

I don't want to only make the movies that studios will greenlight.

In America, I don't think you have the creative freedom that I'm used to. Traditionally, it's a producer's cinema here.

I always say that I'm a filmmaker, not a factory. I don't have to churn out films every six months.

Maybe I'll just write books. I'd like to make another movie, but I don't want to go back and [do] what they want you to do, to make it for a million dollars. I did that. I don't need a lot, but I need what I used to get, and they don't give you that anymore.

It's nice when you're working in Hollywood and there's a movie you'd like to see that no one is making anymore. You make it yourself.

You don't always just have to do an indie movie to feel like you're controlling it with a few people that you really have connected with, creatively. You can do it on a bigger scale.

I gladly, I voluntarily gave up the kind of commercial film career I had going as soon as I had enough money to finance my own films.

Blockbusters run the mainstream industry. We may never again have a decade like the 1970s, when directors were able to find such freedom.

I'm so not interested in producing, other than doing my own work, producing my own films. I only do it as favors, for other people to get their films made.

Other people have worked with big studios and maintained control over their movies. I see no reason why it wouldn't work for me.

You gain and lose different things in different mediums or different sectors of different mediums. There are liberties you get on tiny indie films in terms of not having to be designed toward a marketing demographic.

I have a freedom that's incredibly valuable. Obviously my freedom is far smaller in scale than people like Zemeckis and Spielberg have here. But it's comparable. I can dream up a project, develop it, make it, control it, release it.

I don't make movies because I think audiences will want to go see them.

Anyone who thinks Peter Jackson would fall for market forces around him rather than artistic integrity doesn't know the guy or the body of his work.

With independent film, as an actor, you have more involvement - it's very much more connected. It's not just like I'm showing up and there's another actor on the call sheet; you're very attached to it.

All studio movies are the middle of the Bell curve. The only way to do something is to do it yourself. And the only way to do that is to not take any money from anyone or take as little money as possible from anyone and that's it.

The only person who can, with impunity, make the movie he wants to make, has got to be Steven Spielberg.

Studios never put pressure. They know the kind of films I want to make.