Some people come out going, I don’t get it. And I don’t quite know what they’re trying to get, what they’re struggling for. We have had the reaction where people leave the movie sort of uncomfortable and befuddled. Although that wasn’t our intention.
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.
Our mother was a very religious and observant Jew, our father less so. She was kind of driving the religious education, so for us it was more a burden and an obligation when we were kids at that age.
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.
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.
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 guess everything having to do with your background has some influence on how you tell stories but it’s hard to parse how growing up in a Jewish community in Minnesota really affected it.
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 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.
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.
Maybe our telling of the story wasn’t as clear as it should have been, but I don’t think that’s true. In terms of understanding the story, it comes across.
It’s a funny thing because you look at the careers of other filmmakers, and you see them sort of slow down, and you realize, maybe this becomes harder to do as you get older. That’s sort of a cautionary thing. I hope it doesn’t happen to me.
I’d be perfectly happy never to have to answer anything again about how I work with Ethan, or whether we have arguments, or… you know what I mean? I’ve been answering those questions for 20 years. I suppose it’s interesting to people.