"WE HAD AN ANSWERPHONE AT THE OFFICE THAT SAID: 'You have reached the office of Circle Arizona, Circle Productions, usually of Hudsucker, Hudsucker Industries, Hudsucker Immigrations, and all of the other companies under the Hudsucker umbrella. No-one is in right now, but please leave a message.' Most people hung up in the middle of the message." - Joel
"WE'VE NEVER HAD A PROBLEM CONTROLLING OUR MOVIES. At this point they figure they know what they're going to get from us and if they don't want one of our movies, they're not going to ask to do it. Also, relative to most Hollywood product, our movies are still pretty cheap, so that helps." - Joel
"GENERALLY WE JUST DECIDE ON A FEW EXTRA INGREDIENTS, things that are separate from what the movie is going to be, and throw them in there. At the script stage we figure out what we're doing on a basic level and the visual touches get more and more specific as the movie proceeds." - Ethan
"THE HAT IN MILLER'S CROSSING WAS REALLY THERE FROM THE BEGINNING. In some weird way in our heads, the obsession with the hat was kind of central to the whole idea of the movie." - Joel
"IT'S HARD FOR US TO WRITE SOMETHING THAT'S CLOSE TO HOME... I think Fargo is the one exception where we did something that was set in an environment that we're familiar with. Generally, we have a predilection for period and place." - Ethan
"THE TRUTH OF THE MATTER IS, YOU WOULDN'T WANT TO HAVE TO WRITE EXCLUSIVELY SMALL SCALE AND YOU WOULDN'T WANT TO DO EXCLUSIVELY LARGE SCALE. They are different challenges and like anything else, you don't want to be tied to one thing. So if you're lucky you can mix it up." - Joel
"TITLES ARE INTERESTING. Sometimes you come up with something that feels right - you know you're not going to change it, like Raising Arizona - and sometimes it's kind of neutral and stop-gap like Miller's Crossing. We were never completely happy with that, we just stayed with it by default because we never thought of another one." - Ethan
"I'D BE PERFECTLY HAPPY NEVER TO HAVE TO ANSWER ANYTHING AGAIN ABOUT HOW I WORK WITH ETHAN, or whether we have arguments, you know what I mean? I've been answering those questions for 20 years. I suppose it's interesting to people, but you would think that if they were that interested they would go back and read any of the hundreds of interviews we've given over the past 20 years." - Joel
"WE DON'T ARGUE. We don't argue with each other and we don't argue with the people we collaborate with. We're non-confrontational guys. When we're finally on the set of the film, we've already gone through the whole process of writing the script together, and having gone through that it's impossible not to look at the material in fundamentally the same way. Differences of opinion tend to be over details. When they do occur, we just talk it out and somebody's point of view prevails. But to characterise any of the discussions we have as arguments would be wrong." - Joel
"I WENT ON A FIELD TRIP TO ST. PAUL, the state capital of Minnesota. I was poorly. There is a large rotunda in the capitol building with a star, because Minnesota is the North Star State, and I actually vomited on the star. You're not even supposed to walk on the star and I vomited on it." - Ethan
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