A Quote by Ethan Coen

'Barton Fink' owed something to Roman Polanski. As a director, he always goes beyond the obvious narrative drift. — © Ethan Coen
'Barton Fink' owed something to Roman Polanski. As a director, he always goes beyond the obvious narrative drift.
When I got the invitation to be part of 'The Ghost' or 'The Ghost Writer,' as it's now known, from Mr. Roman Polanski, my interest level was very piqued. I was very excited and pleased to get such an offer from Mr. Roman Polanski.
Barton Fink is just too self-important as an artist to get much sympathy.
Barton Fink got written very quickly, in about three weeks. I don't know what that means.
To me, the bones of 'Smokin' Aces' is in the Coen brothers. 'Barton Fink' and 'Raising Arizona.' Those two movies, if you look at them, that's where a lot of that comes from.
I guess the wildcard here is Terrence Malick. He supervised me while I was writing the script for Beautiful Country, and he is a genius, although not always easy to follow. What I learned from him is that the narrative can be tracked through all kinds of scenes, that the strong narrative thread is not always the one that is most obvious. Creating narrative with Malick was a bit like chasing a butterfly through a jungle. This approach to narrative is fun and complicated, something that makes the process of writing constantly interesting to this writer.
I shot Barton Fink in July and moved out to LA that fall. The movie came out in the spring and it was a year before I got Wings.
Asked by reporters about his upcoming marriage to a forty-two-year-old woman, director Roman Polanski told reporters, `The way I look at it, she's the equivalent of three fourteen-year-olds.'
Roman Polanski actually said as much to me once. He had his head in his hands, and I said, "Roman, I've got to tell you, as an actor, seeing the director with his head in his hands... Look, I really want to do what you want me to do." And he went away and he came back, having obviously thought about what I said. And he said, "When my head is in my hands, I'm closing my eyes and trying to remember what I saw in my head, before any of the stuff."
I'd done a big movie that I wasn't happy with, and I was moving out of London when I got approached about Barton Fink, because my agent said the brothers were in London. We hit it off immediately, and suddenly I found myself on the way to America!
Phil Spector is probably a better date than Roman Polanski.
Someone like Roman Polanski comes with a lifetime of achievement, cinematically.
I was at a party three weeks prior to the murders at Roman Polanski and Sharon Tate's house.
Narrative should flow as flows the brook down through the hills and the leafy woodlands...a brook that never goes straight for a minute, but goes and goes briskly, sometimes ungrammatically, and sometimes fetching a horseshoe of ¾ of a mile around and at the end of the circuit flowing within a yard of the path that it traversed an hour before; but always going and always following at least one law, always loyal to that law, the law of narrative, which has no law. Nothing to do but make the trip; the how of it is not important, so that the trip is made.
I think if Roman Polanski had asked me to do the phone book, I would have said, 'Yes.'
Faith is not something that goes against the evidence, it goes beyond it. The evidence is saying to us, 'There is another country. There is something beyond mere reason'.
Buddha introduced the idea that young people should become sannyasins. Then it is something significant. When a young person goes beyond sex, when a young person goes beyond desires, when a young person goes beyond greed, ambition, the longing to be powerful, the ambition to be famous, then it is something tremendously meaningful, significant.
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