Making films can be absolutely fantastic but it can also be incredibly dull. You spend the whole day sitting by yourself in your trailer and then you get called to deliver one sentence - then you're told to come back and do it again at 5:30 the following morning.

I try to make films that I find exciting. It makes me want to get out of bed at five in the morning have my make-up done and play for the rest of the day.

I turned down twelve films last year... Huge money films but I had no respect for the writer or the work.

I think there's only one or two films where I've had all the financial support I needed. All the rest I wish I'd had the money to shoot another ten days.

I became alienated from this religious upbringing and started making music. I wanted to be a big star. All those things I saw in the films and on the media took hold of me and perhaps I thought this was my god: the goal of making money.

My mom used to have a lot of European cinema playing in the house so I'd catch bits and pieces of films.

I have two different categories of favorite films. One is the emotional favorites which means these are generally films that I saw when I was a kid anything you see in your formative years is more powerful because it really stays with you forever. The second category is films that I saw while I was learning the craft of motion pictures.

Before it was just about making the films - and now it's releasing them. Which is a steep learning curve.

As an audience member those studio films are fun. I like an adventure tale and I also like to go see something that has more of a social pulse. I like to keep learning and trying new things. And if the scripts are good it doesn't really matter.

I feel like I'm still learning a lot. I think there's a tendency for people who are just doing their first couple of films that I see now where they seem to be really resentful of the technical limitations that come along with filmmaking.

Learning to make films is very easy. Learning what to make films about is very hard.

The truth is often terrifying which I think is one of the motifs of Larry and Andrew's cinema. The cost of knowledge is an important theme. In the second and third films they explore the consequences of Neo's choice to know the truth. It's a beautiful beautiful story.

So that to me is important that audiences are treated with an amount of respect toward their intelligence. Most Hollywood films don't respect their intelligence.

Yes I was correctly quoted in saying I introduced sex into films in the 20's but it was sex in good taste and left a great deal to one's imagination.

Charles Laughton who's a great hero of mine only ever made one film and it happens to be one of the great films ever which is 'The Night of the Hunter.' It's full of his kind of imagination and creation and how you do things and just in the way he used the studio I just thought it was a fantastical way of using the studio.

They seem much rarer now those auteur films that come out of a director's imagination and are elliptical and hermetic. All those films that got me into independent cinema when I was watching it seem thin on the ground.

Maybe there's a chance to get back to grown-up films. Anything that uses humor and dramatic values to deal with human emotions and gets down to what people are to people.

I think films about men are often about characters who don't want to express their feelings. You're supposed to kind of admire them for not expressing their feelings. And I feel that's a bit dull. Women's stories often have stronger emotional content which I enjoy doing. What I really love doing is mixing that with humor.

Even if I went off to some other career I hope I would still be doing Coen films.

I don't feel despair because I am able to make the films I want to make and that gives me hope.

I think films have to reach people and really grab them. That's what I hope to do when I make a film - to get under your skin and really make you think about something and have a transporting time that takes you somewhere.

In between films I like to travel and hope to visit every continent before I become a mother.

When you're young you want to make every kind of film: musicals Westerns horror. Slowly you begin to hear your own voice. I hope people receive what I do as small personal films that are somewhat contrarian about their main characters.

I don't want to make films that give you the answer. If there is a message to my films - and I hope there isn't - it's to be open-minded.