Q: Were you aware of how in pain he was?

JC: Yes! He wasn’t making it apparent. He had a motorcycle accident about a week or two before we started shooting, and then lied to us brazenly about the implications of the accident. So we felt completely at liberty to ignore the fact that he was in pain.

Q: How did you collaborate before shooting with Roger?

EC: Did we do storyboards? Yeah. It varies actually. Roger didn’t do the one we just finished shooting, but he did this movie and the 7 or 8 previous to that. Except when his schedule doesn’t allow it we actually do a draft of the storyboards for the movie ourselves and then a draft, in effect, with him, we kind of redraft with him and the storyboard artist. And we did that on this movie. We have kind of a general discussion about how the movie is going to look and then we all kind of think and forget about it when we are actually shooting the movie. We forget about everything we’ve decided and just take it day by day, scene by scene. That’s probably the norm for how most people work on movies.

Q: What’s the new film about?

JC: The new film is about the culture of the Central Intelligence Agency and the culture of physical fitness in Washington DC and what happens when those two worlds collide. It’s also about Internet dating.

Q: That sounds funnier than No Country for Old Men?

JC: I don’t know. I guess that depends on how funny you find No Country for Old Men or you find this movie. It’s kind of a…

EC: Somebody might say it’s a comedy where as nobody would say that about this.

JC: We just finished shooting it.

Q: Are you already thinking about another project?

JC: We are doing another project in April, in Minnesota. It’s called A Serious Man. It’s a movie about a Jewish community in the Midwest in 1967, a family basically.

Q: Are there benefits to working with your brother?

JC: I haven’t detected any benefit yet. I don’t think it was intentional.

EC: We didn’t do it on purpose.

JC: We didn’t really. It just sort of, shit happens, and then you look back and you go, oh. That’s how it worked out.

Q: Working with Clooney for the third time? And Brad Pitt?

JC: George loves to play idiots for us.

EC: The day we wrapped, just a few days ago. We called wrap on George’s last shot, and he said – All right, that’s it. I’ve played my last idiot. So we told him it was sad that he wouldn’t be working with us anymore.

JC: We always have a really good time with him and we had a great time with Brad too. It was very interesting. They are both very, very funny in the movie, I think.

Q: Is Brad also an idiot in the movie?

JC: I think that’s pretty safe to say, yeah. It’s a dueling idiots movie.

Q: What about co-directors if you get nominated?

JC: We’ve taken co-directing credit on the last, like, three movies. I don’t think it was ever an issue with (the Academy and the DGA). Although the DGA is a different question. We weren’t in the DGA for many years. But we are now.

Q: Do you listen to reviews? This one should get good reviews.

EC: It depends on the movie. It makes it easier to a degree that varies from movie to movie. A little movie needs good reviews more than…well we don’t do many big movies. Yes, yeah, it helps.

JC: Big stars in movies are, it’s all about business. You are certainly concerned about them because they can affect the business of the movie. And the business of the movie is part of what determines what your options are in the future.

Q: Do you guys appreciate that the Big Lebowski’s stature has grown since it came out?

JC: I’m not sure that it’s stature has grown so much as its popularity amongst a certain group of people. But that’s been interesting to say the least. It’s bizarre.

Q: Do you do test screenings or friends?

EC: More friends because there are certain things you want to know when you are cutting a movie or when you think you’ve finished cutting a movie or when you hope you’ve finished cutting a movie and you want to make sure certain things work in terms of clarity more than anything else because those are the really specific questions that educated sympathetic friends can give you an answer to that you’ll trust. Does X work or are X or Y clear? So that’s kind of useful for us.

Q: Are these friends other filmmakers?

JC: Sometimes.

Q: Does the studio make you do test screenings?

JC: They do test screenings at the studio frequently for their own marketing purposes, but not, on our movies anyway, for essentially cutting or content purposes.

Q: Do you offer to cut your own trailers?

EC: There was one or maybe a couple, Intolerable Cruelty they did do a recruited audience screening or two. And then did talk about changes. It wasn’t coercive. We’ve always had the right to final cut, but they are paying for the movie. And that kind of movie, a flat-out comedy, it was actually kind of interesting. We actually did a couple of things and actually did some minimal additional shooting. It was interesting. I don’t know that it helped any. It didn’t hurt any either. It was interesting.

Q: How did you shoot the air gun?

JC: That’s from the novel, the cattle gun, the air gun. There was a considerable amount of research done on those particular machines or whatever you call them. And then we built one that was sort of modified just to work for the cameras essentially.

Q: So were they real?

JC: It was made by the special effects department based on real cattle guns. Javier was using it, but you wouldn't describe it as lethal.