The point at which we worked with some of these actors, they weren't really stars yet. Nicolas Cage was not a big star when we did Raising Arizona. A lot of these people were also virtually unknown, too, when we worked with them first.
And when you see it the first time you put the film together, the roughest cut, is when you want to go home and open up your veins and get in a warm tub and just go away. And then it gradually, maybe, works its way back, somewhere toward that spot you were at before.
The architecture of a story can be a little bit different if it's a true story.
I guess there's a certain amount of poking fun at certain characters, but that's because there is something amusing about them or about the way they behave, so I guess you can say that that's poking fun at the character. But the character is your own invention, so who cares?
These things are hard to pin down. We work on a script a bit, then work on a different one.
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.
