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“It was 12 years of slamming our head up against the wall, trying to be the Coen Brothers, trying to be somebody else. You joke but that was the key. We were being derivative back then. We were looking at movies we wanted to make and we were thinking, “Oh, let’s try and make that but the thing is, we are not the Coen Brothers and we don’t make movies like them cause they’re really good at it and we are not…” It took us finding out what we uniquely had to offer and it was only when we exploited that little private conversation of ours… that we were like, “I think this might be what we’re good at. These are our stories and this is our sensibility and we have literally, to this day, not wavered…”
— Jay and Mark Duplass in an interview with Jeff Goldsmith for Creative Screenwriting Magazine