In 1989, film-makers Joel and Ethan Coen began writing the script for a film eventually released as "Miller's Crossing". The many threads of the story became complicated, and after four months they found themselves lost in the process. Although biographers and critics later referred to it as writer's block, the Coen brothers rejected this description. "It's not really the case that we were suffering from writer's block," Joel said in a 1991 interview, "but our working speed had slowed, and we were eager to get a certain distance from "Miller's Crossing"." They went from Los Angeles to New York and began work on a different project.