These two A-list actresses have a lot in common: They were trained in the theater, they refuse to live anywhere but New York, and, this year, they’re both Oscar hopefuls (McDormand for ‘Almost Famous’ and/or ‘Wonder Boys,’ and Allen for ‘The Contender’). No wonder they’re friends. Recently, they sat down in McDormand’s Manhattan apartment for one of their informal chats and allowed PREMIERE to be a fly on the wall.

McDormand: I feel like we’ve been having a conversation for years.

Allen: Yeah, it really feels that way. I remember seeing you at a critics’ luncheon—I think when you won for Fargo, and I was there for The Crucible or something—and seeing you in the lobby of that hotel. I remember grabbing onto your arm, and then we talked and talked.

McDormand: Definitely—

Allen: Well, for a few minutes at least, before people were, like, dragging us away and you were saying, “No, we’re talking here!”

McDormand: That was the first time someone had approached me to do an interview for an Internet thing.

Allen: I remember that.

McDormand: And I was so freaked out. I was like, “Joan, they’re taking over the world! I’m terrified of this!”

Allen: Have you done a lot of them?

McDormand: I’ll be on one of those junkets where every five minutes someone’s coming in the room, and you get all the standard people you’ve seen forever and ever who have, like, chat shows around the country, right? And then a 25-year-old geeky person with really interesting questions comes in, and I’ll say, “Where are you from?” “Oh, blah-blah dot-com.” And I’m, like, “Oh, I’ve misjudged you people.” (Laughs)

Allen: It’s very odd to do those interviews where you’re actually talking into the camera.

McDormand: It’s interesting, because I really loved that scene in The Contender where your character does that. The way that the camera was behind your advisers and how they started picking up on it a little before you did and the whole earwig thing. It’s like this great acting thing you had to do—

Allen: The scene wasn’t planned that way. It was budgetary. We wanted Ted Koppel to be interviewing me. But we didn’t have the money! (Laughs) And so they came up with that instead.

McDormand: See? That’s always the better way. If money pinches you, then you come up with something else. Sometimes, I think there are too many people on a movie set being paid to make this a comfortable situation. And there’s too much money being put into having time to make decisions, when in fact—and I think it’s just the way I was trained because of Joel and Ethan [Coen, her filmmaker husband and his brother, respectively]—it seems like it’s better to just fly by the seat of your pants. Because that’s when you really start collaborating.

Allen: Have they been able to maintain that over the years?

McDormand: Yeah. I think they’re more successful at it because they plan everything and they’ve collaborated with the same people for so long—the crew and actors. It was like that on Fargo and it felt that way when I worked with them this past summer [on the as-yet-untitled “Barber Project”]. That one’s going to be black and white, and nobody had done it before, so even though the crew had a lot of experience making movies, everybody was black-and-white–challenged. Everybody was walking around with these color charts, going, “That’s gonna be gray and that’s gonna be gray and that’s gonna be another shade of gray. . . .” It was weird.

Allen: That’s what they did on Pleasantville, too. I had to wear green makeup at one point—it was when my character had turned into color, and I’m flipping out, so Tobey Maguire puts the makeup on my face to turn me back into black and white. It was actually green because that’s what the computer could see. It was like an episode of Star Trek! I got a lot of unwelcome comments, you know, “What did you have for breakfast?” and things like that from the teamsters. And then somebody told me that in early television they wore sort of greenish makeup. Was your makeup sort of green?

McDormand: No, but the makeup artist used this little airbrush thing, which made me feel like a car getting detail work—

Allen: Like spray-painting your car!

McDormand: I felt like I was a little chassis out there. Oh, and like ten days before I started the job, I tripped down some stairs and cut my eye. So I had stitches and was black-and-blue when the job started. Joel was already in L.A., and I called him, and it was great. Like, half of him was the husband going, “Are you okay?” and the other half was the director going, “Shit!” But it was so bizarre because in the first scene we shot, the character is in prison, and it said in the script, “Looks like she’s been in a fight.”

Allen: Perfect. (Laughs) I want to ask you something: I have this fantasy about working not necessarily with a husband but with somebody who I’m very tight with regardless of the relationship, and that it’s just fabulous because you’re so relaxed with that person because he or she knows you so well.

McDormand: But you’ve done that in theater—