Producer Scott Rudin bought the film rights to McCarthy's novel and suggested an adaptation to the Coen brothers, who at the time were attempting to adapt the novel To the White Sea by James Dickey.[23] By August 2005, the Coens agreed to write and direct the film, having identified with how it provided a sense of place and also how it played with genre conventions. Joel Coen said that the book's unconventional approach "was familiar, congenial to us; we're naturally attracted to subverting genre. We liked the fact that the bad guys never really meet the good guys, that McCarthy did not follow through on formula expectations."[23][24] Ethan Coen explained that the "pitiless quality" was a "hallmark of the book, which has an unforgiving landscape and characters but is also about finding some kind of beauty without being sentimental." The adaptation was the second of McCarthy's work, following All the Pretty Horses in 2000.[25]
Writing
The Coens' script was mostly faithful to the source material. On their writing process, Ethan said, "One of us types into the computer while the other holds the spine of the book open flat."[20] Still, they pruned where necessary.[23] A teenage runaway who appeared late in the book and some backstory related to Bell were both removed.[26] Also changed from the original was Carla Jean Moss's reaction when finally faced with the imposing figure of Chigurh. As explained by Kelly Macdonald, "the ending of the book is different. She reacts more in the way I react. She kind of falls apart. In the film she's been through so much and she can't lose any more. It's just she's got this quiet acceptance of it."[27] In the book, there is also some attention paid to the daughter, Deborah, whom the Bells lost and who haunts the protagonist in his thoughts.
Richard Corliss of Time stated that "the Coen brothers have adapted literary works before. Miller's Crossing was a sly, unacknowledged blend of two Dashiell Hammett tales, Red Harvest and The Glass Key; and O Brother Where Art Thou? transferred the Odyssey to the American south in the 1930s. But No Country for Old Men is their first film taken, pretty straightforwardly, from a prime American novel."[28]
The writing is also notable for its minimal use of dialogue. Josh Brolin discussed his initial nervousness with having so little dialogue to work with:
I mean it was a fear, for sure, because dialogue, that's what you kind of rest upon as an actor, you know? ... Drama and all the stuff is all dialogue motivated. You have to figure out different ways to convey ideas. You don't want to overcompensate because the fear is that you're going to be boring if nothing's going on. You start doing this and this and taking off your hat and putting it on again or some bullshit that doesn't need to be there. So yeah, I was a little afraid of that in the beginning.[29]
Peter Travers of Rolling Stone praised the novel adaptation. "Not since Robert Altman merged with the short stories of Raymond Carver in Short Cuts have filmmakers and author fused with such devastating impact as the Coens and McCarthy. Good and evil are tackled with a rigorous fix on the complexity involved."[21]
Director Joel Coen articulated his interest in the McCarthy novel. "There's something about it – there were echoes of it in No Country for Old Men that were quite interesting for us", he said, "because it was the idea of the physical work that somebody does that helps reveal who they are and is part of the fiber of the story. Because you only saw this person in this movie making things and doing things in order to survive and to make this journey, and the fact that you were thrown back on that, as opposed to any dialogue, was interesting to us."[30]
Coen stated that this is the brothers' "first adaptation". He further explained why they chose the novel: "Why not start with Cormac? Why not start with the best?" He further described this McCarthy book in particular as "unlike his other novels ... it is much pulpier." Coen stated that they have not changed much in the adaptation. "It really is just compression," he said. "We didn't create new situations." He further assured that he and his brother Ethan had never met McCarthy when they were writing the script, but first met him during the shooting of the film. He believed that the author liked the film, while his brother Ethan said, "he didn't yell at us. We were actually sitting in a movie theater/screening room with him when he saw it ... and I heard him chuckle a couple of times, so I took that as a seal of approval, I don't know, maybe presumptuously."[31]
Title
The title is taken from the opening line of the 20th-century Irish poet William Butler Yeats' poem "Sailing to Byzantium":[32]
That is no country for old men. The young In one another's arms, birds in the trees – Those dying generations – at their song, The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas, Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long Whatever is begotten, born, and dies. Caught in that sensual music all neglect Monuments of unageing intellect.
Richard Gillmore relates the Yeats poem to the Coens' film, saying:
The lament that can be heard in these lines is for no longer belonging to the country of the young. It is also a lament for the way the young neglect the wisdom of the past and, presumably, of the old ... Yeats chooses Byzantium because it was a great early Christian city in which Plato's Academy, for a time, was still allowed to function. The historical period of Byzantium was a time of culmination that was also a time of transition. In his book of mystical writings, A Vision, Yeats says, "I think that in early Byzantium, maybe never before or since in recorded history, religious, aesthetic, and practical life were one, that architect and artificers ... spoke to the multitude and the few alike." The idea of a balance and a coherence in a society's religious, aesthetic, and practical life is Yeats's ideal ... It is an ideal rarely realized in this world and maybe not even in ancient Byzantium. Certainly within the context of the movie No Country for Old Men, one has the sense, especially from Bell as the chronicler of the times, that things are out of alignment, that balance and harmony are gone from the land and from the people.[33]
Differences from the novel
Craig Kennedy adds that "one key difference is that of focus. The novel belongs to Sheriff Bell. Each chapter begins with Bell's narration, which dovetails and counterpoints the action of the main story. Though the film opens with Bell speaking, much of what he says in the book is condensed and it turns up in other forms. Also, Bell has an entire backstory in the book that doesn't make it into the film. The result is a movie that is more simplified thematically, but one that gives more of the characters an opportunity to shine."[34]
Jay Ellis elaborates on Chigurh's encounter with the man behind the counter at the gas station. "Where McCarthy gives us Chigurh's question as, 'What's the most you ever saw lost on a coin toss?', he says, 'the film elides the word 'saw', but the Coens of course tend to the visual. Where the book describes the setting as 'almost dark', the film clearly depicts high noon: no shadows are notable in the establishing shot of the gas station, and the sunlight is bright even if behind cloud cover. The light through two windows and a door comes evenly through three walls in the interior shots. But this difference increases our sense of the man's desperation later, when he claims he needs to close and he closes at 'near dark'; it is darker, as it were, in the cave of this man's ignorance than it is outside in the bright light of truth."[35]
Filming
The project was a co-production between Miramax Films and Paramount's classics-based division in a 50/50 partnership, and production was scheduled for May 2006 in New Mexico and Texas. With a total budget of $25 million (at least half spent in New Mexico[36]), production was slated for the New Mexico cities of Santa Fe, Albuquerque, and Las Vegas (which doubled as the border towns of Eagle Pass and Del Rio, Texas), with other scenes shot around the West Texas towns of Sanderson and Marfa.[37]
Coincidentally, Paul Thomas Anderson’s film There Will Be Blood - which competed with No Country For Old Men at the Academy Awards - was being shot in Marfa simultaneously.[38] The Coen brothers were actually forced to scrap an entire day of filming for No Country For Old Men when preparations for the oil derrick scene in There Will Be Blood nearby produced enough smoke to ruin all potential scenes.[39]
The U.S.-Mexico border crossing bridge was actually a freeway overpass in Las Vegas, with a border checkpoint set built at the intersection of Interstate 25 and New Mexico State Road 65.[40] The Mexican town square was filmed in Piedras Negras, Coahuila.[37]
In advance of shooting, cinematographer Roger Deakins saw that "the big challenge" of his ninth collaboration with the Coen brothers was "making it very realistic, to match the story ... I'm imagining doing it very edgy and dark, and quite sparse. Not so stylized."[41]
"Everything's storyboarded before we start shooting," Deakins said in Entertainment Weekly. "In No Country, there's maybe only a dozen shots that are not in the final film. It's that order of planning. And we only shot 250,000 feet, whereas most productions of that size might shoot 700,000 or a million feet of film. It's quite precise, the way they approach everything. ... We never use a zoom," he said. "I don't even carry a zoom lens with me, unless it's for something very specific." The famous coin-tossing scene between Chigurh and the old gas station clerk is a good example; the camera tracks in so slowly that the audience isn't even aware of the move. "When the camera itself moves forward, the audience is moving, too. You're actually getting closer to somebody or something. It has, to me, a much more powerful effect, because it's a three-dimensional move. A zoom is more like a focusing of attention. You're just standing in the same place and concentrating on one smaller element in the frame. Emotionally, that's a very different effect."[42]
In a later interview, he mentioned the "awkward dilemma [that] No Country certainly contains scenes of some very realistically staged fictional violence, but ... without this violent depiction of evil there would not be the emotional 'pay off' at the end of the film when Ed Tom bemoans the fact that God has not entered his life."[43]
Directing
In an interview with The Guardian, Ethan said, "Hard men in the south-west shooting each other – that's definitely Sam Peckinpah's thing. We were aware of those similarities, certainly."[20] They discuss choreographing and directing the film's violent scenes in the Sydney Morning Herald: "'That stuff is such fun to do', the brothers chime in at the mention of their penchant for blood-letting. 'Even Javier would come in by the end of the movie, rub his hands together and say, 'OK, who am I killing today?' adds Joel. 'It's fun to figure out', says Ethan. 'It's fun working out how to choreograph it, how to shoot it, how to engage audiences watching it.'"[44]
Director Joel Coen described the process of film making: "I can almost set my watch by how I'm going to feel at different stages of the process. It's always identical, whether the movie ends up working or not. I think when you watch the dailies, the film that you shoot every day, you're very excited by it and very optimistic about how it's going to work. 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."[30]
David Denby of The New Yorker criticized the way the Coens "disposed of" Llewelyn Moss. "The Coens, however faithful to the book", he said, "cannot be forgiven for disposing of Llewelyn so casually. After watching this foolhardy but physically gifted and decent guy escape so many traps, we have a great deal invested in him emotionally, and yet he's eliminated, off-camera, by some unknown Mexicans. He doesn't get the dignity of a death scene. The Coens have suppressed their natural jauntiness. They have become orderly, disciplined masters of chaos, but one still has the feeling that, out there on the road from nowhere to nowhere, they are rooting for it rather than against it."[45]
Josh Brolin discussed the Coens' directing style in an interview, saying that the brothers "only really say what needs to be said. They don't sit there as directors and manipulate you and go into page after page to try to get you to a certain place. They may come in and say one word or two words, so that was nice to be around in order to feed the other thing. 'What should I do right now? I'll just watch Ethan go humming to himself and pacing. Maybe that's what I should do, too.'"[29]
In an interview with Logan Hill of New York magazine, Brolin said, "We had a load of fun making it. Maybe it was because we both [Brolin and Javier Bardem] thought we'd be fired. With the Coens, there's zero compliments, really zero anything. No 'nice work.' Nothing. And then—I'm doing this scene with Woody Harrelson. Woody can't remember his lines, he stumbles his way through it, and then both Coens are like, 'Oh my God! Fantastic!'"[46]
David Gritten of The Daily Telegraph wonders: "Are the Coens finally growing up?" He adds: "If [the film] feels pessimistic, Joel insists that's not the Coens' responsibility: 'I don't think the movie is more or less so than the novel. We tried to give it the same feeling.' The brothers do concede, however, that it's a dark piece of storytelling. 'It's refreshing for us to do different kinds of things,' says Ethan, 'and we'd just done a couple of comedies.'"[47]
Musical score and sound
The Coens minimized the score used in the film, leaving large sections devoid of music. The concept was Ethan's, who persuaded a skeptical Joel to go with the idea. There is some music in the movie, scored by the Coens' longtime composer, Carter Burwell, but after finding that "most musical instruments didn't fit with the minimalist sound sculpture he had in mind ... he used singing bowls, standing metal bells traditionally employed in Buddhist meditation practice that produce a sustained tone when rubbed." The movie contains a "mere" 16 minutes of music, with several of those in the end credits. The music in the trailer was called "Diabolic Clockwork" by Two Steps from Hell. Sound editing and effects were provided by another longtime Coens collaborator, Skip Lievsay, who used a mixture of emphatic sounds (gun shots) and ambient noise (engine noise, prairie winds) in the mix. The foley for the captive bolt pistol used by Chigurh was created using a pneumatic nail gun.[48]
Anthony Lane of The New Yorker states that "there is barely any music, sensual or otherwise, and Carter Burwell's score is little more than a fitful murmur",[49] and Douglas McFarland states that "perhaps [the film's] salient formal characteristic is the absence, with one telling exception, of a musical soundtrack, creating a mood conducive to thoughtful and unornamented speculation in what is otherwise a fierce and destructive landscape."[50] Jay Ellis, however, disagrees. "[McFarland] missed the extremely quiet but audible fade in a few tones from a keyboard beginning when Chigurh flips the coin for the gas station man", he said. "This ambient music (by long-time Coens collaborator Carter Burwell) grows imperceptibly in volume so that it is easily missed as an element of the mis-en-scene. But it is there, telling our unconscious that something different is occurring with the toss; this becomes certain when it ends as Chigurh uncovers the coin on the counter. The deepest danger has passed as soon as Chigurh finds (and Javier Bardem's acting confirms this) and reveals to the man that he has won."[51] In order to achieve such a sound effect, Burwell "tuned the music's swelling hum to the 60-hertz frequency of a refrigerator."[48]
Dennis Lim of The New York Times stressed that "there is virtually no music on the soundtrack of this tense, methodical thriller. Long passages are entirely wordless. In some of the most gripping sequences what you hear mostly is a suffocating silence." Skip Lievsay, the film's sound editor called this approach "quite a remarkable experiment," and added that "suspense thrillers in Hollywood are traditionally done almost entirely with music. The idea here was to remove the safety net that lets the audience feel like they know what's going to happen. I think it makes the movie much more suspenseful. You're not guided by the score and so you lose that comfort zone."[48]
James Roman observes the effect of sound in the scene where Chigurh pulls in for gas at the Texaco rest stop. "[The] scene evokes an eerie portrayal of innocence confronting evil," he says, "with the subtle images richly nuanced by sound. As the scene opens in a long shot, the screen is filled with the remote location of the rest stop with the sound of the Texaco sign mildly squeaking in a light breeze. The sound and image of a crinkled cashew wrapper tossed on the counter adds to the tension as the paper twists and turns. The intimacy and potential horror that it suggests is never elevated to a level of kitschy drama as the tension rises from the mere sense of quiet and doom that prevails."[52]
Jeffrey Overstreet adds that "the scenes in which Chigurh stalks Moss are as suspenseful as anything the Coens have ever staged. And that has as much to do with what we hear as what we see. No Country for Old Men lacks a traditional soundtrack, but don't say it doesn't have music. The blip-blip-blip of a transponder becomes as frightening as the famous theme from Jaws. The sound of footsteps on the hardwood floors of a hotel hallway are as ominous as the drums of war. When the leather of a briefcase squeaks against the metal of a ventilation shaft, you'll cringe, and the distant echo of a telephone ringing in a hotel lobby will jangle your nerves."[53]
