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Joel Coen on No Country for Old Men
By Fred Topel | Image property of Miramax.
No Country for Old Men
Joel Coen Adapts No Country for Old Men
"We didn’t actually pick it," explained Joel Coen. "It was sent to us by Scott Rudin who had acquired the rights to it. He sent it to us in galleys about a year before it came out. He asked us if we were interested in doing it and we read it and both, we’d read other Cormac McCarthy books just for pleasure and liked him a lot, but this one we thought was, could make a really interesting movie."
Set in 1980, the period was part of the attraction for the Coens. "I think if the novel had been more conventional in that respect, I think we wouldn’t have been much interested in making it into a movie. That was one of the things about the novel, from a storytelling point of view, that was interesting to us. But from the point of view of it being a full appropriate and satisfying expression of what the author was trying to say what we thought the book was about, and therefore there would be no reason to change that from our point of view either in terms of making it into a movie. We didn’t feel that it was in conflict with some larger sort of dramatic idea that couldn’t be satisfied for an audience. Although whenever you’re doing things you’re aware, as we’re sure Cormac McCarthy is aware when he writes a novel, that he might not be writing it for everybody. We’re aware when we make a movie that we might not be making the movie for everybody, but we’re convinced that we’re making it for enough people who sort of will see it as an interesting thing that we don’t worry about it. We didn’t see it as being fundamentally as being so perverse dramatically that it couldn’t work in a satisfying way. That we didn’t think."
With most of the film chronicling a killer's pursuit of the hunter who stole money from a crime scene, the film shifts in the third act, just like the book. "This is true of the novel and one of the things that was interesting to us about the novel as well, it does undergo a shift three quarters of the way through. The reason for that and what the engenders or what that means and how that works as a story and all the rest of it was part of what was so interesting about the novel."
Some my find the film darkly comical, in the macabre situations and characters' reactions to them. The Coens resist defining it as such. "It’s one of those things where we don’t really have any feelings positive or negative about how anyone takes the movie, in terms of that. If people choose to see the movie completely clenched, a chase movie or suspense movie or whatever it happens to be, that’s fine. In fact from our point of view it means that a certain aspect of the movie is working well. And people also choose to laugh. For instance, people often laugh in places we don’t expect it, or never expected, and that doesn’t bother us either. So it’s not in any way bothersome to us if somebody takes it either more comically or not comically at all. The only thing that we both thought that in the book there was a real sense of humor there as well, and that was part of the sensibility from our point of view that informed the movie."
No Country for Old Men is now playing in limited release.
For trailers, review and more movie info, go to the No Country for Old Men Movie Page.
Fred Topel
Sources: Image property of Miramax.
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