No Country For Old Men

[MacGuffin]

New Trailer here.

[pete]

Hey Friends,

You are invited--All you have to do is go to our website www.iffboston.org you can download and print passes for two free screenings at the Somerville Theater in Davis Square:

On Monday, Oct. 22 at 7:30pm, we will present a special advance screening of the Coen Bros. new film, NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN starring Javier Bardem and Josh Brolin.

And!!

On Tuesday, Oct. 23 at 7:30pm, we will present Sidney Lumet's upcoming film, BEFORE THE DEVIL KNOWS YOU'RE DEAD starring Phillip Seymour Hoffman.

All you have to do is go to our website's homepage, click on the film title. It will bring you to a description page for each of the of the films. At the bottom of the page you can click the link to print a pass for the show. Bring the pass with you to the Somerville Theater. We recommend arriving early because these events are FIRST COME, FIRST SERVE and subject to the size of the theater.

Best,
IFFBoston

[MacGuffin]

What Happened When a Very Private Writer ...
Source: Time Magazine

If you were going to play the parlor game of arranging the most interesting, improbable, imaginary conversation among American entertainers, you could do worse than the one that took place in midtown Manhattan earlier this month. The participants were the filmmakers Joel and Ethan Coen, known for smart, stylish and slightly silly movies like Fargo and O Brother, Where Art Thou?, and the novelist Cormac McCarthy, who won the National Book Award for All the Pretty Horses and the Pulitzer Prize for The Road. If it were a reality show it would be called Eccentric Genius Island.

McCarthy and the Coen brothers have just collaborated on a movie version of McCarthy's novel No Country for Old Men, a thriller about a serial killer and a busted drug deal. It's a searing, shocking movie that plays like a eulogy for the great American West. It also features the best scene ever filmed of a dog chasing a guy in a river.

McCarthy is famous for two things: his omnivorous curiosity and his extreme reclusiveness. In his 74 years, he's given a total of three interviews. But here he chats freely with the Coen brothers, who have a tendency to finish each other's sentences. Time's LEV GROSSMAN was invited to observe. The conversation took place in a fancy hotel room with stunning views of Central Park in early autumn. Nobody glanced out the window even once.

CORMAC MCCARTHY What would you guys like to do that's just too outrageous, and you don't think you'll ever get to do it?

JOEL COEN Well, I don't know about outrageous, but there was a movie we tried to make that was another adaptation. It was a novel that James Dickey wrote called To the White Sea, and it was about a tail gunner in a B-29 shot down over Tokyo.

C.M. That was the last thing he wrote.

J.C. Last thing he wrote. So this guy's in Tokyo during the firebombing, but the story isn't really about that. He walks from Honshu to Hokkaido, because he grew up in Alaska and he's trying to get to a cold climate, where he figures he can survive, and he speaks no Japanese, so after the first five or 10 minutes of the movie, there's no dialogue at all.

C.M. Yeah. That'd be tough.

J.C. It was interesting. We tried to make that, but no one was interested in financing this expensive movie about the firebombing of Tokyo in which there's no dialogue.

ETHAN COEN And it's a survival story, and the guy dies at the end.

C.M. Everybody dies. It's like Hamlet.

E.C. Brad Pitt wanted to do it, and he has this sort of remorse or regret about it. But he's too old now.

J.C. But you know, there's something about it--there were echoes of it in No Country for Old Men that were quite interesting for us, 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.

C.M. David Mamet has a collection of essays called Writing in Cafés, or something like that. He says that the ideal venue for a playwright is to write radio plays, because then you have nothing, just--this is what somebody said. That's it. You have nothing to fall back on. That's quite interesting. Plays are hard, and I suspect that a lot of people who write plays don't really know how it's going to play. I mean, how do you know? Like some years ago, my wife and I went to see Ralph Fiennes do Hamlet. And I'd seen movies of Hamlet, I'd seen kind of amateurish productions, and I'd read the play. But we walked out of that theater, and we stood there, and we went, "Holy s---." Now how did Will know that was going to happen? [Everybody laughs.] So my question is, At what point do you have some sense of whether a film is going to work or not, as you're working on it?

J.C. 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.

C.M. See, I don't see how you could feel that. I would think that when you see the damn frames go by for the 45th time, it just doesn't mean anything anymore. Obviously that can't be true, but ...

E.C. Well, you're problem-solving at that point. You're working on it. It's only painful when the movie's done.

C.M. So tell me about this horrible dog. Was Josh [Brolin, who plays Moss] just terrified of this animal? You pushed a button, and it leapt for your jugular?

J.C. It was a scary dog. It wasn't a movie dog.

C.M. It was basically trained to kill people.

J.C. It was basically trained to kill people.

E.C. The trainer had this little neon-orange toy that he would show to the dog, and the dog would start slavering and get unbelievably agitated and would do anything to get the toy. So the dog would be restrained, and Josh, before each take, would show the dog that he had the toy, he'd put it in his pants and jump into the river ...

J.C. ... without having any idea of how fast this dog could swim. So the dog was then coming after him ...

E.C. ... so Josh came out of the river sopping wet and pulled the thing out of his crotch and said--he was talking to himself--he said, "What do you do?" "Oh, I'm an actor." [Everybody laughs.]

C.M. There are a lot of good American movies, you know. I'm not that big a fan of exotic foreign films. I think Five Easy Pieces is just a really good movie.

J.C. It's fantastic.

C.M. Days of Heaven is an awfully good movie.

J.C. Yeah. Well, he is great, Terry Malick. Really interesting.

C.M. It's so strange; I never knew what happened to him. I saw Richard Gere in New Orleans one time, and I said, "What ever happened to Terry Malick?" And he said, "Everybody asks me that." He said, "I have no idea." But later on I met Terry. And he just--he just decided that he didn't want to live that life. Or so he told me. He just didn't want to live the life. It wasn't that he didn't like the films. It's just, if you could do it without living in Hollywood ...

J.C. One of the great American moviemakers.

C.M. But Miller's Crossing is in that category. I don't want to embarrass you, but that's just a very, very fine movie.

J.C. Eh, it's just a damn rip-off.

C.M. No, I didn't say it wasn't a rip-off. I understand it's a rip-off. I'm just saying it's good. [Everybody laughs.]

E.C. Do you ever get, in terms of novel writing, stuff that's too outrageous? One wouldn't guess that you reject stuff as being too outrageous.

C.M. I don't know, you're somewhat constrained in writing a novel, I think. Like, I'm not a fan of some of the Latin American writers, magical realism. You know, it's hard enough to get people to believe what you're telling them without making it impossible. It has to be vaguely plausible.

E.C. So it's not an impulse that you even have.

C.M. No, not really. Because I think that's misdirected. In films you can do outrageous stuff, because hey, you can't argue with it; there it is. But I don't know. There's lots of stuff that you would like to do, you know. As your future gets shorter, you have to ...

J.C. Prioritize?

C.M. Yeah. Somewhat. A friend of mine, who's slightly older than me, told me, "I don't even buy green bananas anymore." [He laughs.] I'm not quite there yet, but I understood what he was saying.

[JG]

is anyone else a bit perplexed by this?  like how did this come to be and how come its not a bigger deal (or is it?).. i had no idea until mac posted this!

i think its really great that this even happened but whats printed is way too abridged.  i want the complete transcript.

its cool he likes malick though. 

[modage]

huge fucking spoilers in that article! 

damnit.

[squints]

you should read the book 

[squints]

I got a ticket to see this Monday the 5th. I'm so fucking hyped!!

[w/o horse]

Seeing it Wednesday at the Aero.

[MacGuffin]

Coens Find New 'Country' to Roam

Joel and Ethan Coen have proved to be masters at mixing the horrific and humorous, the ominous and outrageous nowhere more so than in their latest film, the savage crime saga "No Country for Old Men."

The brothers take familiar Hollywood genres film noir ("The Man Who Wasn't There"), the gangster tale ("Miller's Crossing"), the true-crime thriller ("Fargo"), the screwball comedy ("O Brother, Where Art Thou?") and filter them into something uniquely their own.

Like that "Barton Fink feeling" a studio executive blathers on about in "Barton Fink," their tale of a playwright in Hollywood, there's a "Coen brothers feeling" that can defy definition, but you know it when you see it in their films.

"No Country for Old Men" co-star Josh Brolin calls it "Planet Coen."

"They find the absurdity of who we are in every situation. That's what they're fantastic at. Even in a movie as tense as this, they give you the ability to kind of chuckle and inhale and take a breath," said Brolin. "You never know what's going to happen around the next Coen brothers corner, whether it be fate or absurdity or a lack of humor where you're positive they're going to inject a joke."

Adapted by the Coens from Cormac McCarthy's novel, "No Country for Old Men" centers on three characters. There's a wily Texan (Brolin) who stumbles on a drug deal gone bloodily wrong in the desert and makes off with $2 million left behind among the corpses. There's a relentless, inhumanly brutish killer (Javier Bardem) tracking Brolin to recover the cash. And there's a valorous but wayworn sheriff (Tommy Lee Jones) pursuing both men. The film opens Friday.

At its core, the story seems a bit conventional for the filmmakers who made yodeling the musical backdrop for baby-snatching in "Raising Arizona" and turned a urine-stained carpet into a key plot catalyst for a crime comedy set among bowlers in "The Big Lebowski."

But the balance of black humor and brutish violence, the sense of an otherworldly America in the vast Texas panorama, and the abrupt turns McCarthy sneaks in late in the story set the novel squarely on Planet Coen.

"It immediately seemed like the kind of thing we could make a movie out of, largely by virtue of what kind of story it is, which for Cormac is a little anomalous compared to his other things," Ethan Coen, 50, told The Associated Press during an interview with his brother. "I don't know what to call it pulpier, more of a chase-action thing."

"On one level," continued Joel Coen, 52, "it's a very straightforward crime story, and on another level, it's not that at all. Without sort of giving away the ending, he does certain things in terms of the structure of the story, the way the story moves, and what happens sort of three-quarters of the way through, which are quite unexpected and unusual and probably unique in terms of what one would expect from this kind of story. There's nothing predictable about this."

There has been nothing predictable about the Coens' work since their 1984 debut with another violent Texas crime tale, "Blood Simple," starring Frances McDormand, Joel Coen's wife.

They seemed like pure fringe players with their early films, including "Raising Arizona," "Miller's Crossing" and "Barton Fink." The latter earned the top honor at the 1991 Cannes Film Festival, but it baffled many viewers, as did their next film, "The Hudsucker Proxy," the films helping to solidify the Coens as cult favorites well outside the mainstream.

Then came "Fargo," a surprise commercial success that grabbed seven Academy Award nominations, best picture and director among them, and won the best-actress Oscar for McDormand and the original-screenplay prize for the Coens.

"Fargo" spun the tragic farce of a real-life kidnapping in the Coens' home state of Minnesota, which seems like an alien landscape as the story plays out in a seamless mix of the grotesque and hilarious.

Likewise, "No Country for Old Men" twirls the audience through a whirlwind of bloodshed leavened with wicked laughs.

Strangely, it's Bardem, the film's most menacing figure, around whom much of the humor revolves as he brushes people and obstacles aside with stoic tenacity and a cache of outlandish weapons.

Bardem said he necessarily had to play such a ruthless character straight. The comedy came from the Coens.

"They made it happen by the way they put it together," Bardem said. "Thank God, I didn't know it, because then I didn't pretend to be funny. I had my job to do, which was to be dead serious and frightening. So when they put it together, they put it together with a reaction from another person listening to me. That makes it funny.

"That's why the Coens are the Coens. They know how to put it together to really release the tension and make you laugh out of fear, out of tension."

"They understand that even when the bleakest things happen in life, there's humor there," said Kelly Macdonald, who plays the wife of Brolin's character in "No Country for Old Men." "That's one of the biggest human traits. It's a coping mechanism or something."

The Coens deflect attempts to analyze their work or the combination of light and dark that goes into it.

"It's not like they're separate ingredients," Ethan Coen said. "There are some situations that you might react to by laughing or being horrified. Either way is fine with us, but again, they're not like two different ingredients that you measure and pour in. It's kind of the fact that you can react either way that's appealing."

"We're sometimes surprised when people laugh at certain places, although we're never bothered by it," Joel Coen said. "Every now and then, you get a laugh in really unexpected places."

His brother recalled one such scene that surprised the Coens in advance screenings since the film debuted at last spring's Cannes festival:

"Javier is in this motel room, and he unzips a bag and takes out a gun with this big honkin' silence on the end of it, and people laugh," Ethan Coen said. "You go, `OK, I didn't really expect that, but great.'"

"In that situation, it is quite funny. It's horrifying at the same time it's funny," Joel Coen said.

The Coens' next film leans more toward funny than horrifying, though Ethan Coen guaranteed that both qualities will be well-represented.

"Burn After Reading" is a comic adventure reuniting them with "O Brother" star George Clooney, who co-stars with McDormand, Brad Pitt, John Malkovich and Richard Jenkins.

True to that Coen feeling, the brothers describe it as a yarn set in motion by the collision of two diverse cultures: the CIA and the physical-fitness world.

That juxtaposition reminded them of the time they met former Texas Gov. Ann Richards and described the plot of the film they were then working on, "The Man Who Wasn't There," with Billy Bob Thornton.

"We said, `It's about a barber who wants to be a dry cleaner,'" Joel Coen said. "She looked at Ethan as well as me and said, `I'm trying to get excited about that.'"

[w/o horse]

No Country is distinctly Coen brothers.  The classical connotations of this term carry over, including the expected:  wonderful, human, interesting, clever, etc.  I'd like to see it back to back with Blood Simple, this film's cousin.  I was thinking during the film that the Coens were born filmmakers, that all of their films have been movies, that they're really very little like their NYC independent brothers, and that No Country makes sense of their previous dissapointments because you are reminded of how capable and talented they are and you begin to think of their nimbleness.  Because usually you say something like "The filmmakers sure have matured here, this is an excellent example of great talent coming into age" but it doesn't at all fit the Coens who were wine from the first film.

I really liked it.

I only now realized where I've seen Javier Bardem from.  The from being Live Flesh.   That's so funny.

[modage]

huge fucking spoilers in that article! 

damnit.

SPOILERSi skimmed that article and saw the "everybody dies in the end.  its like hamlet" bit thinking it was a no country spoiler.  i saw the film last night and kept waiting for EVERYONE to die, which of course, they don't because as i re-read that article, i see they were talking about To The White Sea.  this made the abrupt ending even more shocking. END SPOILERS

the short review is: its really good.  there are some incredibly thrilling/tense scenes.  i wouldn't put it near their best work, but its a really good paring down of everything that sucked about their recent films and will hopefully put them back on the right track.  now, Blood please.

[MacGuffin]

Interview: Joel and Ethan Coen
The cinematic siblings discuss their latest opus, No Country for Old Men.

It might be an overstatement to call Joel and Ethan Coen enigmatic filmmakers, but their body of work certainly suggests that they are some weird fellows. From Blood Simple to The Ladykillers, they have consistently demonstrated an intelligent but remarkably unusual sense of tone, whether it's a matter of H.I. McDonough's hair in Raising Arizona or the strange lingo that elevates O Brother Where Art Thou? from hick epic to epic poem. In their latest film, No Country for Old Men, they revisit some of these ideas, but do it in typically iconoclastic fashion, destroying the arm's length detachment of their previous work for a more soulful examination of the world's penchant for betraying mankind's best laid plans.

IGN recently spoke to the Coen brothers during a roundtable interview in Los Angeles to promote the film. Though predictably evasive about some of the machinations of their directorial process, Joel and Ethan explain what appealed to them about author Cormac McCarthy's novel, and describe the process of deconstructing and rebuilding the source material for their big-screen adaptation.


Q: This seems to be the least mannered of your films to date. Was that dictated by the source material or did you make a conscious attempt to...

Ethan Coen: Knock it off? [laughs]

Joel Coen: No, well we never make those kind of overall abstract decisions or calculations. It's an adaptation of a book, and we like the story so we try to serve the story. But you know, it's also what we do in movies that derive from our own stories; our attitude toward them is the same -- you kind of want to treat it how it feels to you it wants to be treated.

Q: Does that extend to the characters as well? Because in some of your other films, you have characters who are maybe a little buffoonish and in this film they all seem to get a fair shake.

Joel Coen: Again, it's kind of like the answer to the last question. Yes, there's no question that we've written some buffoonish characters. Their stories are about buffoons, but this was not a story about buffoons so they're not treated that way or portrayed that way. The concept of giving the characters a fair shake is one that I don't understand, at least in the abstract.

Q: What was it about Cormac McCarthy's book that you responded to? Do you see this as perhaps a distant cousin to Fargo?

Joel Coen: Honestly, we didn't think about it that way, although retrospectively at one point I sort of realized there are certain superficial resemblances to Fargo like the very specific regionalism of the story and the fact that they're both about sheriffs in small towns confronting crimes. But no, to be quite honest we were presented with the book and just took it on as an interesting book that we had [read] that had another sensibility that comes from somebody else's imagination, and it was our job to take that and adapt it into a movie.

Q: Did any of the material's potential political or social relevance resonate with you?

Joel Coen: We never thought about it in terms of topicality.

Q: Why then was the location or setting so important to you?

Joel Coen: Well, in every story that we do it's important, just in terms of how you think about story, that it be very specific from the point of view of a region or location. It's hard to imagine stories for us sort of divorced from that aspect. I don't know why -- it's something that we share with Cormac McCarthy and part of why we were drawn to this, is that sort of intense focus on the place informing the story. But beyond that, there were lots of reasons that we liked the book. The ideas in the book were also very interesting to us -- the characters, all of those things. It's a big soup; you go and you try to parse the soup, and it's a little artificial; it was just kind of the whole package that just kind of appealed to us.

Q: Can you talk about your fidelity to McCarthy's novel, since you make some unexpected choices when filming key scenes?

Ethan Coen: Well, it's unusual in that kind of book -- it's a surprise in the book... but you're right, even moreso in a movie. The convention is even more ingrained that the good guy is going to meet the bad guy and they're going to confront each other. We were aware of how unusual that is and we talked about it with Scott Rudin, the producer, [because] we didn't want to do the movie if we got the idea that he was asking us to do a Hollywood-ized version of the [story]. And he was very much not. He liked the book too, and he wanted to see the book made, as opposed to seeing it turned into something else. I mean, the story is very much about how unforgiving and capricious the world can be.

Joel Coen: 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, but 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.

Ethan Coen: Not just interesting, but satisfying, because in a way it's frustrating but it also has to be satisfying. And as Joel says, for some people it never could be, but...

Joel Coen: We didn't see it as being fundamentally as being so perverse dramatically that it couldn't work as Ethan was say in a satisfying way. That we didn't think.

Q: It seems like Tommy Lee Jones' character carries that satisfying portion of the story as he holds the movie together until the end.

Joel Coen: Right.

Q: Well, not to belabor the Fargo connection, but both Jones' character and Marge are in a line of work that puts them in contact with this evil that mystifies and saddens them.

Joel Coen: That's true.

Ethan Coen: Ehh, right. [laughs] Evil may not be the perfect right word, but yes, with the real, horrible world.

Joel Coen: What they share explicitly is a certain amount of bafflement, being baffled by what it is, by the world and how it manifests itself that way.

Ethan Coen: In the case of that character in Fargo, in kind of a naive way, and in the case of Cormac's character, sort of a more sophisticated way.

Q: Talk a little about how you cast Javier Bardem as Anton Chigurh.

Joel Coen: Javier is someone that we always wanted to work with, but there's lots of actors we've wanted to work with, and it's all about finding the right marriage of that person you want to work with in a part that's going to be right for them. One of the things that was interesting about this character is that he is described so little in the book, but one of the things that you do get in the book is the sense that he's the one character that's not sort of "of the region" -- that there's something exotic or maybe foreign about him. That gave us a certain amount of license to think outside of American actors, and another thing that we needed which was extremely charismatic screen presence that we knew was necessary for that part. That's how it happened: We didn't know what Javier was going to do with the part, but we were utterly convinced that whatever he did, it wouldn't be what we were most afraid of, which is to make the character into a cliche of the sort of implacable, terminator killer. We felt having satisfied that fear, having allayed that fear in our minds, we were perfectly confident with him and we just thought it's going to be very interesting, whatever he does.

Q: Speaking of Chigurh, if he's not evil then what is he?

Ethan Coen: Quite clearly in the book, he's a personification of the world, which is an unforgiving and capricious [place]; the embodiment of that is the whole coin-tossing thing that gives the character place, and it doesn't have to do with good and evil. The book is also about trackers, it's about predation, which is a horrible thing in a way. But, you know, it doesn't have to do with good and evil.

Q: What about Kelly MacDonald? She's an unexpected choice to play a Texas wife.

Joel Coen: Yeah, it doesn't work on paper [laughs]. It's true. On paper we weren't even anxious to see her because we figured why would we see this actress with this thick Glaswegian accent for a gal from west Texas? But she came in and did this very convincing accent, just completely off the cuff, really, and so that went well.

Q: How would you describe the balance of humor in this? Because there seems to be an undercurrent of humor, but there wasn't much chuckling happening in the theater during the screening.

Ethan Coen: We weren't trying at all, although here's the best way of putting it: I think there's a lot of humor in Cormac's work and this book specifically, and we were alive to that and we tried to be faithful to Cormac's spirit. I think if you're alive to it, it's there.

Joel Coen: But on the other hand, 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, you know, in terms of what the movie is -- a chase movie or suspense movie or whatever it happens to be -- that's fine. And 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 as Ethan was saying that we both thought that in the book there was a real sense of humor there as well, and as he said, that was part of the sensibility from our point of view that informed the movie.

Q: How does that mean you shape or direct the tone of the material on set? Tommy Lee Jones, for example, said that the way to play the character was to read the lines; how do you make sure that you're getting what you need or want artistically?

Joel Coen: Just again it comes down to a scene and story thing. Even when we're doing something which we're very conscious is a comedy, we're not asking the actors to sort of acknowledge the comedy in their performances. It's kind of the same thing here. It's like yes, there may be humor in this, but when it comes to sort of what you're looking for in a performance, you wouldn't want to be directing the actor towards a self-conscious awareness of that in a performance.

Q: So then are you just sort of dealing practically with what's going on in a scene, or do you discuss at any level what the film or even just the scene is about?

Joel Coen: Well, yeah. It depends on the actor, I suppose. They're all different, in terms of what they want to talk about or whether they want to talk about it at all. It just runs the whole gamut.

Ethan Coen: Yeah, we do what the actor wants to do, and it does vary. We don't have a position on that. In terms of discussing it in the abstract, discussing very specific things which some actors like to do as a way of getting at maybe deeper things, but you know -- everybody's got their own [process].

Joel Coen: There's so many different ways that actors arrive at a performance and it's just so idiosyncratic. Some do tons of research, some don't look at the script until the night before they're shooting the scene; [some get] everything down by heart weeks in advance, and other people are looking at the sides right before you start shooting the scene. Some people do lots of research, some people want to have very sort of subtextual discussions about motivation, and some wouldn't go near that.

Q: So how do George Clooney and Brad Pitt work, given that you just worked with them on Burn After Reading?

Joel Coen: Where would they fit in that spectrum?

Ethan Coen: George is interesting because on the last two movies we've done with him, our whole discussion of the character took place about five minutes before we started shooting [laughs].

Joel Coen: Brad is kind of the same, although Brad struggled a little bit more in terms of trying to find the right [approach]. But George had worked with us before -- this was the third movie we'd done with George -- so sometimes it's a little different in that respect too, and I think Brad was trying to find a place where he was going to both understand the character and find a place where he was going to pitch it that was going to be appropriate in terms of what everyone else was doing.

Ethan Coen: Sometimes this happens a lot with actors, they kind of don't know where to jump off from, like where do you start. Geographically where is he from, or ethnically, or could he be this or that? You kind of talk about those things, and you never arrive at any conclusion and you feel vaguely dissatisfied, but then everything's fine -- it takes care of itself.

Joel Coen: And they all start from different places. There are actors who if they get the right haircut, they'll know exactly what to do. There are actors who in the costume fitting start to understand the character, because they may get directorial signals just in terms of what you've chosen to show them, or your conception of how the character dresses that they didn't understand from the script. I mean, there are actors that can set up very externally like that and come to a really interesting understanding of their characters that helps them do the part that way, and others who that means nothing at all.

Ethan Coen: Actually with Brad, I think the character all came from a botched dye job that he had on his hair for a commercial, and we all looked at it, us and Brad, and thought, "Oh, OK. That's the guy."

Q: After doing something serious like this is it natural to move to a comedy?

Joel Coen: That happened really because of availability of all of these actors at this time. That had more to do with that in relation to the other movies than anything else.

Q: Have you ever thought of making a movie without one another?

Joel Coen: We think about it all of the time [laughs].

Q: Do you know what you're doing after this?

Joel Coen: Yeah [laughs].

[SiliasRuby]

Extremely well done. The tone reminded me alot of Miller's Crossing and Blood Simple. You could feel the texas atmosphere. I could tell that the audience I was with wanted it to be a bit more funnier in the vein of raising arizona and The Big Lebowski, because there were bouts of forced laughter in the theatre where it wasn't really that particularly humorous. Some of the violence and how it was shown reminded me of Cronenburg's films. The scene with the dog is one of the most invigorating scenes I've seen in a film in a long time. The ending was a bit abrubt but the more I think about it, the more I think that it fit the movie 

[pete]

vague spoilers
I didn't feel cheated at all, far from it in fact.  I kinda knew what was going to happen when he was in the car.  it was a movie that delivered, nonetheless.  I don't think there was any music in the film at all, though I may be wrong.  that was pretty cool.  the violence was great.  I'm glad that after a year's worth of worthless violence a la 300 and Eli Roth films, I saw three films with very good use of violence in a week (the other two being There Will Be Blood, American Gangster).
but anyways, the Coen Bros have come close to featuring a few soulful characters, though most of the time they're only peripheral characters.  as ruthless as this movie was, it was a big step forward for them to embrace soulfulness.  I also do really enjoy seeing films by directors I love after their long pauses.  This year I saw Death Proof, Darjeeling, There Will Be Blood, and this one.  It feels good, the wait reminds you how much you loved them in the first place, and your favorite things about them.  Like watching this film, I could really go, aw, thems was some great dialogue (though they probably came from the book).

[picolas]

spoils

i had forgotten how much the coens could terrify me.
- there was a moment where, without thinking, i craned my neck to look somewhere and the camera dolly'd in that exact direction. i was in this movie's grip.
- there are so many brilliant moments that have a clear coen ancestry. for example the motel scene (with the tracker and the shadow in the door) is a direct descendant of the barton fink scene where he disturbs the next door neighbor and the camera follows a man through a wall as though it can see him. they should've used the line "it's a true story in the sense that it's true it's a story" when fargo was happening. or not. it reminded me of it, though. it's a good thing to say.
- there are so many great cuts. "it's unusual" actually made me go 'that's damn good editing.' in my head. i was the agent cooper of observing editing for a second.
- javier bardum has given one of the best psychopathic performances EVER. every. single. syllable. was terrifying. every moment he's on screen is so damn WATCHABLE. i want him to win everything. or at least, he'll do 'till the blood gets here.
- i love how quiet the whole movie is. every little sound means something. any ambience is silence.
- i love the feeling (that seeps through the earlier parts of the movie especially) that all these characters are experts in their fields.. or amazing at what they do. murder, escape, tracking down people, standing by their man, etc. it's a game being played by masters.
- it lost me near the end. but i'm sure it will make sense eventually. i understand the frighteningness of this movie is only the first/most obvious layer.
- walking outside afterwards everything was lit like that scene lewellyn runs from javier and i was worried. then an hour later i found myself staring into a doorknob.
- i imdb'd lewellyn's wife because i knew i'd seen her somewhere before. girl in the cafe. holy crap. everyone in this needs a nomination at the very least.