No Country for Old Men
The film premiered in competition at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival on May 19. Among its four 2007 Academy Awards were Oscars for Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Adapted Screenplay, allowing the Coen brothers to join five previous directors honored three times for a single film. In addition, the film won three British Academy Film Awards (BAFTA) including Best Director, and two Golden Globes. The American Film Institute listed it as an AFI Movie of the Year, and the National Board of Review selected the film as the best of 2007.
No Country for Old Men appeared on more critics' top ten lists (354) than any other film of 2007, and was regarded by many critics as the Coen brothers' finest film to date. Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times called it "as good a film as the Coen brothers...have ever made," The Guardian journalist John Patterson said "that the Coens' technical abilities, and their feel for a landscape-based Western classicism reminiscent of Anthony Mann and Sam Peckinpah, are matched by few living directors," and Peter Travers of Rolling Stone said that it is "a new career peak for the Coen brothers" and is "as entertaining as hell."
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), 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 Marfa and Sanderson in West Texas. 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 Highway 65. The Mexican town square was filmed in Piedras Negras, Coahuila.
By coincidence, filming in Texas took place not far from that of another Best Picture nominee, There will be Blood and one day smoke from the neighboring shoot forced the production to shut down.
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."
"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."
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."
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