No Country for Old Men - Trivia, Questions and Fun Facts

[discussimdb]

Fan of No Country for Old Men or just want to share your movie knowledge? This topic is dedicated to all trivia and questions related to No Country for Old Men

[ronnie]

This was the only film written, produced, edited and directed by Ethan Coen and Joel Coen to win Best Picture at the Academy Awards.

[kristen]

Garret Dillahunt auditioned five times for the role of Llewelyn Moss before ending up in the role of Wendell.

[cameron]

In Fargo (1996), another film directed by Joel Coen and Ethan Coen, about one million dollars in a leather case gets buried in a snowbank, apparently never to be found. In No Country for Old Men (2007), about two million dollars in a leather case is sought. In both movies, the leather case used is the type usually used by airplane pilots to carry their charts and maps.

[kylie]

There are several different theories around Javier Bardem's character (Anton Chigurh) being the Angel of Death, or The Grim Reaper, etc. This explains when Woody Harrelson's character (Carson Wells) tells Josh Brolin's character (Llewelyn Moss) about Chigurh and how he says "you've seen him...and you're not dead." This also explains why Chigurh wears dark clothing, has a somewhat professional way of executing certain plans, how he handles pain with ease, and overall his eerie presence... The way he flips a coin to decide the fate of his victims may be another clue to these theories.

[carl]

A nail gun was used for the sound effect of Chigurh's cattle gun.

[carl]

Until the release of The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (2018), this was the Coen brothers movie with the longest runtime (two hours and two minutes), as well as the only Coen brothers movie to exceed two hours in length.

[lynn]

Joel Coen, Ethan Coen: [Stanley Kubrick] Llewelyn Moss is killed in room number 114 and there is crime scene tape in front of the door, yielding CRM-114 ("CRM" from the repeated word "CRiMe" printed on the tape and "114" from the room number) - an homage to Kubrick who referenced CRM-114 in two of his films.

[morris]

An unforeseen expense for the film was the make-up department buying expensive fake blood at eight hundred dollars a gallon. Joel Coen realized why they were spending so much when it came to film the scene where Llewelyn (Josh Brolin) stumbles across the aftermath of a shoot-out with lots of extras lying around dead in the dust. Ordinary fake blood (made with sugar) would have meant the extras would have been crawling with bugs and ants, while the insects had no interest in the expensive stuff.

[fred]

Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem) flips a coin to determine whether or not he will kill someone. Tommy Lee Jones played Two-Face in Batman Forever (1995), whose character also flipped a coin for similar reasons.

[melinda]

Composer Carter Burwell's score consists of only sixteen minutes of music.

[sophie]

Josh Brolin was working on Grindhouse (2007) when he became drawn to the role of Moss in this film. He asked Grindhouse (2007) director Robert Rodriguez if he could borrow a video camera for his audition tape, and he ended up having his audition elaborately shot with the theatrical camera they were using, directed by Quentin Tarantino, and with Marley Shelton as Carla Jean. When the Coens saw Brolin's tape, their response was that they loved the lighting.

[nina]

The score music is used quite sparsely throughout the film, blending elusively into the background. Some can be heard during Ed Tom Bell's (Tommy Lee Jones') opening narration, during Anton Chigurh's (Javier Bardem's) quarter speech, when Bell shows up at the aftermath of the motel shoot-out towards the end of the film, and the closing credits.

[chris]

In the novel, Sheriff Bell says of the dope-dealers, "Here a while back in San Antonio they shot and killed a federal judge." Cormac McCarthy set the story in 1980. In 1979, Federal Judge John Howland Wood was shot and killed in San Antonio by Texas free-lance contract killer Charles Harrelson, father of Woody Harrelson (Carson Wells).

[phyllis]

Like the book, the film is set in 1980. Several weapons seen in the movie would not have been present in that time frame. Jones' Colt Government Model Enhanced Series 80 was first made in the early 1990s. Bardem's shotgun was a Remington 1187 with a synthetic stock, and no such shotgun was available in 1980. The Glock 9mm Bardem picks up in the desert to kill his two competitors had not even been invented yet.

[morris]

This film was voted the second best film of 2008 by Empire Magazine, narrowly missing the top spot to The Dark Knight (2008).

[veronica]

When Moss is lying hurt on the floor, after crossing the Mexican border, a mariachi group starts singing to him. What they say, in English, is, "You wanted to fly without wings, you wanted to touch the sky, you wanted too much wealth, you wanted to play with fire." The lyrics are probably in reference to the story of the film.

[liam]

Anton Chigurh kills or tries to kill almost every person to whom he speaks during the film. The only people he spares are the gas station proprietor, the woman who works in the trailer park office, the woman at the motel front desk and the two children at the end. It is unclear if he kills the man who is in the office when he executes the Businessman. He is unable to kill Llewelyn Moss, who instead is killed by the Mexicans. It is implied that he kills Carla Jean Moss when he checks the soles of his boots, presumably for blood, after he exits her house.

[bessie]

In April 2010, Paramount Pictures was forced to pay Tommy Lee Jones a fifteen million dollar bonus when an arbitrator found that the studio's lawyers had made an error drafting Jones' deal to appear in the film.

[riley]

Tiffany Dupont auditioned for the role of Carla Jean Moss.