No Country For Old Men
Screenwriting

No Country For Old Men screenwriting is the art at its finest. Screenplays don't come better than this disturbing, violent and dark apocalyptic vision of America in terminal moral decline.

Bold, fiercely intelligent, uncompromising, No Country For Old Men screenwriting is quite simply a masterclass in the art and craft of creating the blueprint for a wholly original, unforgettable movie.

Considered the best Coen Brothers' movie to date, nominated for eight Oscars and nine BAFTAs, the film won the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Film, and Best Director, and the screenplay also won the Golden Globe.

A Masterclass in Original Screenwriting

No Country for Old Men is also a brilliant example of how to adapt a novel for the screen. The movie is based on Cormac McCarthy's great western thriller that portrays with unflinching realism a world of brutal killings and law enforcement helpless to stop them, and explores themes of fate and redemption.

Although the Coen Brothers followed McCormack's elegaic novel quite faithfully, they shaped it into a movie of breathtaking cinematic power.

All scriptwriters can benefit from studying No Country For Old Men's screenwriting techniques - narrative drive, point of view, the use of almost abstract treatments of visuals and sound, the pulse and rhythms of language. How the Coen Brothers shaped every element of a screenplay into a fiercely intelligent, imaginatively structured, original whole offers an inspirational unique screenwriting course in itself.

No Country For Old Men Visuals

Many of the films they've written and made over the last twenty years are known for their superb use of visual grammar.

Josh Brolin
in No Country For Old Men. Mike Zoss Productions
Scott Rudin Productions.
Paramount Vantage. Miramax.

No Country For Old Men's screenwriting is a masterly achievement in using images for rendering a story in cinematic terms. The Coen Brothers are famous for writing out detailed storyboards for their movies, so although they end up directing their own scripts, they clearly work out the visuals at the scriptwriting stage, before the shooting script is done.

No Country For Old Men Screenwriting: Structure

There are three plot strands centring around the three protagonists - the terrifying, pathological killer, Chigurh (played by Javier Bardem, the ageing Sheriff, Bell (played by Tommy Lee Jones), and the younger Vietnam vet, Moss, (played by Josh Brolin).

The finely modulated pattern of extreme suspense and brutal violence with reflective sequences where Lee Jones' sheriff laments the passing of the Old West days is one of the ways which take the movie beyond the usual crime thriller cliches of a thrill-a-minute action film.

The movie is a superb example of how unique screenwriting can transform tired genres such as the crime thriller and completely reinvent them in ways we've never seen before.

No Country For Old Men Screenwriting: Irony

Joel and Ethan Coen on location
for No Country For Old Men. Mike Zoss Productions
Scott Rudin Productions.
Paramount Vantage. Miramax.

With this movie, the Coen Brothers transformed their trademark humour and irony into something deeper and more potent. No Country For Old Men is shot through with dark - make that black - irony, and the comedy is disquieting.

This is yet another element of the movie which repays close scrutiny. The humour and irony are woven seamlessly into the screenplay with a restraint and control which serves to heighten the ruthlessness and brutality of the story.

It demonstrates that unique screenwriting demands intelligence, deep thought, and discipline. You only have to compare No Country For Old Men with traditional crime thrillers that are soaked in brutal killings and scatter-gunned blood, to realise that the Coens offer a far more complex and thoughtful treatment of the genre. The moral theme of the story is never compromised by considerations of protecting the audience from unpalatable truths.


To watch the movie clip of the last section of the film and for more about the ways in which the movie explodes the genre expectations and refuses to soften the dark apocalyptic nightmare it depicts, click her for the article No Country For Old Men - The Ending. Movie Clip

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The Power of Silence. A Note on The Coen Brothers'
Screenwriting Restraint

One of the screenwriters I'm mentoring at the moment is asking how to de-clutter her writing. She says she wants to discover how to stop over-writing.

It got me thinking about the vast stretches of silence and the almost absence of soundrack music in No Country For Old Men. But it also got me thinking about all the artists and writers who seem to pare down what they create as they move on. Samuel Beckett took this to an extreme with a 35 second play called Breath. It consists of light and breath and silence with no actors.

Maybe it's partly because artists and writers get more confident the more they create - they've discovered how to trust their unique voice to 'stand alone', and don't feel the need to try to fill up the space of what they're expressing in case it's not enough.

A lot of movies get stuffed with overcompensating matter. My personal bugbear is music that tries to punch the emotion and tell the audience what to feel, which has the opposite of the effect intended - it just detaches us from the characters. A movie that I can't seem to stop thinking and talking about (you've noticed?!), No Country For Old Men, is a magnificent exception to this rule. Film composer Carter Burwell's score is only 16 minutes long, and the majority of it is heard during the end credits.

Director/screenwriters Joel and Ethan Coen are still quite young, but they seem to have reached the stage where they trust their superb cinematic story-telling instincts. And, perhaps, more importantly, they trust in the intelligence of their audiences. The power of silence and stillness in this movie demonstrates something I think all screenwriters can get inspiration from.

What's important is what you leave out. The unspoken, the stasis, the deeper meaning that is what lies beneath.

I'm not sure I could want to go as far as Beckett in stripping away words and actions to a raw core of meaning, but I think he helps me to understand that what a writer leaves out can be more important than what you put in.

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Click to see No Country for Old Men - The Ending

Click to my Article about the Coen Brothers' Latest Movie Burn After Reading

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