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Ethan Coen on music and sound effects:
 "There is actually a little music, but it’s very minimal and pretty subliminal. It’s sparse. There are a few synthesizer drums that almost sound like and almost could be sound effects, because they blend in with the sound effects of the movie. And up until the end, that is the extent of the music in the movie. There wasn’t tons of it and, I don’t know, it just seemed to work well. Looking at the movie, it worked well without music. It made more of the background effects and the sound effects. When the music is there, it’s just there to set the mood, and that seemed to be the right mode in this case."
Joel Coen on the dialogue, or lack of dialogue:
"The first twenty minutes, I guess, there isn’t a lot of dialogue. On the other hand there’s not a lot of dialogue at that point… well, that’s not exactly true. There is a lot of dialogue at that point in the book because the book operates in such a different way. It alternates these chapters, which are sort of these first-person ruminations by the sheriff with the actual story of the novel unfolding. It is true that through successive drafts of the script we seemed to illuminate more dialogue in a general way and we discovered while writing it that the less people said in the movie the better we liked the way it felt."
Joel on the origin of Javier Bardem’s retro hairdo:
"Well, the haircut came from... it actually came from a piece of research that the wardrobe department did. It was a photograph of a man sitting in a bar or a brothel in a Texas border town in 1979. So we actually copied the clothes and the haircut that this person was wearing. It is a haircut that says a lot."
Joel on the challenges of filming in the desert:
 "Here’s one challenge: We had a lot of extras that had to lie around in the baking sun, covered in blood for hours at a time. And, at a certain point, I found out from the make-up department - it’s like being the Pentagon and being charged $3000 for a hammer - the make-up department was buying this special make-up blood that was made in England and it was something like $800 a gallon. So I wanted to know why they were doing that instead of just mixing food coloring and corn syrup, or whatever they do, and I was told that this blood had no sugar in it, which most mixtures do. This was rather important, given the fact that they were lying there for hours and didn’t want to be attacked by all kinds of creepy bugs and animals that might be attracted to the sugar."
Joel Coen on the amount of violence in No Country for Old Men:
"Well, the violence was... one of the first things we said to Scott Rudin, who brought us this project initially after we read it... you know, it’s a very violent book, as are many of the books Cormac McCarthy writes. Violence is a sort of an important hallmark or element in many of the books he writes. It seemed to us completely misguided to try and soft kettle that in an adaptation, and we wanted to make sure that Scott was in agreement with that, which he was. Having said that, we were aware that we were doing a very violent movie. You have to find a place with that that seems appropriate for the medium and setting and the whole thing, but it wasn’t something we worried about. It was just an element of the book that we thought was important that we felt had to be included and it was like any other sort of directorial problem."
The Coen Brothers on filming in Del Rio:
JOEL: We went to Del Rio to see the actual places that the novel is set in, but we didn’t actually shoot in Del Rio. The only part of Texas that we shot in was the part around West Texas between Marfa and Sadisiar, the border with Mexico there. The other part was...
ETHAN: Actually, you shot one day in Piedras Negras, Mexico, the town across from Eagle Pass, Texas, where that scene is in the town square that Cormac [McCarthy] describes.
JOEL: Right, but the rest was New Mexico. So the parts that are supposed to be Del Rio are mostly shot in Las Vegas, New Mexico. And the border bridge that’s in the movie was made on a freeway overpass in Las Vegas, New Mexico.
The Coen Brothers on casting Javier Bardem to play Anton Chigurh:
JOEL: That was one of the big casting puzzles of the movie.
 ETHAN: Yeah right, like where do you decide where to look, because I don’t know that I’d even characterize the character as evil. He’s a little more elusive than that, [and] a little more mysterious. Clearly he’s not the good guy; I’ll concede that. But the fact that he’s mysterious, he’s kind of withheld to a certain degree in the novel, there’s very little description of him. He’s a character that’s unsettling. It’s hard to find your feet with him. He’s hard to pigeonhole. So this, in effect, presents a casting challenge. Well, that was a long preamble and I have no idea why we thought of Javier, except that whatever it is that Javier supplies - and we don’t know what it will be because it should still be mysterious and elusive - he’s a great actor and it will be interesting.
JOEL: We won’t do the cliché is what we were completely convinced of, without really knowing what he would do. We were sure he wouldn’t do a cliché. One thing that maybe, sort of led to him, or a little arrow in his direction, was that he’s the only character in the book that isn’t of the region. We felt that he could be an outsider, he could be exotic, and when we thought about it that way, it opened up the possibility of someone like Javier and helped us find him in a way. We were completely confident that he would inhabit the role in an interesting way without even knowing what he was going to do.
-- Troy Rogers
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