No Country for Old Men - from screenplay to novel to screenplay

The movie 'No Country for Old Men' has been seen by many, and many know that the Oscar-winning film was based on Cormac McCarthy's novel - but did you know it started out as a screenplay?

Cormac McCarthy is best known for his Pulitzer Prize-winning The Road. Clearly, he’s first and foremost a novelist, but he has also written plays and screenplays. He wrote Ridley Scott’s The Counselor, a tale that didn’t particularly grab audiences. One of the reviews says, “The Counselor raises expectations with its talented cast and creative crew—then subverts them with a wordy and clumsy suspense thriller that's mercilessly short on suspense or thrills.”

Well, sometimes (often, in fact) things go awry on the development journey of a film. I’ve been there - there are so many things that need to come together, at the right time and in the right way, that every film that ends up working well on every level is a miracle. And not a minor miracle, either! Back to the focus of this article - unlike in The Counselor, there is absolutely nothing clumsy and absolutely nothing wordy about No Country for Old Men. It really is a gem of a movie.

As mentioned, McCarthy wrote the story as a screenplay, found no interest for it in Hollywood - then turned it into a novel instead. When you read the novel, you still get the clear sense of the screenplay. McCarthy did not write the adaptation for the Coen film (they did), but he might as well have. Joel and Ethan Coen were very faithful to the original. They do make some excellent choices in the best interests of a film, but, by and large, the book is the film, and the film is the book.

No Country for Old Men won the Oscar for best picture, best director, best adapted screenplay and - of course - best supporting actor for Javier Bardem in the role of the uber-enigmatically menacing Anton Chigurh. Here’s one of those menacing - iconic, really - scenes with Anton Chigurh at a gas station - in the lower half of the screen you’ll see the corresponding script.

The Coen Brothers, asked about the process of adapting the novel, jokingly said that

“One of us typed on the computer while the other held the spine of the book open flat.”

Self-deprecating, of course, but there is some truth to it. The great screenwriting work of the Coen Brothers shines in a few stellar choices where they depart from the novel (but those are entirely in keeping with the novel and its characters), and in the way they compressed/removed here and there.

If you’re interested in reading the screenplay, you’ll find it here (with a great many more insights, from interviews to storyboards).

I’ve adapted novels myself - two of them were produced and one, alas, has not yet seen the silver screen light of day (here’s the story of that one, The Coffee Trader) - and, like you, I’ve seen countless adaptations. Most of them require a great deal of changes for the simple reason that novels tend to be long and, since they are a different medium, are often written in ways not automatically suited for the screen.

Take the simple notion of your protagonist, sitting in the grass. In the novel, you can leave him sitting there and enter his mind and fill the next twenty pages with any number of the person’s brilliant ruminations about life and death and everything in between. On film, however, all you see is a person sitting in the grass - so how do you adapt the inner world of that protagonist to the screen? I enjoy adapting novels - it really does present a challenge every time, and a fun one! For the Coens the majority of the adaptation work must have been about compressing what was already there and we all know the results - gloriously executed.

If you’d like to read a novel that began as a screenplay only to be turned into another screenplay that went on to win an Oscar, I can only recommend Cormac McCarthy’s novel (and watch the film, too, of course).