Anyway, while I’ve been raving on and on about “No Country,” some of you will be reading my comments for the first time so I have to do some repeating…

Not since Anthony Hopkins first portrayed Hannibal Lector have I been so completely mesmerized by a screen villain. But that’s what happened when I watched Javier Bardem play Anton Chigurh in the new Coen Brothers movie “No Country For Old Men.” His portrayal of a ruthless cold blooded killer is without a doubt one of the finest performances I’ve seen in a long time, and one that’s sure to be remembered next year at the Oscar’s. While I obviously don’t know if he’ll win, I’m positive he’ll at least get nominated.

And while I single out Javier, I don’t mean to say anything but kind words for both the film and the other performances. Although we’ve all come to expect great movies from the Coen Brothers, “No Country” is a whole other level of great.

The movie begins when Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) finds a pickup truck filled with heroin and two million dollars in cash. The truck is surrounded by dead men. When Moss decides to take the money, he sets off a chain reaction of catastrophic violence that not even the law – in the person of aging, disillusioned Sheriff Bell (Tommy Lee Jones) – can contain. As Moss tries to evade his pursuers – in particular a mysterious mastermind who flips coins for human lives (Javier Bardem) – he can only hope to outrun the people chasing him.

So to help promote the movie, the other day I got to participate in a roundtable interviews not only with the Coen Brothers, but also Javier Bardem and Josh Brolin. Just click on the names in case you missed them.

During the roundtable interview with the Coen’s we talked about making this movie, the test screening process, casting, their next two films, and a whole lot more. If you’re a fan of the Coen Brothers this is not an interview to skip. As always, you can either read the transcript below or download the MP3 of the interview by clicking here. And if you missed the clips from the movie you can watch them here.

“No Country For Old Men” is currently playing in limited release and will be everywhere on November 21^st.

Question: Do you find yourselves quoted for each other?

Joel Coen: Yes, it happens all the time. It doesn’t bother us.

Q: Why this book?

JC: We didn’t actually pick it. It was sent to us by Scott Rudin who had acquired the rights to it, he sent it to us in galleys about a year before it came out. He asked us if we were interested in doing it and we read it and both, we’d read other Cormac McCarthy books just for pleasure and liked him a lot, but this one we thought was, could make a really interesting movie.

Q: Did you purposely eliminate the quirkiness from this movie?

JC: Not consciously, we just tried to do an adaptation of the book. It was just a sort of straightforward problem from our point of view, which is, how do you turn that into a movie?

Q: Are there films of yours you feel are more similar to each other than others?

Ethan Coen: Boy, we don’t really compare them. There is just nothing in it for us. There is some pleasure in doing a movie and problem solving on a specific movie and getting a movie made, but once they are done we don’t look at them again, much less relate one to another.

Q: Do you appreciate the process of making them more than watching them?

EC: Yeah, it’s kind of paradoxical. We are never going to enjoy watching the movie. But the whole process is, I don’t know why we do it, yes. Sometimes the process is pleasurable. Yes. On good days it’s fun. I guess that’s why we do it.

JC: I’m to the point now where I have a hard time keeping them straight, honestly, chronologically.

EC: There was an interview with Brando recently where someone asked him about Apocalypse Now and he said – Is that the one I was bald in?

Q: How was shooting in New York?

EC: It was different. We live there and we had never shot and gone home at night to bed. So it was strange by virtue of that.

Q: Any challenges of working in the city?

JC: There are some. It’s a little bit different working in New York. It’s sort of hard figuring out what was what, especially given the fact that we were working with some pretty big movie stars so you are in a big urban environment with high profile people. We’d worked with high profile people before, but not in a big urban environment like that so much. So that was a little bit different. Sort of logistically shooting in the city is a little bit different. And then as Ethan was saying, in the past when we’ve made a movie we sort of go away from home and you are able to a certain extent to sort of divorce your working life from your home life for a discreet period of time. It’s a little bit different in terms of maintaining focus, a little bit easier in a way. So all in all it was an interesting experience. It was really the opposite side of the coin from this shoot.

Q: Why film in New Mexico?

JC: Oh, the rebate.

EC: The economic incentive. As you know, the story takes place in West Texas and we shot for two weeks based in Marfa, West Texas for the stuff you really see landscape because New Mexico offers spectacular scenery, but not of that kind and it is a very different landscape. So we shot, as everybody is in New Mexico now, for economic reasons. And because it does offer things, while it’s not West Texas there are things we could shoot there we couldn’t have shot in Flemington, New Jersey.

Q: How did you cast the extras?

JC: The day players came in combination from New Mexico and Texas, most of them. There were a few, actually, that came from Los Angeles and New York. But most of them were local people from New Mexico and Texas. Texas actually has quite a deep acting pool for the state as a whole, I would say more than New Mexico, considerably more. So quite a few people came from there.

Q: Josh said he didn’t make the first audition?

JC: Yes, but he’s a notorious liar. (laughs) That’s a good question. Javier was cast much before Josh was. Tommy and Javier were cast fairly early on. Tommy first, he was on the short list of people who could really do this part, both from an age point of view, and he’s one of the sort of great American actors of a certain age and who can convincingly be from that area. In fact he is from that area.

EC: Tommy would love to hear that. We asked him to do it because he’s so fucking old. (laughs)

JC: In fact he got up my ass about it one day. “I'm only 59 years old.” Javier is a little more complicated. Look, if you have a chance to cast Javier Bardem in a movie, even if it’s a stretch, which I don’t think it was in this movie, you should do it. He’s fantastic. The problem is once we cast Javier and Tommy in those two parts, it’s a movie about three men, each of whom sort of has equal weight in the movie. So you’ve got a problem. You’ve got to find somebody who can be an equal in the movie with those two guys. We saw everybody and we were not happy with anyone until we met Josh. He came in and read for the part and that was that.

Q: You were more enthusiastic after Woody’s scenes that Josh’s scenes?

JC: That’s because Woody did what we told him to do.

Q: Did you know you wanted Javier and his hair to look that way? Did he come up with that?

JC: No, he didn’t, but he embraced it when it was suggested.

EC: The look, actually the feeling of the wardrobe and the haircut came from, the art department does a lot of research, mainly photo research, because it’s a period thing, although a recent period, it’s 1980 Texas border area. So they don’t just kind of make it up from scratch. They look at archive pictures of the time and place. And the wardrobe department had found this picture of a guy at a bar in West Texas in 1979 and it was that alarming haircut and actually that kind of wardrobe as well. And we looked at it and thought, well, he looks like a sociopath. And Javier really enjoyed it as well.

Q: Do you see this as an action movie?

JC: In a way. It’s not Live Free or Die Hard, but it’s…

Q: Did you see it as a tonal shift towards the end when it get more dialogue heavy?

JC: Yes, well clearly, and this is true of the novel and one of the things that was interesting to us about the novel as well, it does undergo a shift three quarters of the way through. The reason for that and what the engenders or what that means and how that works as a story and all the rest of it was part of what was so interesting about the novel.

Q: Were there other tricks along the way like Josh’s Mmmm?

JC: That’s funny because I remember discussing that. When he’s finding the money, you mean? Hmmmm…not really.

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