No Country for Old Men Q&A.

Frank and I got to see a screening of No Country for Old Men (his review). After the flick there was a Q&A session with Josh Brolin and The DC Film Society posted most of it. I say most of it because there were some funny stories that he told that didn’t make the cut.

Q: What’s it like to work with the Coens?

JB: There’s a lot of quiet. Ethan Coen hums and rubs his head. Joel stares off in the distance. It’s eerily quiet. They feel absolutely no need to uphold their end of the conversation. When it comes to directing, they really complement each other. There’s no arguments, no ego. The silence was very unnerving at the beginning, because as an actor you want to be told you are going in the right direction. Javier and I thought we would be fired in two weeks. After a while we found out that this [silence] was a great compliment. Our interpretation at the beginning was “You’re not going to get any better so we better move on because we don’t have the money.” We had a lot of great rehearsal time. We asked a lot of questions to get the characters down as much as we needed to before opening up to spontaneity. I would work with them again. But nobody would be saying anything for 20 minutes. So I tried to lend myself to surrealism. But when it came down to direction they were very clear, very precise.

He actually went on tell about how during one of the silent sessions he actually stood up and told the Coen’s that he thought that this being thier first movie they where doing a great job. To which (I think) Ethan looked up and said “Thanks” and then continued to be silent and rub his head.

Go see this movie you won’t be dissapointed. Here is the Q&A.