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Working with Joel and Ethan Coen: Asked if, after admiring their work for so long, the experience turned out to be what he anticipated, Josh Brolin replied, “I enjoyed them for a long time. I don’t know. I don’t ever remember thinking, ‘God I would love to work with them.’ I think it was so far over there that I just never entertained it, you know? So when it came up I was like, ‘Oh yeah, of course I would love to do that.’ But Javier [Bardem] tells the same story, but from a Spaniard’s point of view. It’s like, ‘I’m a Spaniard, when am I ever going to work with the Coens? It’s not going to happen.’ So I think both of us were equally like, ‘Really? Us? Now?’
How is it working with them? Easy. It’s not weird. They’re not little freaks that walk around and do a funny, really kooky Coen thing. We’d all like to believe that, you know Planet Coen. They’re really sweet. Really collaborative, they pay attention. They don’t not listen. I’ve worked with a lot of directors that kind of half listen to you. They’re extremely attentive and they tweak. They get in there and they say, ‘What if you only brought your hand up half-way?’ But maybe you should just go like that instead of like that?’ ‘Okay.’ And then I do it and I go, ‘Wow, that’s really cool like that. That’s good. Visually that looks better or whatever.’
I think they put the majority of their anxiety and their onus is on the casting process. Once they cast the person that they feel is right—they could have cast my part a lot sooner than they did. They could have just said, ‘No, he’ll be fine,’ but they wanted that person that made them go, ‘That’s the guy.’ Or, ‘His interpretation of it is similar to ours,’ kind of thing. But it was fun. It was easy and it was fun. Extremely collaborative--that’s the thing that stuck out and the total lack of ego on the set, total lack.”
On Cormac McCarthy’s Book: Brolin was familiar with the source material before he signed on to the film. He read the book after Sam Shepard turned him onto it while Brolin was working on Grindhouse. “I read it and just loved it for this great weighty literary piece of art. It wasn’t until later that I heard that they were making a movie and what that was. I didn’t revisit the book until I actually found out that I was doing it and after I was over the initial collarbone pain. Then I could fix my eyes enough to read it.”
Brolin offered his opinion on the film adaptation of the book compared to McCarthy’s work. “Honestly it was much funnier than I thought. I was very, very happy because the humor’s very, very subtle. It’s very absurd and it’s very subtle. I think that that’s so needed in movies like this because it allows you to go back to a base, and allows the tension to build once again and all that so you get to go through all those fluctuations.”
The Challenges of Filming on Location: “I love location because it does lend a certain [realism]. I can’t imagine doing No Country in the back lot of Universal with some kind of painted background, you know? It really, for me, lends to what’s happening in the story. It’s a character unto itself that I think really helps the tone of the movie.”
But one part of the location shoot Brolin could have done without was the river. “The river’s a pain in the ass truthfully,” admitted Brolin. “It looks great and I love the way it turned out, but you know when you’re waking up at 4:00 in the morning because Roger Deakins wants to get the light just right, and you’re doing that for a full week. You can only shoot from 4-5 because that’s when the light’s perfect and you’re freezing your ass off. You’ve only slept from 1:00 because you couldn’t go to sleep because you’ve been doing nights, and you wake up at 4:00 completely discombobulated. Then they say, ‘Jump in the river when it’s freezing and then we’re going to throw the dog after you.’ There’s moments where you go, ‘Why, why? I could trade and I could never do this again and it would all be okay.’ And, ‘They’ll still eat and go to college. It will be fine.’
But when you look at it, Javier [Bardem] and I watched the movie together for the first time and we kind of supported each other because we didn’t know how is the movie going to be. Don’t know, and they’re not going to tell us—the Coens. They don’t call and say, ‘Oh my God we just cut it, we just locked it, and it’s amazing. Good bye.’ But we watched the movie together and we were deeply satisfied. Javier leaned over and goes, ‘This is a pretty good f---ing movie.’ I said, ‘Yeah, man. I think it’s pretty good.’”
