No Country for Old Men - Opening Scene

Opening scene to Joel and Ethan Coen's film adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's "No Country for Old Men" - 2007.

Violence and mayhem ensue after a hunter stumbles upon a drug deal gone wrong and more than two million dollars in cash near the Rio Grande.

[mtc]

You can hear the time passing in the voice. You can hear the struggle that he's faced with. You can actually feel the world becoming more hectic around him, and his hopelessness to stop it. It's the opening scene.

[jessedixon]

“A man would have to put his soul at hazard.” Indeed. Merely in living, we do so. I come back to this scene a handful of times a year, and it’s still haunting every time.

[plataoplomo]

'' If I don't come back tell mother I love her. Your mother's dead, Llewelyn ? Well then. I'll tell her myself.''

[TheZoidberg]

Love how this whole movie has no score. Just silence. Builds atmosphere

[keksimusmaximus]

"be there in about 15 minutes" gives me chills every time.

[jimboa]

"I don't want to push my chips forward and go out and meet something I don't understand. A man would have to put his soul at hazard. He'd have to say, 'Ok...I'll be part of this world'."

I get chills every time I hear that line.

[Bigbot]

He actually explains why the movie ends the way it ends at the beginning. Ingenious!!!

[jollygrapefruit]

I think this is genuinely the greatest film of all time

[LosAmigosMotorSports]

"Be there in 'bout 15 minutes" chilling sentence

[mattaus]

I think that's about my favourite opening scene to any movie I've seen. Tommy Lee-Jones almost whispers the last line and you can almost hear it reverberate through the rest of the movie.

[viniciuseneas]

I think this is one of the best movie openings in the history of cinema.

[BrinsonMHarris]

99% of directors would have opened with the firefight among the smugglers that's never actually seen in the flick. Instead we're hooked by TLJ's voice and the sparse scenery. Way to go Coen bros!!!

[ayecaptin]

I love the sound of his voice, the tone, his meter is perfect, I love the scenery and the sound of the wind, but it's the writing that's so beautiful that it grips me right where I live.
Those of us who were raised a little bit county knew a few people growing up that talked like this, to some degree or another, even those that hear it without knowing such people know that it sounds genuine and authentic. The names of the other sheriff's sound realistic, and when he says things like "that's the younger Jim" it makes it feel like a realistic conversation. He talks about hoping his dad was proud, and that he knows he was, wow that's a powerful and efficient way to build intimacy with an audience.
If I was a college professor teaching young aspiring writers I probably do a couple weeks just on this opening dialogue making students dissect it and analyze it and challenge them to learn to think like this. Really amazing writing.

[yorkshire]

This is one of the best opening scenes of any movie. The silence is deafening. They did a really good job of portraying the Genesis of a character represented by the morning sun coming up and the hope of a new day. There is a part near the end of the movie where he finds out his father was murdered at nighttime and buried just before the morning. Such a deep movie.

[JuniperLamplight]

I obsessively rewatch this. It's so great.

[Frankly]

CinemaSins cannot sin this for 'narration.' This here, it's one of the best narration ever. Sets up the conflict, problem, themes and moral conflict on the central character all in one shot of narration.

[jackrussell]

Cormac McCarthy is incredible. It’s surreal reading classics being written in our time. I read Suttree in Peru at a conservation camp just west of Bolivia. There was a Capuchin monkey that liked to curl up in your lap when you rested in a certain hammock and I read that entire novel by an Amazon tributary just so. I’ve never felt so adrift in time and space and never will again. The tradition of the great American novel is kept alive by very few. Patrick Dewitt is another of the last remaining heroes of western literature, but it’s on all of us to keep it alive. It’s an endangered art.

[HERBERTinALASKA]

The part he whispers “okay I’ll be part of this world” to me it’s like he accepts all of this but he doesn’t agree with all of it.

[JaggedRecordsVa]

This and the first 20 mins of There Will Be Blood are by far two of the greatest opening scenes in film history

[jayjayf]

Okay, I'll be part of this world.