No Country for Old Men
FADE IN:
EXT. MOUNTAINS - NIGHT
Snow is falling in a gusting wind. The voice of an old man:
VOICE OVER:
I was sheriff of this county when I
was twenty-five. Hard to believe.
Grandfather was a lawman. Father
too. Me and him was sheriff at the
same time, him in Plano and me here.
I think he was pretty proud of that.
I know I was.
EXT. WEST TEXAS LANDSCAPE - DAWN/DAY
We dissolve to another West Texas landscape. Sun is rising.
VOICE OVER:
Some of the old-time sheriffs never
even wore a gun. A lot of folks find
that hard to believe. Jim Scarborough
never carried one. That's the younger
Jim. Gaston Boykins wouldn't wear
one. Up in Comanche County.
We dissolve through more landscapes, bringing us to full
day. None of them show people or human habitation.
VOICE OVER:
I always liked to hear about the old-
timers. Never missed a chance to do
so. N*gger Hoskins over in Bastrop
County knowed everbody's phone number
off by heart. You can't help but
compare yourself against the old-
timers. Can't help but wonder how
they would've operated these times.
There was this boy I sent to the gas
chamber at Huntsville here a while
back. My arrest and my testimony. He
killed a fourteen-year-old girl.
Papers said it was a crime of passion
but he told me there wasn't any
passion to it.
The last landscape, hard sunbaked prairie, is surveyed in a
long slow pan.
VOICE OVER:
Told me that he'd been planning to
kill somebody for about as long as
he could remember. Said that if they
turned him out he'd do it again.
The pan has brought into frame the flashing light bars of a
police car stopped on the shoulder. A young sheriff's deputy
is opening the rear door on the far side of the car.
VOICE OVER:
Said he knew he was going to hell.
Be there in about fifteen minutes. I
don't know what to make of that. I
surely don't.
Close on a pair of hands manacled behind someone's back. A
hand enters to take the prisoner by one arm.
VOICE OVER:
The crime you see now, it's hard to
even take its measure. It's not that
I'm afraid of it.
Back to the shot over the light bars: the deputy, with a
hand on top of the prisoner's head to help him clear the
door frame, eases the prisoner into the backseat. All we see
of the prisoner is his dark hair disappearing into the car.
VOICE OVER:
I always knew you had to be willing
to die to even do this job -- not to
be glorious. But I don't want to
push my chips forward and go out and
meet something I don't understand.
The deputy closes the back door. He opens the front passenger
door and reaches down for something-apparently heavy-at his
feet.
VOICE OVER:
You can say it's my job to fight it
but I don't know what it is anymore.
The deputy swings the heavy object into the front passenger
seat. Matching inside the car: it looks like an oxygen tank
with a petcock at the top and tubing running off it.
VOICE OVER:
...More than that, I don't want to
know. A man would have to put his
soul at hazard.
On the door slam we cut to Texas highway racing under the
lens, the landscape flat to the horizon. The siren whoops.
VOICE OVER:
...He would have to say, okay, I'll
be part of this world.
INT. SHERIFF LAMAR'S OFFICE - DAY
THE DEPUTY:
Seated in the sheriff's office, on the phone. The prisoner
stands in the background. Focus is too soft for us to see
his features but his posture shows that his arms are still
behind his back.
DEPUTY:
Yessir, just walked in the door.
Sheriff he had some sort of a thing
on him like one of them oxygen tanks
for emphysema or somethin'. And a
hose from it run down his sleeve...
Behind him we see the prisoner seat himself on the floor
without making a sound and scoot his manacled hands out under
his legs. Hands in front of him now, he stands.
DEPUTY:
...Well you got me, sir. You can see
it when you get in...
The prisoner approaches. As he nears the deputy's back he
grows sharper but begins to crop out of the top of the frame.
DEPUTY:
...Yessir I got it covered.
As the deputy reaches forward to hang up, the prisoner is
raising his hands out of frame just behind him. The manacled
hands drop back into frame in front of the deputy's throat
and jerk back and up.
Wider:
the prisoner's momentum brings both men crashingbackward to the floor, face-up, deputy on top.
The deputy reaches up to try to get his hands under the
strangling chain.
The prisoner brings pressure. His wrists whiten around the
manacles.
The deputy's legs writhe and stamp. He moves in a clumsy
circle, crabbing around the pivot-point of the other man's
back arched against the floor.
The deputy's flailing legs kick over a wastebasket, send
spinning the castored chair, slam at the desk.
Blood creeps around the friction points where the cuffs bite
the prisoner's wrists. Blood is being spit by the deputy.
The prisoner feels with his thumb at the deputy's neck and
averts his own face. A yank of the chain ruptures the carotid
artery. It jets blood.
The blood hits the office wall, drumming hollowly.
INT. SHERIFF LAMAR'S BATHROOM - DAY
The prisoner walks in, runs the water, and puts his wrists,
now freed, under it.
INT. OFFICE - DAY
Close on the air tank. One hand, a towel wrapped at the wrist,
reaches in to hoist it.
Road rushes under the lens. Point-of-view through a windshield
of taillights ahead, the only pair in sight.
A siren bloop.
The car pulls over. A four-door Ford sedan.
The police car pulls over behind.
The prisoner -- his name is Anton Chigurh -- gets out of the
police car and slings the tank over his shoulder. He walks
up the road to the man cranking down his window, groping for
his wallet.
MAN:
What's this about?
CHIGURH:
Step out of the car please, sir.
The motorist squints at the man with the strange apparatus.
MAN:
Huh? What is...
CHIGURH:
I need you to step out of the car,
sir.
The man opens his door and emerges.
MAN:
Am I...
Chigurh reaches up to the man's forehead with the end of the
tube connected to the air tank.
CHIGURH:
Would you hold still please, sir.
A hard pneumatic sound. The man flops back against the car.
Blood trickles from a hole in the middle of his forehead.
Chigurh waits for the body to slide down the car and crumple,
clearing the front door. He opens it and hoists the air tank
over into the front seat.
Seen through an extreme telephoto lens. Heat shimmer rises
from the desert floor.
A pan of the horizon discovers a distant herd of antelope.
The animals are grazing.
Reverse on a man in blue jeans and cowboy boots sitting on
his heels, elbows on knees, peering through a pair of
binoculars. A heavy-barreled rifle is slung across his back.
This is Moss.
He lowers the binoculars, slowly unslings the rifle and looks
through its sight.
The view through the sight swims for a moment to refind the
herd. One animal is staring directly at us, its motion
arrested as if it's heard or seen something.
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"No Country for Old Men" Scripts.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 24 Nov. 2024. <https://www.scripts.com/script/no_country_for_old_men_175>.
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