Vitals

Javier Bardem as Anton Chigurh, relentless psychopathic killer (“but so what? there’s plenty of them around”)

Texas, Summer 1980

Film: No Country for Old Men
Release Date: November 9, 2007
Director: Joel Coen & Ethan Coen
Costume Designer: Mary Zophres

WARNING! Spoilers ahead!

Background

The Coen brothers’ masterful adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s novel No Country for Old Men was released eighteen years ago today on November 9, 2007. The film won in four of its eight nominated categories at the Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Director, Adapted Screenplay, and Supporting Actor for Javier Bardem’s chilling performance as the amoral and awful-coiffed Anton Chigurh.

A team of forensic psychiatrists that watched more than 400 movies identified Chigurh as the most clinically accurate portrayal of a psychopath, as the team’s leader Dr. Samuel Leistedt described Chigurh as “a merciless killer who feels absolutely no remorse for blowing his victims apart with a shotgun. He’s very determined, has no empathy for his victims, and is incapable of emotions like love or shame.”

Chigurh is hired by a mysterious businessman to trace the $2.4 million from a drug deal in the desert gone wrong, eventually leaving a trail of more than a dozen corpses across Texas—some to serve his employers and others to serve his own twisted code. He embodies the ruthless new order that renders obsolete the moral code of old-timers like Terrell County sheriff Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones), a chaotic force of violence so unrelenting that it leaves no country for men like Bell.

Chigurh’s mission is complicated after opportunistic welder Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) happens upon that “colossal goat-fuck out in the desert” and absconds with the money before Chigurh gets there, unaware of a transponder in the satchel that allows Chigurh to easily trace him. As his employer rightly features Chigurh going rogue, he calls in the more charismatic retired Army colonel Carson Wells (Woody Harrelson), whose first move is to make Moss aware of the man he’s up against.

Carson Wells: You’ve seen him? And you’re not dead? Huh.
Llewelyn Moss: What’s this guy supposed to be, the ultimate badass?
Carson Wells: Don’t think that’s how I’d describe him.
Llewelyn Moss: How would you describe him?
Carson Wells: I guess I’d say he doesn’t have a sense of humor.

Javier Bardem had been reluctant to take the role, having told the Coens that “I don’t drive, I speak bad English, and I hate violence.” Convinced by their response (“That’s why we called you”) and his own desire to work with them, Bardem pulled on Anton Chigurh’s boots and stepped into the role that made him the first Spanish actor to win an Academy Award. “Thank you to the Coens for being crazy enough to think I could do that and put one of the most horrible haircuts in history on my head,” he shared in his acceptance speech.

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What’d He Wear?

For her first foray into the Western genre (albeit more contemporary than the traditional Western), the Coens’ frequent costume designer Mary Zophres interpreted Anton Chigurh as “someone who was trying to fit in” while representing the darker end of the desert setting’s color spectrum. “To me, it was like giving him a back story. A reason he was wearing those clothes,” Zophres later explained to Awards Daily. “He was trying to fit in because he knew that he didn’t. He would have purchased something in a store nearby,” establishing how he effectively dresses in Texan-flavored sportswear despite being an obvious outsider.

Cormac McCarthy’s novel describes a range of wardrobe items for Chigurh that includes items not seen on screen, like a suit and tie or sunglasses, but his basic sartorial philosophy of a jacket over shirts with pockets, pressed jeans held up with a belt, and ostrich-skin boots would be echoed in Zophres’ costume design.

Trucker jackets had been increasingly popular as rugged workwear through the latter half of the 20th century, anchored by the classic blue denim championed by the big three American outfitters: Levi’s, Lee, and Wrangler. “In my sketch for that character, I found a piece of research that inspired me to do that darker denim jacket on him,” Zophres shared to Awards Daily. “It was a picture of a convict from the Warner Brothers research library.”

Chigurh’s jacket is cut from a dark midnight indigo denim twill, styled like a contemporary Levi’s “Type III” trucker jacket with its V-shaped seams (and lacking the side pockets that Levi’s added later in the ’80s), though the plain-finished nickel tack buttons and lack of brand signatures rule out the likelihood of Levi’s. His jacket has six buttons up the front, corresponding to buttonholes threaded in burnt-orange. The Type III-informed styling includes straight horizontal chest yokes aligned with the tops of both chest pockets, each covered with a pointed flap that close with a single button. The squared cuffs and short adjuster tabs on each side of the waist also close through matching nickel tack buttons.

All of Chigurh’s shirts were custom-made for the production by Beverly Hills shirtmaker Anto to resemble late 1970s work-shirts—styled with large point collars, front plackets, and flapped chest pockets. He initially wears a shirt basket-woven in burnt-orange and black cotton-blend threads that present as a mottled, almost iridescent dark-brown. The placket closes through black four-hole buttons, matching those used on the cuffs and the pointed pocket flaps.

Until he’s wounded in a gun battle with Llewelyn Moss at the Eagle Pass Hotel that rips buckshot through his left thigh, Chigurh wears plain dark-charcoal polyester twill pants made by Wrangler and styled like jeans with belt loops, curved front pockets, patch back pockets, and a straight-zip fly. The buckshot and Chigurh cutting himself out of the trousers render them ruined.

“He would have worn cowboy boots, but I wanted his boots to seem like they could have been a weapon,” Zophres explained to Awards Daily. “I made them pointy enough that he could probably kill someone with them.”

Chigurh’s cowboy boots have burgundy scaled leather uppers, with the requisite calf-high shafts rigged with pull tabs at the top and Zophres’ designed pointed toes. The exotic scaled leather could be alligator or crocodile skin, with some Redditors theorizing that he wears black cherry gator-belly boots from Tony Lama. (However, this may have been interpreted from an erroneous YourProps post that lists a different set as Bardem’s screen-worn boots.)

Before confronting the cartel gunmen awaiting Moss at the Regal Motel in Del Rio, Chigurh pulls off his boots to reveal a set of thick light-gray crew socks that keep his steps quiet as he approaches the room. After gunning down the men inside the room, Chigurh then strips off his socks—perhaps having bloodied them during the massacre.

After ditching the bloodied brown shirt and charcoal jeans from his gunfight with Moss in El Paso, Chigurh changes into a fresh outfit with a slightly darker brown shirt and identically styled pants in a dark burgundy polyester. This slightly more flamboyant trouser color initially seems out of character, until recalling Zophres’ philosophy that Chigurh likely just purchased whatever he could find that fit.

For the film’s denouement in Odessa, Chigurh wears a blackened variation of the same work-shirt, now tucked into brown polyester jeans that also match the charcoal and burgundy pants he’d worn in earlier scenes.

Chigurh holds up all of his trousers with the same brown tooled leather belt, rigged with a large curved gold-toned single-prong buckle that closes through the holes decoratively punched around the center of the belt.

You can find photos and information of Bardem’s screen-worn costumes at the auction listings posted by iCollector, Prop Store (Lots 259 and 263), and YourProps.

Of course, no mention of Anton Chigurh’s distinctive look would be complete without addressing the hair. The Coens found inspiration from a 1979 brothel patron whose photograph was included in a Texas history book owned by Tommy Lee Jones, sharing this and the direction for a “strange and unsettling” hairstyle with Oscar-winning hair stylist Paul LeBlanc, who blended the hairstyles of English warriors during the Crusades with Mod mop-tops popularized by the Beatles during the swingin’ sixties. But Bardem feared that he would have had the female audiences packing Shea Stadium screaming for all the reasons, reportedly bemoaning upon seeing his new ‘do that “I won’t get laid for the next two months!”

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The Guns

“He had some sort of thing on him—like a oxygen tank for emphysema or something—and a hose that run down his sleeve,” observes the doomed deputy (Zach Hopkins) who becomes Anton Chigurh’s first on-screen kill by foolishly turning his back on his dangerous prisoner.

Anton Chigurh’s signature weapon is a captive bolt pistol—an industrial tool normally used to humanely stun cattle before slaughter, as Sheriff Bell explains after his Charlie Walser anecdote. Unlike a firearm, the bolt is pneumatically driven forward by compressed air (or a blank cartridge) and never fully leaves the barrel, allowing Chigurh to kill silently and without leaving behind bullets or shell casings. He also uses the device to blast out door locks, though the film’s portrayal of its power to punch through deadbolts is more cinematic license than practical reality.

In his Del Rio motel room, Chigurh unveils the Remington Model 11-87 shotgun that he would use to deadly effect in the room next door. Though not introduced until seven years after No Country for Old Men was set (hence the “87” designation), it follows the same gas-operated semi-automatic action as the earlier Model 1100 designed by Wayne Leek in the 1960s, which helps absorb recoil and enables rapid follow-up shots. Built in both 12-gauge and 20-gauge configurations, the Model 11-87 holds four rounds in its under-barrel tube magazine (or seven with an extension), with a self-compensating gas system that can accommodate a range of loads from 2¾-inch to 3-inch Magnum.

Following McCarthy’s description of a “twelve-gauge Remington automatic with a plastic military stock and parkerized finish”, Chigurh’s Model 11-87 is rigged with black synthetic furniture. He signals his murderous intention to the audience by attaching a shining custom-made suppressor—a non-functional prop custom-made for the production, according to Independent Studio Services armorer Larry Zanoff. In reality, practical shotgun suppressors were still largely experimental at the time and wouldn’t become commercially viable until decades later. Each shot’s distinctive muffled hiss was added in post-production to heighten the surreal quiet of Chigurh’s almost mythic lethality.

When anticipating combat requiring more substantial loads than the single-digital capacity of his semi-automatic shotgun, Chigurh arms himself with an Intratec TEC-9—also rigged with a sound suppressor. Though referenced by name in Cormac McCarthy’s novel, the TEC-9 is anachronistic for the setting as it wouldn’t be introduced until the mid-’80s.

The TEC-9 is a blowback-operated pistol made from inexpensive molded polymer and a combination of stamped and milled steel, developed by Intratec—an American subsidiary of Sweden’s Interdynamic AB. Simple in design, cheap to produce, and notoriously easy to modify as a fully automatic weapon, it became one of the most infamous firearms of the late 20th century with an association with gang violence, drive-by shootings, and mass shootings—most notoriously at Columbine.

The TEC-9’s unusual design features a magazine positioned in front of the trigger, a configuration rarely seen since early 20th century pistols like the Mauser C96. This front-magazine layout allows for longer stick magazines with capacities ranging from 10 rounds up to 50, as well as 72-round drum magazines. As the first widely adopted civilian handgun in decades to revive this outdated format, the TEC-9 followed a more submachine gun-like silhouette, cementing its role prioritizing symbolic menace over practical ergonomics.

Aside from his captive bolt gun, Chigurh’s firearms are all technically anachronistic for No Country for Old Men‘s 1980 setting.

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The Truck

Anton Chigurh is only seen driving stolen vehicles in No Country for Old Men, most prominently a maroon 1981 Dodge Ramcharger that he seizes from his own employers after a nighttime ride down to the “O.K. Corral” scene in the desert.

The second-generation Dodge Ramcharger, built from 1981 to 1993, was based on a shortened version of Dodge’s D-series/Ram pickup chassis and competed with full-size SUVs like the Chevy K5 Blazer and Ford Bronco. By 1981, the Ramcharger had adopted the D-series’ new “egg crate” grille and a fixed steel roof, replacing the removable tops of earlier models. Though offered in a handful of trim levels over the years, little changed mechanically.

Based on how nimbly Chigurh’s commandeered truck handles the descent into the rugged terrain, it’s almost certainly one of the 4×4 models rather than the less common two-wheel-drive variant. The automatic transmission—most likely Chrysler’s three-speed TorqueFlite 727, marketed in Dodge trucks as “LoadFlite”—further points to the most plausible configuration: a second-generation 1981 Ramcharger with a 318 cubic-inch (5.2L) small-block V8, the base engine after the Slant Six was phased out. In this setup, the 2-barrel carbureted 318 V8 produced around 140 horsepower, while a 4-barrel version bumped output to 170 hp, with torque in the 240-245 ft-lb range.

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What to Imbibe

“Looking for a man who has recently drunk milk.”

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How to Get the Look

Anton Chigurh’s style adapts the setting to his reputation, drenching era-correct sportswear like a denim trucker jacket, broken-in work shirts, jeans-like pants, and cowboy boots in dark colors that underscore his sinister actions… but it’s truly that terrible haircut that differentiates him from “ultimate badass” to “psychopathic killer”.

• Dark indigo denim twill six-button trucker jacket with flapped chest pockets, V-shaped front seams, button cuffs, and waist adjuster tabs
• Dark brown basket-woven cotton-blend work-shirt with large point collar, front placket, two chest pockets (with single-button pointed flaps), and button cuffs
• Dark charcoal polyester twill flat-front jeans with belt loops, straight-zip fly, curved front pockets, and patch back pockets
• Brown tooled leather belt with large gold-toned curved single-prong buckle
• Burgundy scaled leather cowboy boots with pull-tabs and pointed toes
• Gray crew socks
• Gray cotton briefs

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Do Yourself a Favor and…

Check out the movie and read Cormac McCarthy’s masterful novel, to which the final film is very faithful. As Ethan Coen himself recalled from the brothers’ adaptation process: “One of us types into the computer while the other holds the spine of the book open flat.”

You can also listen to more about the costume design in No Country for Old Men at Pete Brooker’s podcast From Tailors With Love.

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The Quote

What’s the most you ever lost on a coin toss?