Why Filmmakers Are Afraid of Anton Chigurh

[00:00:01]What the hell?

[00:00:02]>> You got me. Well, you can look at it when you get in.

[00:00:06]>> Yes, sir. I got it under control.

[00:00:32]Hello, my name is Kizer Connie. I'm a writer director and lately I've been spending an abundance of time studying villains in film and really what makes the great ones great. That led me into thinking about what my favorite villains are and I came to the conclusion that the greatest villains of all time are those that aren't asking to be understood.

[00:00:54]I need you to step out of the car, sir.

[00:01:03]>> What is that for?

[00:01:04]>> You would you hold still, please?

[00:01:13]>> They say every villain is a hero in their own story. I think that philosophy can lean filmmakers to try to push to humanize their villains, you know, in some sort of traumatic past or something else. It's an attempt to make them three-dimensional. And I enjoy those villains. But I think something that's underlooked is the villain that has no backstory. You know, the villain that you don't know why he's doing it, just that he can't be stopped.

[00:01:36]>> The villain that's a force of nature.

[00:01:38]>> And I thought my jokes were bad.

[00:01:41]>> Like the wind.

[00:01:44]What's the most you ever lost on a coin toss, >> sir?

[00:01:49]>> The most you ever lost on a coin toss?

[00:01:52]>> In the film No Country for Old Men, the moment Luen took the money, he was dead.

[00:02:03]Sugar isn't trying to catch Luen.

[00:02:08]Sugar is the event that's happening to him.

[00:02:12]The film treats him as a process, not a person. That's the principle of the wind made literal. Anton is usually described like a personification of death. The Coins told filming that Shagur was Bergman's death without the cloak. They made him as an abstraction. I think another description for me is to look at him like the weather. You cannot do anything to prevent the weather. You must brace for it. Learn to stay safe from its path.

[00:02:40]I the first thing I asked Cormack when I met him was what? His name is Shagur. C H I G R H. And I said what kind of name is that?

[00:02:49]>> And he said it's it's a name that really I mean what he was saying basically was he he he tried to find a name that was um intentionally untraceable sort of ethnically or n you know in terms of nationality or any of the rest of it.

[00:03:02]The idea is that the the the character is in in many ways a mystery in the book and and and and the the sort of task in terms of casting the character was how do you sort of make that character dynamic and real and compelling but preserve part of that mystery.

[00:03:25]>> The protagonist in a story isn't Luen, it's the sheriff. It's why the story didn't find it important to show the death of Luen in real time. The story becomes about the sheriff's attempt to understand the modern sort of crime. The kind of psychopath that doesn't have a real reason. The sheriff retires not because he's defeated, but because he understands what defeating sugar would cost.

[00:03:46]>> Your granddad never asked me to sign on as a deputy. Loretta tells me you're quitting. How come you're doing that?

[00:03:55]>> I feel overmatched.

[00:04:01]The sheriff's runin with someone that is the personification of death and his reflection on his own mortality against that. The villain's lack of psychology makes the protagonist psychology bigger.

[00:04:11]>> I knew that whenever I got there, he'd be there.

[00:04:18]Then I woke up.

[00:04:21]If in No Country for Old Men, Anton is death, if he is the weather, then in The Dark Knight, the Joker is chaos. What makes the Joker so interesting during his pursuit is he changes his thesis on how best to make his point. He starts off the film by approaching his chaos from the point of the criminals, wanting to change their motive from money onto something bigger.

[00:04:47]>> All you care about is money. this town deserves a better class of criminals.

[00:04:52]>> I'm going to give it to him.

[00:04:55]>> He at that point views Batman as the only one capable of stopping that. He then shifts that into trying to apply that chaos into Batman and the public as a whole by showing how easily people can be pushed to make horrific decisions and how easily they drop their morality.

[00:05:11]>> Like a leper. See, their morals, their code, it's a bad joke.

[00:05:19]We've dropped at the first sign of trouble.

[00:05:22]>> Like Anton Sugar, the Joker has no real backstory. This is obviously intentional, but the filmmakers go past that. The Joker gives fake backstories to people he meets as a way to horrify them. In the film, we see Joker tell two different scar stories. One to Gamble about his alcoholic father, one to Rachel about his disfigured wife. The film shows us both. By showing us both, the film tells us neither is true. The Joker has no real origin, or at least the film refuses to give us one. These stories, however, aren't randomly different. They're tailored to the listener. The Gamble story, the abusive father, the knife, the wisel serious is told to the tough guy who needs to be psychologically dominated before being killed. It's a story designed to disturb a man who's seen violence. The Rachel story, the disfigured wife, the gambling debt, the loving husband. It's a story about romantic devotion gone wrong. It's tuned for empathy than weaponized.

[00:06:17]That's what makes the scene. The Joker isn't just lying about his backstory.

[00:06:21]He's reading the listener, constructing the most effective psychological weapon for that person. But the character of the Joker was there like this sort of engine running through it. Um, I had told him I needed the Joker to be like the shark in Jaws. He needed to sort of come through and thread through the film in this with this particular energy. and he had just found that and absolutely cracked that even in that first draft.

[00:06:45]>> We as an audience have a deep curiosity about what makes someone like the Joker tick. The film then uses that and flips it on its head by not telling us the truth. By not telling us the truth, we can fill that darkness with our own imagination.

[00:07:15]As Anton sits in for death and the Joker sits in for chaos, the silence of the lamb introduces us to what can only be described as the devil himself.

[00:07:27]When ClariS first meets Hannibal, she walks past the other inmates who scream and throw things at her. They are disorderly and chaotic, but transparent in their menace. is when she meets Hannibal where she sees the opposite. He is a contrast to everything else.

[00:07:44]Hannibal Lectar is a characterization of pure evil, a pure sociopath. He has a distaste for the rude and the incompetent. He lives with an immense charm and charisma that lives to seduce.

[00:07:56]He is the apex predator who lives in his own code.

[00:08:00]>> Sit, please.

[00:08:09]Now then tell me what did Migs say to you?

[00:08:13]>> In every conversation Clarice asks Hannibal demands payment. She gives memories of her father of the lambs of her childhood on the farm. He gives her clues about Buffalo Bill but never about himself. The film knows what it's doing.

[00:08:28]She's the one being read. He's the one staying hidden.

[00:08:32]The way he acts as a mentor for Clarice is the way you'd imagine the devil would. Even behind the glass, there's a tension in asking for his help, like he could control your mind without you noticing.

[00:08:43]>> Oh, no. No. You were doing fine. You had been courteous and receptive to courtesy. You had established trust with the embarrassing truth about Migs. And now this ham-handed segue into your questionnaire, it won't do.

[00:09:02]>> So why don't we see more of these villains? Honestly, I think filmmakers are afraid. Afraid that an unexplained villain will be called underwritten.

[00:09:10]Afraid that audiences will tune out if there's no backstory to invest in.

[00:09:14]Afraid that without a tragic past, the villain will feel hollow. But the truth can be the opposite. The films that leave the villain to be felt rather than explained are the ones that have audiences engaged in endless conversations. It's those films that have the ability to live forever. My own study for these characters stem from the idea that I dream to tell stories where the presence of my villains can live as a force to be felt throughout regardless if they are on screen or not. And that sometimes it might be scarier when the villains just don't want anything. Some men aren't looking for anything logical like money. They can't be bought, bullied, reasoned, or negotiated with.

[00:09:56]Some men just want to watch the world burn.