The Coen brothers were not the ones to pursue the 2007 project No Country for Old Men. In fact, when the project was brought to them by producer Scott Rudin (Who bought the film rights to the original Cormac McCarthy novel), they were at the time attempting to adapt the James Dickey novel To the White Sea. However, upon Rudin's proposition, by August 2005, the Coens agreed to write and direct the film, having identified with how it provided a sense of place and also how it played with genre conventions. Joel Coen said that the book's unconventional approach, in his words, "was familiar, congenial to us; we're naturally attracted to subverting genre. We liked the fact that the bad guys never really meet the good guys, that McCarthy did not follow through on formula expectations." Ethan Coen, from his perspective, explained that the "pitiless quality" was a "hallmark of the book, which has an unforgiving landscape and characters but is also about finding some kind of beauty without being sentimental." The result was a film that many felt showed a maturing of the Coens style that had already existed for nearly 20 years beforehand. Stay tuned!