in his thoughts. Richard Corliss of Time stated that "the Coen brothers have adapted literary works before. Miller's Crossing was a sly, unacknowledged blend of two Dashiell Hammett tales, Red Harvest and The Glass Key; and O Brother Where Art Thou? transferred The Odyssey [of Homer] to the American south in the 1930s. But No Country for Old Men is their first film taken, pretty straightforwardly, from a [contemporary] prime American novel." The writing is also notable for its minimal use of dialogue. Josh Brolin discussed his initial nervousness with having so little dialogue to work with: I mean it was a fear, for sure, because dialogue, that's what you kind of rest upon as an actor, you know? ... Drama and all the stuff is all dialogue motivated. You have to figure out different ways to convey ideas. You don't want to overcompensate because the fear is that you're going to be boring if nothing's going on. You start doing this and this and taking off your hat and putting it on again or some bullshit that doesn't need to be there. So yeah, I was a little afraid of that in the beginning. Peter Travers of Rolling Stone praised the novel adaptation. "Not since Robert Altman merged with the short stories of Raymond Carver in Short Cuts have filmmakers and author fused with such devastating impact as the Coens and McCarthy. Good and evil are tackled with a rigorous fix on the complexity involved." Director Joel Coen justified his interest in the McCarthy novel. "There's something about it – there were echoes of it in No Country for Old Men that were quite interesting for us", he said, "because it was the idea of the physical work that somebody does that helps reveal who they are and is part of the fiber of the story. Because you only saw this person in this movie making things and doing things in order to survive and to make this journey, and the fact that you were thrown back on that, as opposed to any dialogue, was interesting to us." Coen stated that this is the brothers' "first adaptation". He further explained why they chose the novel: "Why not start with Cormac? Why not start with the best?" He further described this McCarthy book in particular as "unlike his other novels ... it is much pulpier." Coen stated that they have