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True Grit

Coverage by Nobuhiro Hosoki

Story : A 14-year-old girl (Hailee Steinfeld) joins an aging U.S. marshal (Jeff Bridges) and another lawman (Matt Damon) in tracking her father's killer into hostile Indian territory in Joel and Ethan Coen's adaptation of Charles Portis' original novel. Sticking more closely to the source material than the 1969 feature adaptation starring Western icon John Wayne, the Coens' True Grit tells the story from the young girl's perspective.

Opened December 22, 2010

Runtime:2 hr. 8 min.

Q&A with Joel Coen & Ethan Coen

 
(Q): Let me ask what drew you to it in the first place. Why did you say it’s going to be “True Grit”? Didn’t anybody come up to you first and say hey, they made that already back in 1969? How did this all happen?
 
(Ethan Coen) : It came out of an enthusiasm for the book, which we had both read, and of course we knew that a previous movie had been made of it. We weren’t really familiar with the movie. We saw it when we were kids basically, when it came out, and we didn’t remember it very well and haven’t revisited it since. The first version just wasn’t much of a factor for us. We just liked the book and thought there was probably still room for another movie to be made about it.
 
(Q): No temptation to look at the movie again?
 
(Joel Coen): Well yeah, there was some actually when we were shooting. In a couple of different scenes it did cross our minds a few times, “I wonder how they did this?” I think you were planning on renting it at one point halfway through the show because we were curious. At first we sort of thought why watch it, we’ll do our own thing, and then we got a little bit more curious about it. And then we just couldn’t get it together to go get a copy of it and look at it. We still haven’t seen it since we saw it when we were kids. We saw the trailer recently, the trailer for the original movie, which is actually a pretty amusing trailer. But no, honestly we’re not interested in the original movie. As Ethan said, it was the book that sort of got us interested in the story and doing the project.
 
 
(Q): This language is appealing to you why? What about reading Portis made a connection with both of you?
 
(Ethan Coen): Well there are a couple of things in this novel. This is actually the only period thing he wrote; his other four novels were all contemporary when they were written. There’s something funny about the novel is narrated by the 14 year old girl, it’s all told in her voice in the novel. It’s a first-person thing. And she’s just very funny. There’s something about both her attitude, which is really stoop-necked and the language, which is a little flowery and a little stiff, a little formal, all very Protestant. There’s something that’s funny about that embodied in a 14 year old girl, so there’s that. And just the dialog in general is actually kind of stiff and a little archaic sounding and a little flowery and funny in the Western context.
 
(Q): Can you talk a little about finding, she was 13 when she did this, Hailee Steinfeld, correct? How do you find exactly the right person to play this?
 
(Joel Coen): Well the language throughout the movie is taken form the novel and throughout the novel is rather formal and not at all contemporary. To a certain extent that’s where a lot of the hundreds or thousands of candidates for this job sort of washed out, which is that they didn’t sound natural doing that kind of language.

You can either make it sound natural and you have an instinct for that and a facility for that, and it has to be at that age obviously, because you don’t have training at the age of 13 in those things, or you don’t. So 99.9% of the girls that were seen I think for this role one of the things that washed them out early was the fact that they didn’t sound right. Hailee didn’t have any problem with it at all right from the get-go, and it was one the things that we immediately noticed about her when we first saw the audition tape of her.
 
(Q): Do you have them come in and read the same scene?
 
(Ethan Coen): Yeah, they came in. Actually, we did about 1/1000th of the work involved in finding Hailee. Most of it was done by a casting director named Rachel Tenner who saw literally thousands of girls throughout the South. We ended up casting Hailee in Los Angeles, which is an irony that wasn’t lost on any of us. But Rachel did see lots and lots of girls for this.
 
(Q): What about the idea of somebody like this…she had a little experience right? She had done some tv?
 
(Ethan Coen): I think one pilot, yeah.
 
(Q): And yet you’re throwing her into this movie with all of these professional actors. Was she thrown by this at all or was she just fearless?
 
(Joel Coen): No, she wasn’t. The very first time we met her in person we put her in a room with Jeff Bridges and Barry Pepper and an actor named Dakin Matthews and said “Okay, do the scenes.” She wasn’t at all intimated. She’s kind of completely unfazed. It’s the other thing which allowed her to ride in the movie. She didn’t have a lot of experience on horseback either but the wrangler said to us “She’s not got that much experience riding but she has absolutely no fear of being on a horse,” so she looked completely natural.
 

(Q): So what does Jeff Bridges do when you approach him about doing this, playing this part that if anybody reads or hasn’t watched the movie, the 1969 movie knows, come on, sacrosanct in Hollywood, John Wayne won his only Oscar guys for playing Rooster Cogburn. And you go to Jeff Bridges, The Dude, and say “We want you to do this part.” What does he say?
 
(Ethan Coen): It sounds odd but I don’t think it was a factor for him either. None of us much worried about that. We actually had anticipated maybe that will be something that makes him not want to do the part, but he just didn’t really seem to care. We told him he should read the book, which he did, to get a feeling for the pat, and like us was taken with the book and that was that. Matt Damon I think never even saw the movie, although I don’t know that he would have been much worried about being compared to Glen Campbell if he had. But again, for whatever reasons, he wasn’t worried about redoing that. None of us really thought of it as doing a remake; we were all kind of doing it with reference to the original novel.
 
(Q): This sounds great; nobody’s worrying. Who worried on this set?
 
(Joel Coen): Well we worried about other things. We may have been a little naïve in that respect, it’s true, I don’t know. But there wasn’t a lot of worrying about the comparisons to the first movie. We knew that the movie had a reputation and it was John Wayne and all that, and there was kind of a threshold decision about whether or not to proceed despite that. And once you have it’s sort of like you’ve jumped off the cliff or whatever and you just forget about it. You just go okay, well that decision was made so let’s not dwell on it. And I think that was probably the case for everyone involved. It never got revisited and I don’t think even in the back of any of our minds, in the back of any of our thinking. There were so many other things to occupy the space in your head that you use for worrying. Principally weather on this movie because so much of it was shot outside and we had such miserable weather during the show. Those types of considerations just didn’t rise to the surface.
 
(Q): Where did you shoot it?
 
(Ethan Coen): Half around Santa Fe, New Mexico, and about half outside of Austin, Texas.
 
(Q): What about the actors dealing with you? Everybody that reads anything about you guys you hear “two-headed director.” If I ask you a question you’ll answer the same as Ethan does if I ask him over in that corner over there. How does that happen? You’re not twins.
 
(Joel Coen): Well I think it’s a bit of an exaggeration, actually. We have been known to give opposite answers to actors. It’s like any other collaboration.  You proceed from a point of view about the material which is pretty much in sync; otherwise you couldn’t have gotten as far as the first day of shooting. You’ve written the script and sort of hashed out all these issues. And so because again, like all kinds of other collaborations that you have on a movie set, because you’re proceeding from a fairly close, in sync point of view about the material there isn’t a wide divergence of advice or editing or opinion when it comes to what we’re telling the actors.

Also, there’s a process that you get to before you even arrive on set with the actors as well. You sat in a room, you rehearsed scenes, you’ve talked about it. Everybody’s kind of on the same page at that point. I’m not saying that choose any two people and you bring them through that process that that’s going to happen, but after however long it’s been since we’ve been doing it, 25 years or whatever, it’s really not much of an issue.
 
(Ethan Coen): To tell you the truth, we don’t talk to the actors much. Most of the time we spend on the set with the actors, actually we do talk to them, but 98% of it is socializing.
 
(Joel Coen): Yeah it’s true. But the point sort of goes to everybody that you talk to on the set I guess, whatever little amount of talking you actually have to do.
 
(Q): Is there any level of intimidation you feel from the actors that they feel that you two come to the set knowing exactly what you want? Are they afraid at any time to say “What if we did it this way?” I want to know if they live in fear.
 
(Joel Coen): I’m trying to think of any actor who has ever been afraid to suggest something to us.
 
(Ethan Coen): We haven’t worked with a lot of shrinking violets.
 
(Q): I asked Javier Bardem and Woody Harrelson.
 
(Joel Coen): Oh Javier was terrified of us.
 
(Q): You made him drive, you made him do all that. But they said they came up with a bit of business to do in “No Country for Old Men” that they then came to you, they weren’t afraid to do that, and did whatever routine that they worked up, and then each of you together went hmm.
 
(Joel Coen): I don’t remember that but maybe it’s true. I don’t think any of the actors are afraid of suggesting things to us and I don’t think we’re afraid of telling them no, and that’s kind of the bargain that you have with anybody that you’re working with. You want their input and then you want to know that you can say no without them being too uptight about that.
 
(Ethan Coen): Woody Harrelson had read the book and had a dog-earned marked up copy of the book, and we visited him the first day of work in his trailer where he showed us all his speeches that we had cut out and lobbied for putting them all back in. And we actually put a few back in.
 
(Joel Coen): Woody would stay up every night and rewrite the script, bring it in in the morning, we’d say no, and he’d be fine.
 

(Q): Talk a little about working with Josh Brolin and what that experience was like and how you work out a character like that.

(Joel Coen): Case in point; Josh decides the guy has an Andre the Giant voice and we say okay.
 
(Ethan Coen): Actually, I think there was some debate early on about which part to cast Josh in. Wasn’t there?
 
(Joel Coen): We were sort of torn between Tom Chaney or the part that Barry Pepper ended up playing, the character’s name is Ned Pepper.
 
(Q): So you thought of him immediately, Barry Pepper, because it was Lucky Ned Pepper?
 
(Joel Coen): Yeah, I think we were sort of back and forth with Josh about it. Because Chaney is sort of a presence in the movie from the beginning but you don’t actually see him until that one moment in the river that that would sort of be a fun thing to do with Josh. That casting made more sense to us. But once we decided that’s what we wanted him to play and asked him to play it and he said yes then there was a little bit of rehearsal and a little bit of working stuff out in the rehearsal room, but mostly the actors make their choices and do their thing.
 
(Q): And you are at times horrified at the choices? What do you do when you are?
 
(Joel Coen): I wouldn’t say horrified, but usually no. Usually there’s very little for us to do, and when there is you talk to them and it’s an editing sort of thing. A little more of this, a little less than that.
 
(Q): Do the actors that you work with try to discuss the other movies that you’ve made with you? Do they want to sit down and talk “Fargo”? Do you let them?
 
(Ethan Coen): No, it’s doesn’t come up. As a frame of reference for thinking about this specific character in a specific movie, no, I can’t think of a single instance of that happening, referring back to another one of ours.
 
(Q): Nobody does that?
 
(Joel Coen): I can’t remember any. Honestly, I don’t think so. I guess it’s possible that every now and again somebody references something from another movie. Not ours necessarily, but just talking about as it may relate to a character in a very general way, but no.
 
(Q): How often do you two discuss what you’ve done in the past?
 
(Joel Coen): Well at a technical level that happens a lot. Especially since we collaborate so frequently with people in really key positions on the movie that we’ve worked with many times before, so there is this sort of frame of reference for a lot of the things you do from a technical point of view and you have that history on your own movies and can discuss that. So I’m talking about Roger, or Peter Kurland, who does the sound mixing, or Carter Burwell. There is a certain amount of discussion that way, yeah.
 
(Q): But nothing thematic?
 
(Ethan Coen): No, more in a problem solving kind of way.
 
(Q): Because your last movie, when you were making “A Serious Man,” the connection was well this must be about you, it was about you when you were growing up in Minnesota, the Bar Mitzvah had to be your Bar Mitzvah. How do you react to those questions about is it you?

(Joel Coen): I think those questions were fair enough on the last movie because we were sort of framing it in something which was consciously a familiar context to us. So I think the question’s fair but there’s a certain amount of over reaching that happens with it because whenever you’re doing a story, and it’s a made up story, it’s not our story, it isn’t you. It’s a character that you made up and there are things that touch on your own experience and in this case maybe directly on our own experience, but it’s still not you, it’s still a character.
 
(Q): Sometimes just as filmmakers you might feel closer to a particular character than you do to another one. I mean that can just happen because as the process is happening you go oh. But it hasn’t happened with you two?
 
(Joel Coen): Seeing ourselves in our characters?
 
(Q): Saying “I am The Dude” just didn’t happen?
 
(Joel Coen): No. I don’t think either of us is particularly interesting to ourselves or each other, seriously.
 
(Q): There’s this book that I saw and I didn’t have a chance to look at it but it’s a book about your films and it’s evangelical. It suggests that in every movie you’ve done that every movie comes back to faith. It’s called “The Dude Abides” and the sense of spirituality is inherent in every film that you’ve done and spells it out in maybe the most bizarre way I’ve ever seen. But the book exists. What do you do when you read what other people write?
 
(Joel Coen): I think Ethan wrote that under a pseudonym.
 
(Q): Do you want to confess your evangelical side today?
 
(Ethan Coen): It’s all strange. That’s an understandable exercise on the part of other people but it’s something that really doesn’t interest us. You do a story, you make up a story and you find it compelling. What gets you going is imagining different characters in a context that has nothing to do with yourself or what you’ve experienced personally. That’s kind of the fun of it; that’s the fun of doing it. Actually, since it’s us having dreamed it up, some people will want to relate to us personally, but that’s their exercise, not ours. And to the extent that we were aware of anything being close to home really we change it. Anything that relates to us is in spite of our efforts, not because of our trying to do autobiography in any sense or even work out concerns that we have.
 
(Q): There was somebody when I was coming in tonight that asked me to ask a question so I will because they said “Please ask them, they’re two Jews from Minnesota and Bob Dylan’s a Jew from Minnesota. What about him? What effect has he had on what you two do?” Any?
 
(Joel Coen): What effect has Bob Dylan had? Um. I can’t think of any in particular. I think we both like his music, but we like lots of people’s music. He’s from Hibbing(Minnesota) anyway, isn’t he?
 
(Ethan Coen): Prince is closer.
 
(Joel Coen): Prince is from Minneapolis.
 
(Q): So it’s like New Jersey to Miami; there’s just no connection whatsoever.

(Joel Coen): He’s Jewish. Is he? I think he’s born again.

(Ethan Coen): Well no, I think that ended.
 
(Q): Your next book under a pseudonym could be about Bob Dylan.
 
(Ethan Coen): We used one of the songs from “New Morning” on “Big Lebowski” actually, used it a couple of times.
 
 
(Q): Do you two look at yourselves as having a specific sense of humor? Are there some specific things that make you both laugh?
 
(Ethan Coen): We both like this book but so do a lot of other people. I don’t know that there’s anything peculiar to us. We like cheap gags but there are things where you just let the audience laugh where they want to and it’s not necessarily a comedy or gags or “funny” in quotes.
 
(Joel Coen): Our sense of humor is close enough so that we’re able to do what we do. That’s just kind of a given I guess. It’s a pretty un-self-conscious process that way in terms of how you approach the movies that you’re making, the stories that you’re telling, the script you’re writing, whatever it happens to be that humor finds its way in sort of despite any sort of conscious effort to inject it. And sometimes it’s really just a question of, as it was I think with Cormac McCarthy or Charles Portis, that there’s something that appeals to you about the sense of humor in the source material. Obviously, as Ethan just said, we both find that funny, and then you’re just trying to sort of do that justice in the adaptation.
 
(Ethan Coen): Actually, the Cormac McCarthy book, “No Country for Old Men,” well the book actually is pretty funny; although the movie we made from it there aren’t a lot of laughs in it. That’s probably the movie of ours with the fewest, mostly I guess because the humor in that Cormac McCarthy books comes from a first-person narration which mostly had to be tossed out. There’s not much of the sheriff’s voice in the movie.
 
(Q): Who makes you laugh in the outside world? Are there comedians, are there people that just strike your funny bone more than other people?
 
(Joel Coen): Bob Dylan we find very funny.
 
(Ethan Coen): I saw this thing on “The Tonight Show” with Charlie Callas doing a Henry Kissinger impression that just killed me. That’s kind of my frame of reference. I think of the old “Tonight Show”s.
 
(Joel Coen): Old “Tonight Show”s and Doris Day movies. Bob Hope movies.
 
(Q): You’ve added things. You didn’t just say “I’m going to do Charles Portis’ ‘True Grit.’” There are scenes in this movie that aren’t in the novel “True Grit.” So something about what you’re doing you’re saying to yourselves “We need to add this” for a reason.
 
(Joel Coen): I don’t think it’s so much need to add this for a reason as when you’re going through it you realize that in adapting in, making it a drama or making it a movie there might be a way of dealing with the way the story works that’s a more dramatic way or cinematic way. And so you take kind of a left turn and that leads to having to invent or embroider to a certain extent on the source material, and then it’s just like any other script or story that you’re making up.
 
 
(Q): You guys are such an inspiration to young filmmakers. I was wondering what your goals are as filmmakers. You make all these films but at the end of the day what do you want to get from your movies?
 
(Joel Coen): That’s a really good question. I don’t know what we’re trying to do really. Seriously. At a certain point you go we’re making all these movies, why exactly?
 
(Ethan Coen): At the end of the day it’s impossible for us to enjoy the movie having worked on it for whatever a year and a half you’re so sick of it and you do go wow. Well the pay is good. But we don’t watch our own movies. Why do we do it? Actually, one of the [W 05:59], and I get them confused, I can’t remember which one, he came to the office and he asked us the same question. He said “Why do we do this?” He was puzzled because you just cannot like your own movie so what’s the point?
 
(Joel Coen): That’s a seriously good question and one that we ask ourselves, and one for which we don’t have an answer really.
 
(Ethan Coen): It’s like life; it’s a little bleak.
 
(Q): What legacy would you guys like to leave behind and how would you like to be remembered as filmmakers?
 
(Ethan Coen): You want to just say see the answer to the last question. I don’t know. I guess it’s a sort of a compulsion and one isn’t thinking about a legacy, or even to tell you the truth, to some extent what other people will make of it except to the extent that what you’re doing has got to work, and work means work for other people. But beyond that you’re not thinking of terms any wider than that really.
 
(Joel Coen): I have to say the process itself can be enormously rewarding somehow and fun. That’s part of why you keep doing it. I mean not always, but it can be, and it frequently is. Just the pleasures of being involved in some kind of work that you enjoy as you’re doing it.
 
(Ethan Coen): But I mean I’m sure it’s something that those of you who are aspiring filmmakers can relate to is just the impulse of “I’ve got to get my movie made, I’ve got to get this thing done, I have to get this story told, I have to make my movie.” That’s all it is. And then alright, so you’ve made your movie.
 
(Joel Coen): Yeah, you want to get it out there. It seems enormously important to do that. The problem is that once you’ve done it it doesn’t seem so important anymore.
 
(Q): But you say it’s impossible to like your own movies, but the making of them could be. Is there one movie or two that you had the most fun making? Not looking at it but just the making of it?
 
(Ethan Coen): Oh sure. Some are more fun than others. I think probably the first one was the most fun just because we didn’t know what we were doing.
 
(Joel Coen): The experience of making certain movies is much more enjoyable than others, and it has to do with all kinds of things. Whose involved in the production, who the personalities are, what happens just in terms of where you have to be, what happens on the set. Just the whole process of it.
 
(Q): Your ability to make bleakness seem really, really full for really no reason is amazing. Any chance you can make “Blood Meridian”?
 
(Ethan Coen): That would be a hard one. “Blood Meridian” is another Cormac McCarthy novel and by far his most obscure. I actually read that book and through much of that book, not in a literal sense, going what the hell is going on? So that would be daunting to translate to film.
 
(Joel Coen): Various people have had the rights to the adaptation. I think Tommy Lee Jones had it. He may still have it. It does seem like one of those untranslatable novels in a way. I think a lot of Cormac’s stuff is. One of the things that struck us about “No Country for Old Men” is we both read a lot of his stuff before we read that. We read that in galleys but we thought this could be a movie, unlike I think a lot of his other stuff. It really struck us that way. There’s something much pulpier about it and it actually has a plot in a way that many of his novels don’t, especially “Blood Meridian.”
 
(Q): It seems that all of your films embrace different genres, different cultures, different times, and I think all your fans probably have a certain film that they look to when they think of the two of you. Is there a film that you take an especial amount of pride in that you’ve accomplished? A film that you are most proud of and the two of you kind of remember that holds a special place in your history of making films?
 
(Joel Coen): The answer would be no. Really, seriously. The more I think about it, and you’re only forced to think about it in forums like this, no you only make them out of some compulsion and once the fever passes I’m glad that’s over.
 

(Q): I was wondering why did you decide to go with widescreen, and how do you decide upon where the camera goes and capturing what you capture?
 
(Joel Coen): Well that’s interesting. The widescreen is generally something that seems natural for a landscape movie, for a movie that you’re shooting principally out doors and to a certain extent you want the location to figure as a major element or a character in the movie. We shot “Oh Brother Where Art Thou?” widescreen. Actually, I can’t remember; was that Super 35? Yeah. And then other ones where you go it’s just not appropriate, the format isn’t appropriate with the subject matter.
 
(Ethan Coen): We did talk about since there’s this crazy for 3D and since the lead character does just have one eye we thought maybe we should shoot this in 1D.
 
(Q): Is there an image from “True Grit” if I just came to you and said “True Grit” that sticks with you?  Not because it was good, not because it was beautiful or gritty or anything else, but you can’t get it out of your head.
 
(Joel Coen): An image that would pop in our head if you said “True Grit”? Um. I’m flashing on all kinds of things that have nothing to do with the movie. It’s like people at the studio. That’s a hard one. It’s kind of interesting to think about, but now that I’ve thought about it for more than five minutes it’s not fresh anymore; it’s ruining the experiment.
 
(Q): So the experiment failed, but we’re all happy the two of you came here tonight.

End.