Joel and Ethan Saddle Up for a Truly Gritty Remake of a Western Classic

By Baz Bamigboye

IT’S a way off, but the Coen brothers, who made the Oscar- winning picture No Country For Old Men, are planning another version of True Grit.

This was the movie that won John Wayne an Oscar for playing crusty old Marshal Rooster Cogburn.

But the Coen brothers intend to go back to Charles Portis’s 1968 novel, which has a spinster recalling that, when she was 14, she set off from her family’s 480-acre Arkansas farm to avenge her father’s murder.

‘The book recounts the girl’s story,’ Joel told me. ‘In the John Wayne film, she was played older. We want her to be her real age it’s her story!’ In fact, I’ve just read Portis’s book and it’s a tale of rough frontier justice and a girl’s coming of age. Cogburn’s in his 40s much younger than Wayne was when he played him.

The Coens will join forces again with No Country For Old Men’s Oscarwinning producer Scott Rudin on True Grit, but it’s not going to happen for at least two or three years.

The Coens have Burn After Reading with George Clooney, Brad Pitt and Academy-Award-winning Tilda Swinton coming out this autumn, and they go into production later in the year on another Rudin production, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, based on Michael Chabon’s book.

Meanwhile, No Country’s Oscars triumph gave the film a big boost at the box office in Britain: figures this week have been up 92 per cent. As of Wednesday, the film had taken Pounds 5,958,000..

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