There’s not much that Joel and Ethan Coen haven’t achieved in their fabulously successful career. But, as anyone who saw their ill-advised version of The Ladykillers would know, they haven’t yet produced a cracking remake of a classic film.
So now they’re about to have another go at it, with a remake of the classic Western, True Grit, better known as the film that finally won John Wayne an Oscar.
Of course, the Coens are never ones to do things conventionally. Their **True Grit **won’t be a straight remake of Henry Hathaway’s 1969 movie, which told the tale of a young girl who, along with Wayne’s cantankerous one-eyed marshal, Rooster Cogburn and Glen Campbell’s US Marshal, hunts down her father’s killer in hostile Native American territory.
Instead, the Coens will base their movie on the original Charles Portis novel, and will focus their story on the young girl, rather than Cogburn. That said, we’re sure that Cogburn will still be a doozy of a role, and we’ll be astonished if the Coens don’t ask Tommy Lee Jones to fill it.
True Grit will be the Coens’ next movie, leaping ahead of their previously-announced adaptation of Michael Chabon’s novel, The Yiddish Policeman’s Union. Both that and True Grit will be produced by Scott Rudin, who produced No Country For Old Men for the brothers.
Paramount will be funding the whole kaboodle. And we’re genuinely excited – No Country For Old Men was a semi-Western, of course, but the prospect of the Coens working their magic on the genre full-blown is mouthwatering.