Following modern French classics like The Beat That My Heart Skipped, A Prophet, Rust & Bone and Dheepan, Jacques Audiard is set to make his English-language debut. He'll direct a Western adapted from Patrick DeWitt's novel **The Sisters Brothers{
DeWitt's book, shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2011, revolves around the colourfully named gold prospector Hermann Kermit Warm, who's being pursued across 1000 miles of 1850s Oregon desert to San Francisco by the notorious assassins Eli and Charlie Sisters. Except Eli is having a personal crisis and beginning to doubt the longevity of his chosen career. And Hermann might have a better offer...
Audiard announced the project on French radio station RTL yesterday morning, so further details on the production set-up are unforthcoming so far. He said The Sisters Brothers chimed with him for having similar themes - principally survival in an alien country - to Dheepan; although clearly in a very different setting.
While Audiard will be negotiating a foreign language and an American genre, it's amusing to note that Reilly has just done the same thing in the opposite direction: he made a contemporary Western in France. Les Cowboys was directed by Audiard's regular collaborator Thomas Bidegain. Clearly connections were made.
There's no ETA for The Sisters Brothers yet, but Dheepan should hopefully arrive in the UK by the end of the year. Les Cowboys is out in France on November 25, but doesn't have dates anywhere else so far.
DeWitt's novel is published in the UK by Granta.