Written Interview: Joel & Ethan Coen (“True Grit”)
Today’s written interview is with Joel and Ethan Coen about their movie True Grit which has opened this week. The Film.com interview was conducted by Cole Haddon:
Cole Haddon: What was the most challenging part of making True Grit? Roger Deakins, your cinematographer, said it was keeping to the schedule.
Joel Coen: That’s true because it’s a largely exterior movie, and we were shooting in really difficult places. The weather was very uncooperative, so we were trying to really get a lot done in terms of the number of setups we usually do … to stay on schedule. Then fighting weather and other issues that were sort of really peculiar. Animals, dealing with horses, production issues that were peculiar to this movie that made it difficult to shoot it on such a short period of time.
CH: Following that up, did shooting some pretty damn iconic Western landscapes pose additional challenges?
Ethan Coen: You know what? That’s one thing that’s not faithful to the novel. The landscape is a total cheat, but we kind of thought people will think it’s a Western, and some things you just can’t mess with. People want that.
JC: The whole pictorial idea of the movie would have been much different in a place like Arkansas. The honest answer is it kind of becomes this mishmash of different considerations that go into where you’re shooting and how you want to treat the landscape. They’re a little hard to sort out after the fact, but it’s everywhere from the practical to just what does the movie actually want to be about.
CH: You two have done numerous genre movies — screwball comedies, film noir, detective. What about the Western genre did you want to convey or refute?
EC: I don’t think we thought about it as a genre movie so much as you might think. It was an interest in the novel, the story, Charles Portis’ novel. It is a Western, inarguably. There are guys with six-shooter guns on horses, but it’s not a Zane Grey story. It’s not a Western in that sense. Really, we were thinking about the novel more than doing a Western per se.
CH: Would you say this is less a Western then, and more of a dark comedy? Also, how did the actors tackle the stylized dialogue you wrote?
JC: Less a Western than a dark comedy? Well, there’s certainly a lot of comedy. There’s a lot of humor in the Charles Portis novel. It was one of the things that attracted us to the novel and the idea of adapting it. We wanted what was funny about the book, what was the humor of the book, to come through in the movie. That was important.
EC: The dialogue too, the formality of it and the floweriness of it also is just from the book. Again, that might be a question for the actors. Jeff [Bridges] noticed. That was the first thing Jeff mentioned, noticed, and liked, the kind of foreign-sounding nature of the dialogue and lack of contractions. It wasn’t a problem for us. We just lifted it from the book. I don’t know how the actors feel about it.
True Grit JC: I have to say, one of the things, when we first saw the first take of Hailee [Steinfeld] doing a scene from the movie, 99.9% of the hundreds or thousands of girls that read for this part didn’t have the facility to [speak as we needed them to]. They sort of washed out at the level of not being able to do the language. That was something which was never an issue with Hailee. Right from the beginning, it was clear that she was completely comfortable with the language. The language isn’t, as everyone’s pointed out, our language. That was the threshold level at which you could sort of hope to do the part, but Hailee had it right from the get-go in a very, very natural way.
For the rest of the interview, go here.