< Our interview with directors Joel and Ethan Coen
Last weekend Jeff Bridges, the star of such hits as “The Fisher King”, “Starman”, “The Fabulous Baker Boys” and recently “TRON Legacy”, scored his biggest hit in over a decade with… well, a remake of an old John Wayne cowboy movie. Xerox or not “True Grit”, directed by “Big Lebowski” duo Joel and Ethan Coen, is one of the finest films you’ll likely see this side of the cinematic plains. Bridges spoke about the movie about the recent L.A Press conference. Moviehole was there.
Jeff, you have an iconic character in this movie, but why was the eye patch moved from the left eye to the right eye?
Because I’m a commie [laughs]. No, we put on the right eye, it felt good. We put it on the left eye, not so good. The right eye, “This feels right, what do you think, guys?” And we went back and forth like that.
Did you have any hesitation initially taking on a role that held so much weight?
Well, I was curious why these guys wanted to make that movie again and I think it was Ethan who talked to me first, and he corrected me. He said, “We’re not making that movie, we’re making the book,” as if there weren’t any another movie made, kind of thing. Just referring to the book, and I wasn’t familiar with the book, and he said, “Go check that out, tell me what you think.” And I read the book and I saw what they were talking about, because it’s such a wonderful book and it suited them so well, I thought. And, God, what a great character! Most westerns have that strong, silent type, and here we have this boorish bah-bah bah [laughs]. And it was going to be a lot of fun, I thought.
In terms of your performance, at what point did you find your Rooster Cogburn?
Each scene is an opportunity to show a different facet of the person you’re portraying. I began developing a character pretty much the same way every time. You’re looking at the script or if you’re lucky enough to have a book, you’re looking at that material and seeing what other characters say about your character, what you say about yourself, what the author says about you. That tells you quite a bit, and then one of the first things you do when you’re hired on to make a film is you work with a costume designer. In this case, it was Mary Zophres who was also the costume designer on The Big Lebowski. That’s one of the cool things about making movies, there’s a collaborative art form so you have all these other artists who are concerned about just specific areas that might be what the room your character lives in, what it looks like and what the clothes look like.
You meet them early..
The first people you meet is the costumer because they have to make all those clothes. So Mary has these wonderful books that she brings out and so you look at here’s a hat like this, like this and your character starts to fall in place. You dress as you’re looking in the mirror. There comes a time when the character starts to tell you what it wants and you might prefer, “Oh, this scarf looks nice and the character [pretends to spit],” it won’t stick.
Probably the same thing happens when you’re making a movie too. Sometimes you want to do something, it’s not what the movie wants. There’s a wonderful time when that happens. I’m not sure there’s one particular time it happens. It’s kind of a slow process coming into focus.
