The longer the Coen Brothers' "True Grit" sits in our brains, the more we realize it's less a Western than it is a comedy whose soul is as inky as a moonless night on the trail. At the film's press day, we asked the notoriously illusive Coen Brothers (who we thought had a written stipulation in their contracts that they never had to set foot in the City of Angels when promoting their films) if we’d accurately gauged the film’s tone.
"Less a western than a dark comedy—" Joel Coen muses. "Well, there's certainly a lot of comedy [and] 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."
"The dialogue too," Ethan adds, "the formality of it and the floweriness of it also is just from the book."
The film is peppered with lines like "I call that bold talk for a one-eyed fat man, " and "You give out very little sugar with your pronouncements," is spoken in a brand of English that is contraction-less. There are no conjuction junctions functioning on the Coen Brothers screen.
"That was the first thing Jeff [Bridges] mentioned, noticed and liked," Ethan smiles, "the kind of foreign sounding nature of the dialogue and lack of contractions. We lifted it from the book."
"It was more like doing American Shakespeare," Barry Pepper offers. "There's almost like an iambic pentameter, a musicality and a rhythm to the dialogue. Charles Portis has such a specific vernacular of the period. It's so authentic in my mind because most people were probably pretty illiterate back then. They were maybe schooled on the King James Bible and that really infused the way they spoke. I think a lot of westerns missed that."
"I agree," Bridges interjects. "[Barry] said it perfectly. It was a fun challenge to take on."
