Tagline: Punishment comes one way or another.
Charles Portis’ novel is about a 14-year-old girl who, along with an aging U.S. marshal and another lawman, tracks her father’s killer in hostile Indian territory. While the original film was a showcase for John Wayne, the Coens’ version will tell the tale from the girl’s point of view. The original starred Kim Darby as the teen, Wayne and Glen Campbell as the lawmen, Jeff Corey as the killer and featured Robert Duvall and Dennis Hopper as fellow outlaws.
Mattie Ross (Hailee Steinfeld) arrives in Fort Smith as her family’s sole representative, in search of the coward Tom Chaney (Josh Brolin), who is said to have killed her father for two gold pieces before setting out into Indian Territory as a fugitive. Beholden to follow Chaney and see him hanged, Mattie enlists the help of a man rumored to be the most ruthless U.S. Marshal in town — trigger-happy, drunken Rooster Cogburn (Jeff Bridges), who, after many objections, agrees to hunt Chaney. But Chaney is already the target of the talkative Texas Ranger LaBoeuf (Matt Damon), who also aims to catch the killer and bring him back to Texas for an ample reward – which brings the trio to collide on the trail.
Each willful and stubborn, each driven by their own rough moral codes, this unlikely posse rides towards an unpredictable reckoning, as they find themselves enveloped in the stuff of legend: mischief and brutality, courage and disillusion, doggedness and unalloyed love.
“People do not give it credence that a young girl could leave home and go off in the wintertime to avenge her father’s blood, but it did happen.” – True Grit, by Charles Portis
In 1968, The Saturday Evening Post published a serial novel that riveted readers with a story that immediately felt like a grand and timeless American legend, and kept them hungering for more. This was Charles Portis’ True Grit, the tale of an unusually stalwart young girl seeking to avenge her father’s death with the aid of a washed-up, frontier lawman and a forthright Texas Ranger who all set out into Indian Territory to find the killer. Laced with deadpan humor, rife with ruggedly individualistic characters, and cut through with richly American themes, the novel would take on a life of its own.
Like Mattie Ross, it would cross the river into that realm where real life events turn into tall tales and legends, becoming both a bestseller and an enduring literary classic, passed from reader to reader and writer to writer, over the decades. The book was soon being taught in schools, became a 1969 movie starring John Wayne, and the title was woven into the very fabric of the language.
The words “true grit” came to represent the kind of single-minded, cocksure gutsiness that can see a person through incomprehensible circumstances – a concept at the core of the American spirit. But Portis’ story was about more than courage. Narrated by the starkly unsentimental spinster that Mattie Ross becomes in the wake of her escapade, it also probed the restlessness of the American character, with its conflicts between the yearning for adventure and the need for home, between the desire to right injustices and the cost of such retribution to body and soul. The characters of Mattie, Rooster Cogburn and LaBoeuf clash in big ways not just with each other and the outlaws they’re after, but with their own hearts as they veer between the untamed and the righteous.
What lends the novel its timelessness and transcendent quality most of all is Mattie’s voice, which stands apart in literature. Best-selling author George Pelecanos in a 1996 NPR interview, explained: “Mattie’s voice, wry and sure, is one of the great creations of modern fiction. I put it up there with Huck Finn’s and that is not hyperbole… Most importantly, it can be appreciated by readers of various ages, education levels and economic backgrounds. It’s an egalitarian work of art.”
Portis ultimately wrote five novels (True Grit was his second, after Norwood), and over the years, readers have fallen in love with his alchemical blend of comic folksiness and bold archetypal themes. Among those who came to admire Portis’ works were Joel and Ethan Coen, who themselves have spun some of the most compelling motion picture tales of our times, starting with the noir classic Blood Simple and including Raising Arizona, Miller’s Crossing, Barton Fink, the Oscar-winning Fargo, The Man Who Wasn’t There, O Brother Where Art Thou?, the Oscar-winning No Country For Old Men and A Serious Man.
“We’d read Charles Portis’ books but this one seemed especially amenable to have a movie made from it,” says Ethan of their decision to adapt True Grit. The brothers were drawn to Portis’ daring decision to place an irrepressible young girl at the center of a novel rife with brutality, irony and harsh realities, which appealed to their sense of the unusual. Mattie’s story is certainly full of the raw humanity and ink black wit that have often characterized the Coens’ cinematic vision, but at the same time, True Grit is a departure for them, featuring their most unabashedly literary, emotional and direct storytelling.
“It’s told by this very self assured 14 year-old girl,” adds Ethan, “which is probably what makes the book so strange and funny. But it’s also like Alice in Wonderland because this 14 year-old girl finds herself in an environment that’s really, now-a-days, exotic.” Ethan continues: “That’s another thing about the book — the setting is really exotic but obviously Portis knew the period and the place. He made the details of the setting so vividly real that they became surreal.”
The novel is also decidedly a Western, a genre that the Coen brothers wanted to tackle outright for the first time. Although some might want to put No Country for Old Men in that category, for Joel and Ethan that film was a modern thriller. The tones of the two films diverge. “No Country For Old Men was set in Texas,” explains Joel, “but it was a contemporary movie. Nobody rides a horse in it except in the respect that people still ride to get into the backcountry. We never really considered that a Western. That was in our minds something different.”
The screenplay stayed faithful to Portis’ construction of the novel, which keeps Mattie at its core and brings her full circle as a tough, old woman searching for Rooster Cogburn in a faded Memphis Wild West Show. Echoing Portis, they aimed to give Mattie’s voice – as plain, unflinching and sonorous as an old ballad – its full due on the screen, and to paint the equally mesmerizing Rooster Cogburn and the Texas Ranger LaBoeuf through the light of her recognition –or hope — that they all might be connected by something gritty and honorable in their spirits.
Jeff Bridges, who was cast in the role of Cogburn, says it was the idea of mixing the book’s authentic cadence and rollicking yet moving tone with the Coens’ cinematic approach that got him so excited to tackle an iconic character in a fresh way.
“When the Coens first mentioned the idea of making True Grit, I said ‘Gee, didn’t they make that movie? Why do you want to do it again?’ and they said, ‘We’re not remaking the film, we’re making a version of the original book by Charles Portis’. So I read the book and I immediately saw what they were talking about. It seemed like the perfect story for the Coens to make into a movie. And since they have never made an actual Western adventure before, it was going to be a surprise.”
Adds Matt Damon, who plays LaBoeuf, “I’d never read the book until the Coens gave it to me, but it’s a fantastic American novel that deserves to be recognized as that. Their adaptation was just great. They used so much of the original dialogue and captured Charles Portis’ ear for the way people really spoke. I was just floored by it. Yet you always feel the Coens’ voice because they’re such powerful artists.”
Concludes Barry Pepper, who plays the outlaw Lucky Ned, and works with the Coens for the first time on True Grit: “The dialogue in the novel is like cowboy poetry done by Shakespeare. The Coen brothers got that rhythm, that precise musicality. What’s remarkable about their adaptation is how specific and true the language is. The way they have re-interpreted and then visually expanded on what Portis did in his novel is something quite beautiful and special.”
Setting and Design
The dueling themes encompassed by True Grit – justice and revenge, wilderness and sanctuary, individualism and loyalty, real life and legends — may be outside of time, but the action takes place in a very specific era and place that has long enraptured the American imagination: the last days of the true frontier West. The tale begins in 1878, when Mattie sets out across the river on her first, and greatest, adventure. At that time, the U.S. consisted of only 38 states and the town where Mattie’s father died — Fort Smith, Arkansas — was the very westernmost border of the nation, the last “civilized” town before the formal United States faded into an untamed and feared wilderness.
Just across the state line lay the Indian Territory, then not part of any state (but which would in 1907 become Oklahoma), where land had been set aside for the use of Native Americans under the Indian Intercourse Act of 1834. This “no-man’s land” drew fugitives, escaped slaves and others hoping to disappear off the map, who often holed up in the woods or the rough-hewn Winding Stair Mountains about 70 miles from Fort Smith. Thus, Fort Smith also became a hotspot for U.S. Marshals, a colorful assortment of whom were posted to bring back escaping criminals, dead or alive.
Considered a kind of gateway between two worlds, a popular saying about Ft. Smith at the time was “There is no law west of St. Louis and no God west of Ft. Smith.”
To recreate life on both sides of this fraught, powder keg of a borderland, the Coens worked with a trusted artistic team, including cinematographer Roger Deakins and production designer Jess Gonchor, who early on dove into exhaustive research and scouting, searching for remote areas where they could authentically recreate the late 19th Century West as Mattie and Rooster Cogburn would have experienced it. Hunting for a place to shoot a wintry landscape in the late spring, they wound up heading northwest from Arkansas into New Mexico and West Texas.
“The story was written as taking place in Arkansas and Oklahoma Territory but we had a couple of constraints which were, this is a winter movie and we wanted snow in part of it — on the ground,” explains Joel Coen. “That made us look a little bit further north than either of those locations. We shot most of the exteriors in New Mexico and most of the town of Fort Smith and interiors in Granger, Texas, just outside Austin.”
For Roger Deakins, who recently shot another take on the 1870s West, Andrew Dominik’s The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, as well as the Coens’ No Country For Old Men – both of which drew Oscar® nominations for his cinematography in 2008 – True Grit was a chance to entwine all that he learned on those two very different films. “To me, this film is a kind of amalgamation of that stark natural realism in Jesse James with the poetic realism of a Cormac McCarthy story,” he explains. “I was very glad I had done both of those films before True Grit.”
Deakins says the folkloric feel of the film evolved organically as he and the Coens began collaborating. “I began by reading the book, which is so poignant and has such a deep sense of the period,” he says. “The idea of this young girl coming of age during a journey of revenge is both harsh and melancholy. But because the whole story is really the memory of young girl, that lends to it a slightly larger than life quality. Then I read the script, and of course Joel and Ethan write in an extraordinarily visual way. They created a path of storyboards but the look of this film really developed as we found it, scene by scene. For example, the scene with the hanging tree is one we looked at again and again. Originally, it was going to be in a completely open, empty wilderness, but then we found this stand of denuded Cottonwoods, literally moments before they were about to bud, and that influenced the whole creation of the sequence.”
Although he and the Coens have developed a rhythm of working together over the years, Deakins say True Grit was something new again. “This film has a very different feel to it,” he acknowledges. “It has a lovely kind of flow as a singular piece. There is nothing tricky or clever or ornate about it and that was the aim. The way the film was lit, the way it was framed, the way the camera relates to the story and the characters, was all very much based on intuition and personal interpretation.”
He goes on: “The biggest challenges were related to the physical scale of the locations and the logistics of lighting so many night shoots. It was important to the boys to show the landscape at night, but it is difficult to shoot that kind of terrain in low light conditions. I also wanted to play a bit with color in the night scenes, keep them more blue than I might normally do, play with the firelight in the campfire scenes, which contrasts the harshness of the day with the mysteries of the night.”
One of Deakins’ favorite scenes, however, involves sunlight – the early scene in a Ft. Smith Courthouse as Rooster Cogburn defends his trigger-happy ways, engulfed in the shadows thrown by a massive window streaming light over him. “I love the way Rooster is introduced, where he begins in silhouette and then this shaft of light slowly reveals him to Mattie for the first time,” he says. “Of course, it is one thing to imagine such a thing and quite a bit more difficult to pull it off.”
Production designer Jess Gonchor, too, had his work cut out for him, in turning what he and the Coens imagined into palpably real locations. From the moment he read Charles Portis’ book, he knew his biggest task would be trying to place audiences inside the visceral life of Fort Smith, Arkansas, the thriving frontier city where the story kicks off as young Mattie arrives by train, steadfastly determined, whatever it might take, to avenge her father’s killing.
Gonchor began what became an intensive journey with a personal research trip to Fort Smith, which today is the second largest city in Arkansas. Once there, he dove into the local historical society’s vast treasure trove of photographs and started “getting a feel for the place as it might have once been.” Then, he set off on a five state tour in search of a stand-in for Fort Smith that would be amenable to a major overhaul and set construction. He found what he was looking for in Granger, Texas, a quiet agricultural community outside Austin. The town seemed to have everything necessary: turn-of-the-century brick buildings, sprawling streets and, most importantly, it sat right on a historic train line, with tracks dating back to the days of the Union Pacific.
“Granger was the town that time forgot,” muses Gonchor. “It had post Civil War buildings a lot like the ones I had seen in my research, and it had the train crossing, which is so important because you have to sense that Fort Smith is the last stop on the line as Mattie arrives on the train.”
The town lent Gonchor many options. “You have to keep in mind that Fort Smith was a big city. It wasn’t a coal mining town or an encampment, it was a place full of the flavor of a new age coming to America, with these big stream trains rolling through bringing strangers. The tops of the buildings in Granger have fantastic shapes to them, which isn’t 100% historically accurate, but it created great lines and shadows. There were also pockets in Granger where we could create whatever we needed to, where I was able to say, ‘Here is where I could put Stonehill’s Barn’ for example. Tons of work went into remaking the town but it gave us a lot of possibilities.”
Gonchor was ultimately able to turn a town with a population under 1500 into a bustling city on the rebound after the Civil War. “We did a little bit with visual effects to extend the town, but not much,” he remarks. “We were constantly looking for ways to make it feel bigger. When we put the dirt down in the roads — that was the turning point. It put just the right touch on things and gave everything more scale. That’s when I said, ‘We’re going to be able to do this.’”
Ultimately, Stonehill’s Barn, one of several evocative interiors in Fort Smith, where Mattie haggles over returning her father’s ponies, was created in an empty lot that had been an auto body repair shop. “They cleared out their junker cars and we created Stonehill’s Barn,” says Gonchor.
Likewise, the undertaker’s shop was a gutted out old building, which Gonchor filled with pine boxes to become Mattie’s first accommodations; and the boarding house where Mattie upgrades to sleeping with a snoring grandmother, was recreated in one of Granger’s Victorian houses.
Another favorite set from Fort Smith is Rooster Cogburn’s bedroom in the back of the General Store, built on a soundstage near Santa Fe. “Even though it was a stage set, we wanted it to feel very organic,” Gonchor explains. “You have this guy living on a sagging bed, amongst the carnage of all these things people bring back there to store. The idea is that it was all about layers, so we just kept putting more things in there and when people moved them, we left them where they were, to give it a real hodge-podge feeling like it would have in real life.”
Then, there is the courthouse, where Mattie first sees Rooster, which was unearthed in Blanco, Texas in the Texas hill country 45 miles north of San Antonio. “The building we found was a functional hall for town meetings and it was a diamond in the rough,” recalls Gonchor. “It was perfect for creating what was a very informal kind of court from that time.”
Though much of the rest of the film is shot in exterior, Gonchor notes that the locations became no less essential to the story’s fabric – and no less challenging. For example, a key, atmosphere-setting locale is the river crossing where Mattie dodges a ferryman and fords the river on the heels of Cogburn and LaBoeuf. Finding just the right spot was anything but elementary. “That’s the first place we arrive coming out of the city into the wilderness,” Gonchor observes. “We needed just the right crossing, the right length that a horse could swim, and where we could contrast two looks – manicured on one side and a much rougher on the other. A lot of work went into that.”
One of Gonchor’s favorite sets is Bagby’s Outpost, the trader’s cabin where goods and, more importantly, information are exchanged as the woods give way to the Winding Stair Mountains. Gonchor calls it “the most rustic thing in the movie.”
“I love it because it really shows you’re no longer in the city,” he comments. “We found the perfect spot to build it new, Las Vegas, New Mexico, and I was inspired by a house I’d found in my research with a pole through the middle of it. I’ve never seen anything like it, and it was just what we needed to get the right shots. You never see the inside, just as you never see where Mattie comes from, and I like the mystery of that.”
A more makeshift cabin was crafted for Greaser Bob’s place, where Mattie and Cogburn are almost ambushed. After a lot of searching, Gonchor came upon a box canyon on the San Cristobal Ranch in Lamy, New Mexico that had all the right stuff. “It was this oblong ravine surrounded by a rocky cliff and we decided we would kind of bury our cabin among the falling rocks,” he recalls. “The place had to look like a real hideout, and I researched quite a few of them. The priorities were always a place that could be kept warm and protect the people inside.”
While shooting the sequence at Greaser Bob’s, the production lucked into snowfall, which allowed for the stirring shot of several snow-dusted bodies leaned against the outer wall of the cabin.
The Rock Ledge where Lucky Ned and his gang make camp and the Meadow where Rooster has a shootout with the gang was found on the Charles R Ranch outside Las Vegas, NM. The Santa Fe Trail runs through the ranch and the ruts made by the wagons many, many years ago can still be seen, adding to the atmosphere.
This is also where Mattie falls into the infamous pit of snakes, which Charles Portis based on real-life Rattlesnake Cave – the historic site where in the late 1800s, Deputy Marshal John Spencer became a legend after an epic battle with a pack of rattlers while gathering evidence for a murder trial. While the exterior of the pit was an old turquoise mine, the interior was built on a stage in Austin. “We needed somewhere stable and safe to shoot, because there are so many close-ups,” the production designer notes. “We created a massive set that was about 60 feet high, the biggest single set in the movie, and carved the whole cave out of foam. It had to be narrow and frightening, and allow the camera to capture Mattie’s perspective as the snakes slither out of the skeletal remains.”
The final scenes of the film brought the production forward in time as a grown Mattie looks for Rooster Cogburn in a Memphis Wild West Show. Gonchor was cognizant of how much the world would have changed in quarter of a century since Mattie came of age in the wilderness.
“Even when we were creating Fort Smith, I was thinking about Memphis, and the contrast in time, going ahead 25 years,” says Gonchor. “In that one shot where Mattie arrives on the train, you see the buildings now have curved arches, are more expansive, and the city feels more technologically advanced. Then, she finds the Wild West Show, which takes her back into her memories of the past.”
Gonchor explored the rich history of Wild West Shows, which glamorized and exaggerated the Western lifestyle for Eastern audiences, existing somewhere between authentic reproductions and playful fabrications. “They were like a Western version of the traveling circus,” he says. “The beautiful part for me was creating all these wonderful, old side-show banners and the great wagons. We really wanted to create the kind of dusty, sun-worn, tired Wild West Show that Rooster Cogburn would wind up in, nothing fancy, shiny or glamorous. Everything looks like it sat through ten years of sun and rain. It’s just enough to take Mattie back to the feelings she’s held so long about Rooster.”
In the end, it was all these carefully considered, smaller details in the visual design that allowed the story to take on the vast, rambling feel of an American legend.
Summarizes Roger Deakins: “The fantastic part of this film was that no matter how hard the days and the nights were, we all knew at the end of it, we were working on something very special, and we also know that no one was working harder to create this world than the Coens.”
True Grit (2010)
Directed: Ethan Coen, Joel Coen
Starring: Jeff Bridges, Matt Damon, Josh Brolin, Barry Pepper, Hailee Steinfeld, Dakin Matthews, Elizabeth Marvel, Roy Lee Jones, Leon Russom, Bruce Green, Candyce Hinkle, Nicholas Sadler
Screenplay by: Charles Portis, Joel Coen, Ethan Coen
Production Design by: Jess Gonchor
Cinematography by: Roger Deakins
Film Editing by: Ethan Coen, Joel Coen
Costume Design by: Mary Zophres
Set Decoration by: Nancy Haigh
Art Direction by: Stefan Dechant, Christina Ann Wilson
Music by: Carter Burwell
MPAA Rating: PG-13 for some intense sequences of western violence including disturbing images.
Distributed by: Paramount Pictures
Release Date: December 22, 2010