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On Set: True Grit
“I love Westerns,” Jeff Bridges says. “It means you get to ride a horse.” On December 25, Bridges saddles up in Joel and Ethan Coen’s adaptation of Charles Portis’s novel True Grit, in which he plays Rooster Cogburn, a hard-boiled U.S. marshal who helps 14-year-old heroine Mattie Ross (played by Hailee Steinfeld) avenge her father’s murder. The original 1969 film starred John Wayne, but Bridges says he felt no pressure to live up to the Duke’s Oscar-winning performance. “The Coen brothers’ first bit of direction to me was, ‘We’re not remaking the movie; we’re making the novel into a movie,’” says the actor, who shares the screen with Matt Damon, Josh Brolin, and Barry Pepper. When not in the saddle, Bridges spent much of his time on the Austin and Santa Fe sets pursuing another long-standing passion: photography. He was in high school when he started experimenting with the Widelux, a 35mm panoramic camera, and has been using one to capture behind-the-scenes movie moments for decades, often creating books of his images for the cast and crew. “I usually carry it around with me, even to readings and rehearsals,” he says. “It’s a view of making movies that most people don’t get to see.”
January 2011
"This was shot in a particularly beautiful location in New Mexico—a whole
grove of cottonwood trees that went on forever. Wearing an eye patch
wasn't as tricky as I thought it might be. It screws up your depth
perception, but I kind of got used to it. Whenever I wanted to see, I
just lifted the thing up."
January 2011
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