TRUE GRIT

‘I DIDN’T WANT TO

JUMP INTO THE DUKE’S BOOTS’

style and a more whacked-out sense of humour to the central story of a disreputable US Marshall (Bridges) hired by a young girl (14-year-old newcomer Hailee Steinfeld) to track down her father’s killer. American audiences have embraced it in a big way, too. Steadily rising to the top of the box-office charts over the Christmas period, the movie is currently on its way to becoming the highest grossing western ever (it currently sits just behind the Oscar-garlanded Dances with Wolves).

Coming out hot on the heels of Tron: Legacy, though, it has also given Bridges his second number- one movie in the USA in the space of a few weeks. It’s not a bad way of capping off a 12-month period that began with him having as he joked at the time his ‘under-appreciated status’ seriously messed with by winning just about every best actor award going for Crazy Heart. Not that he’s ever really been under-appreciated. Right out of the gate he scored an Oscar nomination with his breakout role in The Last Picture Show and, in the years since, he’s rarely received a bad notice (even if the same can’t be said for some of the films in which he’s starred). Nevertheless, in an industry fuelled by naked ambition and a pathological desperation for success, his current critical and commercial standing feels almost fable-like, the Hollywood movie career equivalent of the tortoise and the hare. Has this easy-going approach ever meant losing roles that he wanted to play? ‘Sure, there are a few of those. But the only director I ever

wrote to, asking to be in their movie, was Martin Scorsese. I wanted to play Judas in The Last Temptation of Christ. I loved that book; Nikos Kazantzakis is a great favourite of mine. But I didn’t get it.’

Mostly, his career has been defined by a desire to avoid getting stuck in a rut. Hence why he’ll follow a small independent film such as Crazy Heart with a $200m digital effects blockbuster such as Tron: Legacy, and then jump in the saddle for a western such as True Grit. It helps too that he’s always been prepared to make mental adjustments to help him negotiate the changing nature of the film industry. ‘You can waste a lot of time making movies and waste a lot of time in life wishing they were playing a different song.’ He pauses to think of a good analogy. ‘You know, you came to the party to dance a cha-cha, but there’s a waltz band here, so you might as well learn to waltz.’ He laughs. ‘Sorry, that’s kind of a weird answer.’ It’s a very Bridges answer, though, a Dude-esque way of underscoring that, while he may prefer the True Grit way of working and would certainly love the opportunity to make a third film featuring the characters from The Last Picture Show (last seen in the 1990 sequel Texasville), Tron: Legacy did give him a unique opportunity to act opposite a digital version of his younger self. In that spirit, then, it seems only right to ask what advice he’d give the eight-year-old Jeff Bridges. ‘Eh, it’s gonna be OK man. Just take it easy.’ The Dude abides.

True Grit is on general release from Fri 11 Feb. 3–17 Feb 2011 THE LIST 11