Joel and Ethan Cohen discuss what motivated them to adapt “True Grit” for the big screen. While the “Western” genre is typically considered a high risk venture, the film is now poised to become the highest-grossing Western of all time:

“In a strange way, I don’t think we were thinking about it even as a Western, exactly,” Ethan Coen said. “We weren’t even aware or thinking, ‘Oh, this is a popular genre or an unpopular genre; it’s commercially easy or it’s commercially not.’ That, actually, we were made aware of when we got a little farther down the road and started actually trying to get the movie financed. That was more something that we sort of discovered through the attitude of the studio. Short answer is we really maybe idiotically weren’t thinking about it.”

Joel Coen wryly rejoined, “Nobody can say being idiots hasn’t worked for us.”