Best Western

THE SISTERS BROTHERS I Jacques Audiard digs his spurs into the cowboy movie, alongside Joaquin Phoenix and John C. Reilly…

I’m like a horse – an unpredictable animal,” smiles Jacques Audiard. “I like to be surprised by things and by a subject that I find interesting.” From his Fingers remake The Beat That My Heart Skipped, starring Romain Duris, to Oscar-nominated prison movie A Prophet, and from unconventional love story Rust And Bone to his Cannes-winner Dheepan, the French auteur certainly lives up to this capricious quality.

Continuing this run is The Sisters Brothers, an eccentric outsider western that marks Audiard’s English-language debut. Adapted from Patrick deWitt’s 2011 novel, this unorthodox 1850-set gold rush tale sees John C. Reilly and Joaquin Phoenix play Eli and Charlie Sisters, sibling assassins who work for an Oregon mobster named the Commodore (Rutger Hauer). “It was a real page-turner and it just jumped out as a film,” says Reilly, who pays tribute to his wife Alison Dickey for urging him to read DeWitt's book before it was published.

They optioned it – wisely, as the book was then shortlisted for the Man Booker prize – then spent the next six years developing it, with Reilly on board as producer for the first time in his long career.

The result couldn’t be better timed, with the western – a hardy perennial if ever there was one – enjoying a cultural bloom. From Scott Cooper’s Hostiles and the Coens’ The Ballad Of Buster Scruggs to videogame of the moment Red Dead Redemption 2, it’s currently cool to be a cowboy. But, typically, Audiard doesn’t see his film that way. “Maybe it’s a western for people who don’t like westerns,” he shrugs.