French filmmaker Jacques Audiard is ready to make his English-language debut, and he’s choosing an adaptation of one of the best novels of the last decade for his source material. The director behind Rust & Bone, A Prophet, and this year’s Palme d’Or-winning thriller Dheepan announced on radio station RTL yesterday that his next project will be the English-language Western The Sisters Brothers, with John C. Reilly attached to produce and star.

Penned by author Patrick deWitt, Sisters Brothers is a darkly comic Western set against the backdrop of the California Gold Rush that revolves around two hired guns, the Sisters brothers, who make their way from Oregon City to San Francisco to murder a prospector. It’s one of my favorite things I’ve read in the last few years, with a biting tone in the vein of the Coen Brothers laced with an undercurrent of sadness and pitch black humor. It’s also a Western through and through, and with the right tonal sensibilities it could make for a truly fantastic feature film.


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Image via BN.com

Reilly has had the rights to Sisters Brothers for a few years now as a producer, but this is the first we’re hearing that he’ll also star in the picture. He’ll no doubt play one of the eponymous brothers, and I’m curious to see who signs on to star as the other brother. Regardless, Audiard is a promising and somewhat inspired choice to direct, so this project is certainly getting off on the right foot.

Read a synopsis for deWitt’s book below:

Patrick deWitt, a young writer whose “stop-you-in-your-tracks writing has snuck up on the world” (Los Angeles Times), brings us The Sisters Brothers, a darkly comic, outrageously inventive novel that offers readers a decidedly off-center view of the Wild, Wild West.  Set against the back-drop of the great California Gold Rush, this odd and wonderful tour de force at once honors and reshapes the traditional western while chronicling the picaresque misadventures of two hired guns, the fabled Sisters brothers. The most original western since the Coen Brothers re-interpreted True Grit—you’ve never met anyone quite like The Sisters Brothers. [BN.com]

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Image via Sony Pictures Classics