The Big Lebowski ends with the Dude assuring us he abides and the story's narrator promising he'll catch us further on down the trail. And we might indeed be in for a follow-up of sorts, given the news that the film's star, Jeff Bridges, is in talks to reunite with its directors, the Coen brothers, for a new adaptation of True Grit.

The Coens are no strangers to working with the same cast again; Steve Buscemi, John Goodman and John Turturro are among those who have appeared in Lebowski and multiple other Coen pictures besides. But Bridges has only ever played one part for them and it remains the defining role of his career, even if it's taken a decade for that to become fully apparent. The suggestion that he might be their leading man once again therefore carries a frisson of expectation for devotees of the Dude, especially as the filmmakers and actor have gone from strength to strength since their first collaboration: even those who turned their noses up at Intolerable Cruelty and The Ladykillers lavished praise on No Country for Old Men and A Serious Man, which just premiered at Toronto, while Bridges' roles in Iron Man and the forthcoming Tron sequel see him wielding more industry clout at the moment than he has for a long time.

But what are we to make of his trading in the Dude's jelly sandals for John Wayne's cowboy boots? The 1969 movie of True Grit stars Wayne as Rooster Cogburn, a semi-retired marshal drawn into action by Mattie Ross, an adolescent girl seeking retribution for her father's death. While the film's main focus is the laconic heroics of Cogburn, the Charles Portis novel on which the story is based – and on which the Coens are reportedly leaning more heavily – filters the entire experience through Mattie's amusingly narrow perspective. Given the Coens' predeliction for outre narrators, there's a clear appeal there, as there is in the bodily mutilations and Biblical overtones that didn't make it from page to screen in 1969.

We can guess at several other reasons this material might have caught their eye. They are repeatedly drawn to mismatched pairs such as the story's central duo; their continuing and wide-ranging tour of great American landscapes has not yet taken in the expanses of Oklahoma and Arkansas, where the novel is set (though the film was shot in Colorado); and, despite being notorious lovers and up-enders of genre, they have never directly tackled a Western. This is all the more surprising given how much attention they have paid, in various forms, to the question posed by the Big Lebowski himself: "What makes a man?" There are few genres to which that question is more central than the Western, which perhaps explains why there are so many cowboy motifs in Lebowski, from the tumbling tumbleweed with which it begins to the not-so-wise words of Sam Elliott's Stetson-toting tee-totaller.

The character of the Dude was a wickedly irreverent send-up of the classic LA private eye, but also a sincere tribute: shambolic instead of sharp, two steps behind instead of one ahead, he was nevertheless indifferent to worldly temptations and instinctively inclined to do the right thing. It's also worth remembering that the character on whom the Dude most obviously riffs, Bogart's Philip Marlow in The Big Sleep, was himself something of a tongue-in-cheek take on the archetype. Cogburn is a similarly doubled-sided character: initially dissolute, drunken and inclined to a quiet life, he still proves worthy of the moral challenge that comes knocking at his door, not so much mending his ways as demonstrating that heroism can be found fully-formed in unassuming vessels. The Dude and the Duke might just have the makings of a great partnership.