Some headlines just write themselves, you know? If that one made you throw up in your mouth a little, fear not. This isn’t a Wachowski Brothers situation, just a creative decision from the set of Tetro, Francis Ford Coppola’s follow-up to his fizzled comeback, Youth Without Youth. Per the Hollywood Reporter: “In what Francis Ford Coppola is calling a ‘sex change’ operation, Carmen Maura is replacing fellow Spaniard Javier Bardem in the family drama Tetro.” See? His words, not mine.

If the name Tetro rings a bell, you may recall an incident from last September: the computer on which Coppola had saved the screenplay was stolen from his home in Buenos Aires. Fortunately the Godfather auteur had backup copies, and production has now commenced in Argentina. “One of the important roles in the script is a mentor and teacher to Tetro (Vincent Gallo), and I originally wrote it for a man,” he said. “As I read and reread (the script), I felt that the interaction between the two characters would be far more intriguing if they were of the opposite sex.”

Other sources claim that Bardem never attended rehearsals for Tetro and “‘became unavailable’ for the project and is reading drafts of the script for his starring role in Rob Marshall's Nine.” Whatever the case, Almodovar regular Maura will now play the “literary critic and mentor to Tetro, whose younger brother (Alden Ehrenreich) searches for him in Argentina's capital city.”

Coppola has been splitting his time between the San Francisco Bay area and his new home in Buenos Aires, where he hopes to make a film a year, taking advantage of Argentina’s “relatively low production costs and the creative inspiration he finds on the streets of its capital,” according to an AP story. “After a while I realized that I was getting further and further away from what my original intentions had been. So at this age I decided, 'Well, why don't I make the kinds of films I wanted to do when I was 18? I'll just do it later in life.'” Nice work if you can get it.