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film CANNES FESTIVAL: 2005
Tommy Lee Jones, anti-hero actor, has turned himself into an auteur, LIAM LACEY writes
By LIAM LACEY
Friday, May 20, 2005 Page R6

CANNES, FRANCE -- By reputation, Tommy Lee Jones is a bit of an ornery cuss. A Texas journalist said he once saw him in a Houston restaurant, where a fan came up to Jones during dinner and said, "I don't mean to bother you but . . .." Jones, without looking up from his steak, shot back, "Then don't."

The deadpan anti-hero of The Fugitive and Men in Black counts among his unusual cast of friends Al Gore, Willie Nelson, Gary Busey and Robert Duvall. Jones's abrupt, no-nonsense style carries through his films and life, but on this warm May morning, in interviews, he's softening his crust, just a little.

At the 58th Cannes Film Festival he has emerged in a new persona: an auteur. His film, The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, is a modern western, in which Jones plays a ranch hand called Pete who goes on a trek to bring home the body of a murdered illegal immigrant. He takes as hostage the border trooper (Barry Pepper) who shot his friend.

As Jones tells it, the idea of making a film came about one day when he was riding in a pickup truck, deer hunting on his ranch near San Antonio, Tex., with two of his buddies, producer Michael Fitzgerald (The Pledge) and Mexican writer Guillermo Arriaga (21 Grams, Amores Perros). "I thought, we got a lot of talent in this truck -- we should make a movie."

He wanted it to be about west Texas and social contrasts between the Hispanics and the anglos, the present and the past, the ranch and the town.

Arriaga wrote the script, concentrating on the relationship between Texans and Mexicans and, as he says, "the weight of death on the living," under the strong influence of William Faulkner and the Mexican novelist Juan Rulfo. Jones had three English translations of the script done, with the final version a composite of the three.

Adding to the international flavour, British producer Fitzgerald introduced Jones to the French director-producer Luc Besson (The Fifth Element), who became the film's main financier.

What Jones asked Arriaga to write was "a movie about my part of the country and my people" of west Texas. By "his people," he means the humbler folk: He holds on to his ol' boy roots, though he has rubbed shoulders with the elite as well.

He grew up in the oil town of Midland, Tex., in the fifties, where the George Bushes were part of the same oil-executive community as his parents. After attending prep school in Dallas, he went on to Harvard, where he roomed with Al Gore, played guard on the football team and graduated cum laude in English literature.

When he talks about influences, he mentions John Ford and Sam Peckinpah, of course, but also Akira Kurosawa and Jean-Luc Godard. Among western actors, he says he's glad to "register my deep admiration for the Duke [John Wayne]."

Jones set out to make a western with some reservations: "There have been a lot of bad westerns made, which made it very difficult for me to make a movie about me and my people. Western is a category, almost an epithet, for a movie that has horses in it. But I don't really care about that."

His primary interest was to portray the fundamental Anglo-Hispanic biculturalism of Texas, and the porous barrier between Texas and Mexico. "I don't believe in that border," he says.

Canadian actor Barry Pepper (Saving Private Ryan), puts it this way: "It's about the timeless ranch life and the archetypal South, contrasted with the bloated, homogenized, greedy, fast-lane America."

Pepper suggests the line of continuity between Jones the man, the actor and the director: "This is a minimalist film consistent with the style of Tommy Lee Jones as an actor, or in his lifestyle. You [the viewers] have to invest a little bit of putty to fill in the blanks."