Tommy Lee Jones seemed out of place in a three-piece suit and looked like he longed for the cowboy hat his co-star Dwight Yoakam was wearing, while attending the American Film Institute premiere of Jones’ directorial debut The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada.
The drama is about a ranch foreman (Jones) who promises to bury his Mexican friend, Melquiades Estrada, back in his homeland. He kidnaps a border patrolman (Barry Pepper), who covers up shooting (Julio Cedillo). The film was shot on Jones’ 105,000 acre ranch in Texas.
During the introductions, the Oscar-winning Jones was compared to great directors–John Huston, Akira Kurosawa–but he kind of gave an aw-shucks when Hollywood.com caught up with him after and said, “It’s nice to hear those kind of words, keep them coming.” And that’s just what’s happening. Jones has already won best actor and was nominated for a Golden Palm at the Cannes Film Festival, while screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga picking up the prize for best screenplay. Now, it looks like Oscar might be calling.
Hollywood.com also chatted with Melquiades Estrada’ cast, including Dwight Yoakam as the sheriff and January Jones as the border patrolman’s wife–and discussed their director’s no-nonsense temperament on the set.
Hollywood.com: Why did you decide to direct a movie?
Tommy Lee Jones: “Essentially it was a lust for a creative control. I don’t direct movies for a living. I don’t have to. So I can be very demanding and it takes a long time to get the demands that I make met. I want to be a director and I don’t want to take direction from anyone. I want to control the script and the casting. I want to be in charge and what lives in you and where we put it. Then I want to be in charge of the editing and I want to do the sound mix too. I’m smarter than most of the directors that I work for [Laughs]. And also I can read my own mind. So it’s a little bit easier.”
HW: Why did you look specifically for Guillermo Arriaga to write this?
TLJ: “I loved Amores Perros and shortly after it was released I was talking to my friend Michael Fitzgerald who wound up on this as a co-producer. I said to him, ‘Man, that’s a really good script. I love the approach.’ And he agreed and said, ‘Well, if you like it that much why don’t we call that screenwriter.’ I said, ‘No. We can’t do that.’ He said, ‘Why?’ I said, ‘I don’t call people that I don’t know. It’s just not something one does.’ He said, ‘That’s fine.’ And he picked up the phone and called him. And a couple of days later Arriaga and his wife and Alejandro Inarritu and his wife and Fitzgerald came to dinner at our house in the Pacific Palisades, that we’d leased while we were working here. We had a nice dinner and talked about movies and kids and politics, and all the stuff that people talk about at dinner. I learned that he likes to hunt. He’s an angelic character. I’ve never even heard him raise his voice. He’s a sweet character, and he likes to hunt things down and kill them and eat them. [Laughs] And we have a need for that because our deer populations grow and grow and grow and they overpopulate and compete with one another for browse and forage and that lessens their disease resistance and lessens the lactations in the does and hurts the herd. So you have to thin them out. And it can be fun and good eating. So he joined our deer hunt that we have in West Texas every year, and after a few years of that we all decided to make a movie together.”
HW: What do you think about the Minute Men on the borders and the vigilantes?
TLJ: “Hmm. There’s a senator here in the United States that has referred to our borders as hemorrhaging. Their chosen metaphor is an open, bleeding wound. She wants to put a bill up that would pour millions of dollars into federal enforcement of the borders and to state enforcement and check this, give money to the vigilante groups. That is the degree of raging paranoia in the United States. It’s actually being discussed on the floor of the senate, whether or not vigilante groups should be funded by the federal government. Now this senator is like many politicians, they feed on headlines in the same way that horse feeds on hay. But the headlines are there, and they are indicative of the paranoia.”
HW: What do you think about them?
TLJ: “I mean, well, can you imagine it–hundreds of frustrated Rambo’s each with his own ball cap. They’ll give them a ball cap and a t-shirt and enough buy a gun and pay for their motel rooms and gasoline and tires while they traipse up and down private property–someone is going to get hurt.”
HW: Have you met guys with the same attitude as Barry Pepper’s character?
TLJ: “Yes, or worse. They’re everywhere. People with that attitude! Of course. Haven’t you? I mean, I didn’t make the movie with the idea of opening a dialogue. These are all issues that all concern me and I wanted to humanize them.”
HW: Can you really turn off your acting like that and switch from being director and actor?
TLJ: “Well, when it comes to doing intensely emotionally things or dangerous things like falling off of a cliff or wrecking a car you’re really interested in the convincing illusion of danger. You really want that to be there. In a sense the same thing would apply to emotions of that level. You’re interested in that illusion. No one needs the real thing. Life would be rather miserable. That’s what we do for a living. We are hired professionals. Please do not do these stunts in your own background.”
HW: Were those your horses in the film?
TLJ: “Some of them. All of the cow horses were. The buckskin who reared up and acted like he was falling off of a cliff was from the ranch. There were maybe two horses and one mule.”
HW: Was that a real horse that fell off the cliff? It looked so real?
TLJ: “Well, we did five takes and had to kill five horses, but they were old horses.”
He’s kidding, of course.
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Julio Cedillo
Hollywood.com: You get a lot of screen time while playing dead on a horse, don’t you?
Julio Cedillo: “Yeah, the dummy got more screen time than I did. Someone told me I should watch Weekend at Bernie‘s to learn about the part. That was a bit morbid.”
HW: We heard you got to work on Tommy Lee’s ranch?
JC: “Yeah, he had me work the ranch, and I didn’t get paid for it, he said he doesn’t pay for an actor to do research. Anyway, I lived and work with the other ranch hands on his ranch. I didn’t need to do much research, I live in Texas, I speak Spanish, I understood.”
HW: Did you have any apprehension working for someone who’s known for being so tough?
JC: “He is so methodical, he still is a cowboy inside. He speaks better Spanish than he does in the film. He is very sure of himself. He cares about every aspect of the film, he could do craft services, and sometimes he was craft services.”
HW: Did you have any concern working for Tommy Lee Jones?
Dwight Yoakam: “He does have a reputation for being mean. He is demanding. There is a method to his approach. He’s a rather sensitive artist, he watches some of these scenes like a mother giving birth. He doesn’t like the trappings of celebrity.”
HW: You have a very unflattering role as the sheriff, and you do a nude scene, too.
DY: “Yeah, this guy has hat hair and he pencils in his moustache. It seemed appropriate, this is not a glamorous film. I had no concerns about the nude scene, I’m 49 years old, who cares? I’m not going to be any more than I am.”
HW: We hear you got to spend some time with real border patrolmen?
Barry Pepper: “Yeah, I went out there with them, heard some of their stories, met some of the Minute Men. It was nice filming on Tommy’s ranch. There’s a lot of open space, a lot goes through your mind when riding out there.”
We also heard you got injured?
BP: “In the scene in the cemetery, a piece of a camera fell and hit me in the head and I had a deep gash that sliced my head open it. I got couple of stitches.”
HW: What about work with Tommy Lee Jones?
BP: “I heard the same stories about Tommy lee Jones, I head them, but he’s a 24/7 hard-ass and I was raised by men like that. Most people don’t see his heart. He cares a lot. I loved working with him and he makes a tremendous director. And as far as acting, he makes it look flawless. I watched him a lot.”
HW: You play Barry Pepper’s wife who was his high school sweetheart, and their sex scenes seem rather emotionless, don’t they?
January Jones: “Their relationship starts to sour, you can’t blame it on his character alone. He is very isolated and she went to the mall a lot. People say what she went through is domestic abuse, but I think it’s common. The husband comes in and wants his fix.”
What surprised you about working with Tommy Lee Jones?
JJ: “He’s very funny, and people won’t know that he wrote the 15-minute soap opera that’s in the movie playing in the background, and that’s our wardrobe woman in it.”
The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada opens limitedly in theaters Dec. 14.
