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Features
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The Mare's Nest of Melquiades Estrada
It was a question designed to shine a light on the perennial topic of art vs. commerce. But it quickly segued into the territory of me vs. Tommy Lee.
Monday, June 5, 2006 at 11:00 AM
By Todd Gilchrist
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Steve Granitz/Wireimage.com
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No fan of inside jokes
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There are certain iconic male actors who can, on a dime, turn the simple exercise of a sit-down interview into a testosterone charged confrontation. I wrote about one such encounter with Morgan Freeman a few years ago, and another FilmStew writer reminded me of their own mood swing moment with Harrison Ford way back in 1989.
Making reference to the scene in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade where the title character takes a gander at a table full of chalices and exclaims, ‘That’s the cup of a carpenter,’ my intrepid colleague asked the actor if this line of dialogue was also a sly reference to the fact that Ford himself once plied that trade in real life. The actor’s smile quickly gave way to a scowl as he muttered, ‘Steven and I don’t do inside jokes.’
So there I was, sitting at the Roundtable Corral with Tommy Lee Jones and some fifth estate colleagues, and for some reason, I suddenly seize the opportunity to bring about my own, albeit temporary burial. ‘What challenge, if any…’ I begin as I ask Jones the question burning in my mind about The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, (new this week on DVD). ‘Did it mount for you to play a character of decidedly greater sensitivity than the roles you’re commonly associated with?’
The laconic star, who had no trouble telling the aforementioned Ford, ‘I don’t care,’ in response to his protests of innocence in The Fugitive, looks me squarely in the eye and replies, “None. Not any."
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Jeff Vespa/Wireimage.com
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A necessary alliance
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The room is silent; my mind is empty. I have no follow-up question. But somehow, I manage to ask the question again, this time in a slightly different way: ‘Does working on a personal project like this prove to be a tougher endeavor than the commercial vehicles you normally work on?’ Thankfully, this time, Tommy Lee cuts me some slack.
“Whether I help to write it or direct it or not, I try and understand every screenplay as well as I can,” he suggests. “I try and figure out what the director wants to see, and do my best to make it easy for him to see it."
A fellow journalist, to whom I’ll always be grateful, then asks a real follow-up question, inquiring if that’s easier when you are the director. "I'm smarter than most of the directors that I work for," Jones says with a generous chuckle. "And also, I can read my own mind, so it's a little bit easier. It’s fun. I’d do it for a living."
Three Burials is not in fact Jones’ first directorial effort; he lensed a made-for-TV movie in 1995 called The Good Old Boys. But the acclaimed actor says that he chose to direct this film because, in short, he wanted to do everything. “Essentially, it was a lust for creative control," he offers nonchalantly. "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 anybody."
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Sony Pictures Classics
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Solving the director IQ problem
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“I want to control the script and the casting,” he admits. “I want to be in charge of what [takes] are usable and where we put it. And then I want to be in charge of the editing and I want to do the sound mix too."
The direction Jones both gives and takes in this film may be unusual to most audiences, who are accustomed to clear, purposeful storytelling that features exposition and explanation at every twist and turn. Not so with Three Burials, which starts on an elegiac note, then detours sharply into morbid humor and then redirects itself towards existential rumination. About the film’s unpredictable combinations of intense drama and featherweight humor, meandering drive and introspective purpose, Jones says that he likes the juxtaposition of so many different elements because if nothing else it keeps you riveted to the screen.
"We wrote the script from beginning to the end and it was ready to shoot before we ever turned the camera on the first day," he explains. "That's the way it's built. You'll have bizarre moments and horrible moments and of course they need to be relieved by humor. It feeds the humor. The humor feeds the horror, and a little mystery every now then doesn't hurt. That's just the screenplay that we wrote."
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Steve Granitz/Wireimage.com
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Screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga
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An equally intrepid journalist pursues the issue further, asking where are the lines between decency and depravity when you’re talking about sustaining a corpse by burning ants off of its head or filling it with anti-freeze. "I can tell where the lines are," he responds definitively. "The movie speaks for itself. If you like the scene, it works. If you don’t, well..." He trails off in a tone of mounting disapproval. "That’s what makes you keep looking at it."
As if to prove his point, Jones reveals the details of his introduction to Amores Perros screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga, who wrote Three Burials especially for him. "I loved Amores Perros," he remembers. "Shortly after it was released, I was talking to my friend Michael Fitzgerald, who ended up being a co-producer, and I said, ‘That’s a really good movie. I loved that script. It’s original. I loved the approach.’”
“And he agreed and said, ‘Well, if you liked it that much, why don’t we call the screenwriter?’ I said, ‘No, we can’t do that’. He said, ‘Why?’ and I said ‘I don’t call people I don’t know. It’s just not something one does’. He said, ‘That’s fine’, and he picked up the phone and he called him."
A few days later, Jones and Fitzgerald welcomed Arriaga, director Alejandro Inarritu and their wives for dinner at the actor’s home in the Pacific Palisades, where the conversation continued. “We talked about movies and kids and everything, politics, all of the stuff that people talk about over dinner, and I learned that he likes to hunt,” Jones remembers. “He likes to hunt things down and kill them and eat them."
As I and a roomful of journalists mentally catalogue the infinite directions this story can go – based also, it must be noted, on the film’s bleak, even sometimes indiscernible comedic sensibility – Jones frames a suitably modest punch line. “He [Arriaga] 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."
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