Elah is a powerful, moving story, but not many people saw it and the film was a box-office disappointment. What happened?
(Looks bored.)
I don’t know. I’m not in the distribution business or the market-analysis business. I can’t begin to address those questions.

Were people reluctant to see a movie about Iraq?
It could be that the issues dealt with are ones that the general audience would prefer to turn away from.

Almost five years after the beginning of the war, you’d hope that the public would be ready for that.
You would hope so. But you might be disappointed. I do believe that the film raises all the important questions that face every American today. Whether or not they want to face the questions …

I know that you’re not crazy about talking politics …
No, I’m not. I’m not even enthusiastic.

… but I want to ask you about the relationship between politics and art ….
Whoa. (Pause.) I think it was Albert Camus who said that every breath you take is a political act.

Aren’t the choices you make as an artist political acts?
Yeah. Of course.

So is there something theoretically problematic for you about talking politics?
Sure. If there’s an art to cinema in the United States, it is embedded part and parcel in a huge economic machine. It doesn’t occupy an independent, disinterested forum where ideas are exchanged.

I’m not following where you’re going.
I’m not going anywhere.
(Contemplative pause.)
If you’re famous, your voice doesn’t really have any greater right to being heard than [that of] someone who’s not famous. Put it that way. It’s not very democratic.

But people who are famous do have a louder voice. Yeah, and I don’t like that. I don’t like that. As they say in Tennessee, I don’t like that idee.
Jones laughs, then falls indefinitely silent.

Let’s talk about Three Burials.
I think it’s a good film. I mean, I know it is. [But] I often wondered, sitting around what we called video village—where the feedback comes out of the camera—I’d look at what we were doing and shake my head and ask the script girl, “Do you think there’s anybody in the United States smart enough to see this movie?”

You’ve said that you chose the title because middle America isn’t smart enough to pronounce “Melquiades.”
Yeah, and they have had trouble pronouncing it, and it might have been costly at the so-called box office. But you would hope that people would want to learn how to say that word. I would love it if everybody could say that word—if everybody could speak Spanish.

You’re fluent. Where did you learn?
From childhood and then from school. It was necessary to speak some amount of Spanish on the playgrounds. Around the seventh grade I started making an academic study of Spanish, which lasted all the way through two and a half years of college. And then lots of travel through Mexico and Spain, and lots of work with Mexican cowboys and Argentine cowboys and horse-trainers. And living in San Antonio, Texas, for 30 years—it’s our second language and an integral part of our culture.

As I watched Three Burials, which portrays the land and people of Mexico beautifully, I couldn’t help but think, “this film was made by someone who loves Mexico.”
I love north Mexico and south Texas, and sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference between the two, and that’s what the movie’s about. “Borders” is the theme of that movie. Not only the international border, but other kinds of borders—between heart and mind, and on and on.

Men and women.
Yeah. It’s kind of a borderline movie.
Though Jones doesn’t smile, this is a joke.

There’s a lot of empathy in the film for Mexicans, and skepticism about North Americans.
That’s another border.

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