Lone Star

by Richard Bradley
March/April 2008

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At age 61, Tommy Lee Jones is hitting his stride. In the past three years, he has excelled in three powerful films: The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, In the Valley of Elah, and No Country for Old Men. Directed by and co-starring Jones, Three Burials tells the story of Texas rancher Pete Perkins, who carries the corpse of his murdered friend Melquiades, an illegal alien, home to Mexico. No Country for Old Men, adapted from Cormac McCarthy’s novel, won four Oscars, including best picture, while Jones was a best actor nominee as Hank Deerfield in In the Valley of Elah, about a retired military policeman investigating the mysterious death of his son, a soldier home from Iraq.

Jones’ own story is the stuff of drama. Born on September 15, 1946, he grew up in Midland, a west Texas oil town. His father worked on rigs; his mother was a teacher, a cop, and a beautician. Jones earned a scholarship to a Dallas prep school, then continued to Harvard, where he acted, played football, and roomed with Al Gore. His first film role was a bit part in the quintessential Harvard movie, 1970’s Love Story.

He was not an overnight star. Over the course of the decade, Jones appeared on the soap opera One Life to Live and on television shows such as Charlie’s Angels and Family. Gradually the parts got bigger and better. In 1982, he won an Emmy for his portrayal of Gary Gilmore in The Executioner’s Song. That was a turning point; so was his scene-stealing role as gay businessman Clay Shaw in Oliver Stone’s 1991 film, JFK. In 1993, Jones won an Oscar for best supporting actor for his riveting performance as federal marshall Samuel Gerard in The Fugitive. After that came the popular Men in Black movies, Batman Forever, Volcano, and Space Cowboys, among others. Along the way, Jones acquired a reputation as sometimes aloof, occasionally surly, and usually disdainful of the rituals of movie marketing—including interviews. I met Jones at Manhattan’s Carlyle Hotel, where the actor, who divides his time between a San Antonio ranch and a West Palm Beach estate, stays when he’s in town. Over two glasses of chardonnay, Jones proved both intimidating and intriguing. Questions that bored him produced monosyllabic retorts, sometimes followed by stony silence. But he was also funny, erudite, gracious, and likeable. One got the feeling that, if one could ever get to know him, Tommy Lee Jones would be a very interesting man to know.

You recently gave an interview to London’s Telegraph in which you called Hank Deerfield, the retired military policeman you play in Elah, “disgusting.”
That writer characterized me as a dog.

He did?
Yeah. I didn’t have anything to say—I barked. Or I growled. Hangdog expression. I tried as hard as I could to be nice to that fella, and he pretended to be polite. He pretended to be a decent journalist and proved himself to be something else. So I don’t want you to think that I have any respect for that journalist at all.

OK … well, is it a challenge to play a character you find disgusting?
(Looks, sounds impatient)
Not at all.

Not at all?
No.
Long silence.

Because Hank didn’t come across that way …
Those are just my feelings about this character. He would seem to be a nice fellow, I would think, to just about everyone.

David Denby wrote in the New Yorker, “In the Valley of Elah is a rarity: an American film that convinces you that its protagonist is genuinely a great man.”
Well, ol’ Hank, he stayed after the investigation [into his son’s death] and uncovered what happened, and learned something from it, and therein may lie some measure of greatness.

I understand that initially you weren’t sure you wanted to play the part.
Yeah.

Why not?
A mood I was in or something. I don’t know.

After seeing the film, it seems hard to imagine anyone but you playing Hank.
Well, we worked really hard, and [writer-director] Paul Haggis worked very hard, and we were lucky enough to have Charlize Theron and [cinematographer] Roger Deakins on hand.

What was the name of the little boy?
What little boy?

The one who played Charlize Theron’s son [Devin Brochu]—you have an emotional scene with him.
I don’t know what that kid’s name was. He was a good kid; we became friends. But not to the extent that I learned his name.

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Lone Star, page 2

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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Lone Star, page 3

Speaking of borders, all the Republican presidential candidates supported building a fence along the border to keep Mexicans from crossing illegally. Mitt Romney advocated repatriating millions of Mexicans. Are those viable ideas?
The idea of a fence between El Paso and Brownsville bears all the credibility and seriousness of flying saucers from Mars or leprechauns. Or any manner of malicious, paranoid superstition. In other words, it’s bullshit.

But you hear the talk.
And the talk is worth headlines, the talk is worth attention, and that might lead to votes. It’s a predatory approach to democracy by those who would instill fear and then propose themselves as a solution. It’s very destructive. Very, very destructive. And it’s the perfectly wrong thing to do.

First of all, it won’t work. You can’t build a fence that I cannot get over, through, or under if I want to go to Mexico. In that [border] country, you cannot do it. It’s a complete folly. Ecologically, it’s a complete disaster, and sociologically, it’s a complete disaster. It’s an act of fascist madness.

And the people who are being appealed to, the voterships that are removed from that country, are being spoken to as if it’s time to fence their backyard so the stray dog doesn’t get in. “OK, let’s just build a fence.” That’s as far removed from reality as can be, and entirely cynical by those who would manipulate these people. It’s a sad day for the democratic process to see people manipulated through fear and insecurity.

In the film, the act of bringing Melquiades Estrada’s body home for his final burial is really an act of love.
It’s kind of metaphorical. It’s not a simple movie.

But the idea of sending Mexicans home by the millions is really an act of hate.
It is—and fear and prejudice and bigotry. You know, we’ve been treated this way by people in the North for a long time. I don’t think they’re going to change their minds and do anything different.

You’ve talked about the film as a story of redemption, and maybe that’s so for the border guard played by Barry Pepper who kills Melquiades. But I thought that it was not at all redemptive for your character, rancher Pete Perkins, who kidnaps and tortures that border guard.
If it appeals to you to track their spiritual journeys, then the film has succeeded. Whatever opinion you might have is right. They all cross borders, and that’s the subject matter of the film. We don’t moralize much.

You speak of films almost as if you were analyzing a text.
As if they’re narratives. Which would have been my specialty during my stay in Cambridge.

At Harvard, you were an English major, and wrote a thesis about Flannery O’Connor.
A cum laude thesis with my senior tutor, Bill Alfred, whom we miss dearly.
(The late William Alfred, a playwright and poet, was a Harvard professor from 1954 until 1991.)

What did you say about O'Connor?
She was Catholic.
Jones laughs once. “Ha!” Then, nothing.

She was Catholic, she was ill …
I didn’t write much about lupus. I wrote about the discovery of the tenets of Catholicism within the profane.

She and Cormac McCarthy, the author of No Country for Old Men, are relatives in a way, don’t you think?
They’re two of the best prose stylists we’ve had in the second half of the 20th century. I suppose that would make them relatives.

There’s darkness in both of them.
Oh, I see a lot of light in Cormac’s work. I’m not one of those people who would call his work apocalyptic. Hell, I was on the airplane today and I saw Rolling Stone and he’d showed up in Rolling Stone and they used the word “apocalyptic.” But, well, it’s OK with me—those people make money by trying to pigeonhole and stigmatize great talent. Let ’em have it. I don’t care.

In No Country for Old Men, innocents die, the villain gets away with murder, and the hero retires rather than pursue evil. Where’s the light in that?
To my mind, Cormac’s book and the movie are a contemplation of morality. We have an innovative perpetrator of evil, a seasoned defender of goodness, a poor, innocent, son-of-a-bitch common man caught in the middle. The forum for contemplation of morality emerges in the form of a detective story. (Laughs.) Which is pretty cool.

And what does this contemplation of morality give us?
Toward the end, [Jones’ character] Ed Tom Bell goes to see his uncle and says, “I’m being overwhelmed by evil. It’s new, it’s different. I can’t handle it. I’m overwhelmed.” And his uncle says, “That’s vanity.”

Evil is no different than it’s ever been.
That’s right. You don’t live at the center of the universe. This is not about you.

And then he relates the story of some bad guys riding up to another uncle’s house and killing him and riding off, in Hudspeth County [in west Texas] I think it is, desolate place, long ago. And it sounds like a recounting of a bad scene in a B-western. But somehow, as you listen to [actor] Barry Corbin relay the story, you think, “Damn, if I had been there on that day, it would have been real. That would have been real evil.”

It’s a rather healthy contemplation of morality. Which, it seems, remains constant. While evil changes face every minute.

I’ve seen the film twice, and both times the audience sat almost stunned at the end, when Ed Tom delivers a monologue about dreams of his father and the movie simply stops. It’s such a nontraditional ending.
(Smiling.)
Oh, it’s good, too.

How did you interpret that dream monologue?
So there’s a lot of different ways of thinking about morality, is what we were saying last, and the conventional way is not always the right way. Morality might be bigger than you are. And I think the human being needs—I don’t know if he deserves, but needs—frequent reminders that the world ain’t flat and he’s not living in the center of the universe. I think that’s an important part about the last few moments in the movie.

You’re asking me now about the last scene, which is essentially a speech by Ed Tom Bell recounting dreams about his father. And you have the feeling that Ed Tom is thinking about hope, about the future, and that no matter what evil might have transpired, or no matter what opportunities were lost for communication between father and son, or between brother and brother, sister and brother, that somewhere off ahead through the darkness and cold there’s a father who carried fire to create a warm place to welcome you. And that keeps you going, because you know he’ll be there.

And after describing that beautiful picture, Ed Tom says, “And then I woke up.” So, as always with Cormac, the question becomes more important than the answer. Was that dream an illusion or not?

It kind of reminded me of [Spanish novelist and philosopher] Miguel de Unamuno and his book, San Manuel Bueno, Mártir, about a priest who didn’t believe in God.

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Lone Star, page 4

McCarthy once said that there’s no such thing as life without bloodshed, and the novelist’s proper occupation is with death. Does the same apply to an actor or director?
No.
(Pause, then vigorously)
No! An actor’s occupation is frequently with absolute frivolity, and the same thing for a director. Death is just one of many things on the counter.

So why is a novelist different?
I don’t know why Cormac said that, and in what context. Cormac is very funny, and he will tease us. Like Bill Faulkner did. If you read Mr. Faulkner’s work you’ll ultimately find yourself getting teased. It’s an invitation to think and feel. As you would with a puppy or a child.

Where did you spend your own childhood?
I grew up in Midland, Texas, and Dallas.

You went to St. Mark’s School of Texas and then Harvard. Why Harvard?
It had a good reputation.

Lots of places do.
But it had the best reputation. I was heavily recruited by colleges and military academies all over the United States when I started to graduate from prep school. I looked at them all, and when I visited Cambridge, that’s the place I felt most comfortable.

Was that a culture shock?
Oh, no. The culture shock was going from Midland to Dallas, to that fancy prep school. I call it “fancy”—I love it with all of my heart. It’s not fancy, it’s just awfully damn good. It seemed fancy at the time. I was very well-prepared for Harvard when I left there.

You were at Harvard from 1965 to 1969, and now Vietnam is an undercurrent in both No Country and Elah. Does Vietnam still influence your thinking?
There wasn’t anybody at Harvard College or in college anywhere that was untouched by Vietnam.

The year of your graduation, University Hall was taken over by students.
I think that was the first time in the history of the institution that police other than university police entered the Yard and committed acts of violence on the student body. That had never happened before. I dare say it won’t happen again.

Today’s students seem far less political. Is there a connection between today’s lack of activism and the fact that Elah never caught on?
Well, about eight months ago, [New York Democratic congressman] Charlie Rangel came out advocating the reinstitution of the draft, and people were shocked. “Congressman Rangel,” they said, “why would you argue for the reinstitution of the draft?” He said, “It’s very simple. We have a volunteer army. We’re sending ’em back tour after tour after tour. We’re running our military into the ground, and if we would just reinstitute the draft so that it had some impact on American people—those who don’t do a lot of thinking—this war would be over in six months.”

Do you agree?
I think that’s right. We had the draft in ’68, we had a bullshit war, and it ultimately ended. And there were terrific repercussions throughout the government. The Bush administration has escaped those repercussions because the American people have a way to turn their head and say, “It doesn’t really affect my family. My daughter is in no threat of having her legs blown off. My son is in no threat of coming back with no face, no ears, no nose—because he didn’t volunteer.”

If somebody were making them incur those risks, the votership might change radically.

It’s such a cliché to ask you about the fact that you roomed with Al Gore that I’m almost embarrassed to do it …
(Not smiling)
Well, don’t embarrass yourself.

I’ll try not to. But lately it seems that you and Vice President Gore are both issuing warnings.
Warrants?

Warnings. You’ve picked serious, provocative projects; Gore is trying to save the planet. Are things you discussed in college manifesting themselves decades later?
No. We had a lot of friends, a lot of roommates, and we were all pretty much of a single mind about what was going on in the late ’60s. We lived through the assassinations and the fraudulent war. Our thinking was good and we haven’t changed our minds.

Let’s talk about upcoming projects. I hear there may be another McCarthy adaptation, Blood Meridian.
I was hired by Sony to write a screenplay of Blood Meridian and I did that and I was paid well for it, and it’s a brilliant screenplay.

Will it be made?
I don’t have a clue.

Jones’ publicist joins us, after which he starts asking the questions.

Is 02138 your magazine? Or do you just work for it?
I came to the magazine after writing about Lawrence Summers.

You think he got a raw deal?
Yes and no.

What’s the yes part?
I don’t think that his remarks about “innate differences” as an explanation for gender disparity in math and science reflected any actual disrespect for women.

And what’s the no part?
At Harvard, he was not an effective leader.

Do you think he got a raw deal?
Yeah, I did. I think this politically correct dog shit is self-important and stupid. Somebody must have hated him a lot to try to make an issue of that remark. It was a dumb-ass remark, but it was not the kind of remark that fells empires and kingdoms. Somebody was out to kill him and seized on it. Seized on it. And the thing that bothered me—yeah, it was a stupid-ass remark. Of course it was. But you shudder to think that the pillars of the empire could be shaken by such a triviality.

Jones’ publicist asks if he really wants that last part on the record. Jones says that indeed he does. He stands up, shakes my hand, says that he hopes he didn’t make an ass of himself, and is gone.

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