The one man you feel is tough enough to direct, produce, co-write and star in a memorable US movie is Tommy Lee Jones. The Oscar-winning actor talks to Steve Pratt about giving a film 'his best shot'.

THE idea for Tommy Lee Jones's new western The Three Burials Of Melquiades Estrada was born during a deer-hunting trip with good friends and hunting buddies writer Guillermo Arriaga and producer Michael Fitzgerald.

"The three of us were driving around in a truck one day and we said, 'we have a lot of talent in this truck, let's make a movie'. Like a bunch of kids, we set about it. But, unlike a bunch of kids, we were able to bring it into reality," says the star of Men In Black, JFK and Coalminer's Daughter.

Three Burials resulted from Jones asking Arriaga to write a screenplay about the border country between West Texas and Northern Chihuahua, Mexico. The principal acting part would be for Jones, who also planned to direct.

The location has a special meaning to the Oscar-winning actor. He was born and raised in West Texas and, for many years, owned a large working cattle ranch in the Davis Mountains. "This is my home country. These are my home people, that's why I'm interested in making a movie about this place," he says.

He didn't specify a story or characters for Arriaga to follow, but related anecdotes of historical injustices along the border, speaking in broad terms about what he hoped to illuminate and achieve with the film. "I wanted essentially to make a study in social contrast between the land that's South of the Rio Grande river and the land that's North of it," he says.

The result was a bilingual script that moves back and forth in time as the lives and fates of a Texas ranch foreman (Jones), a border patrolman (Barry Pepper) and an illegal immigrant (Julio Cesar Cedillo) become intertwined in a journey across the border into Mexico.

"All the thematic matters that I wanted to touch on were embodied in the true story of a young man who was killed by the US government, stupidly and partially by mistake," says Jones.

"It was an outrageous incident and the events that followed were objectionable to the people who live along the border between North Mexico and South Texas. That pretty much opened the floodgates for me. I wanted to put a motion pictures lens on my country and my people, on our culture and consider the issues that come to bear on us from within and without.

"Of course, I love the country and that's why I wanted to shoot there."

Jones filmed in some of the most remote and majestic areas in the US in a landscape as wild and varied as its weather. "The country is capable of giving you a heat stroke or washing you away in a flash flood or making you weep with such beauty," he says. "It'll treat you 15 or 20 different ways in a day."

The shooting schedule was affected by temperatures changing by 50 degrees in a single day and almost unabated rain in the usually-dry season. When torrential rains raised the level of the Rio Grande over ten feet in one day, filming was suspended for a week.

Jones reflects on his feature film directorial debut on Three Burials, as well as starring, producing and writing: "I'm a good actor for me as a director because I do everything I tell myself to do. I'm a good director for me as an actor because I can read my own mind..

"And I'm a pretty good writer because I know what these other two guys want to hear. And I'm a good producer because I know what they like to shoot, so I don't give them anything they don't need, but I'm there with what they need.

"The filming went beautifully. We were extremely well organised so we were ready to go to sometimes very remote or dangerous places and get our work done.

"I gave this movie everything I have. That's a good way to live, as far as I'm concerned. There's a chance of getting hurt, hell yes, but that's the wonderful thing about a 35mm lens. It asks you for everything you've got and if you love movies, you happily give it up."

Jones won a 15-minute standing ovation on receiving the best actor award at this year's Cannes Film Festival for his performance in Three Burials. He calls the reaction "astonishing", saying what impressed him most was the quality of the audience.

"They were all decent, thinking people. I felt like a doctor who's had a hospital full of patients that got well. It made me feel really good. There's no way round the fact that that was one of the most gratifying moments in my working life."

* The Three Burials Of Melquiades Estrada (15) opens in cinemas tomorrow.

Published: 30/03/2006