« In re: Capote; the Mssrs. Shawn reply | Main | Fingered: Toback gets the look-back »
April 01, 2006
Scorn labels, embrace porn: hangin' with Tommy Lee-J
After a few humbling setbacks, Nigel Andrews chats up Tommy Lee Jones in the weekend FT, eliciting this fine spew: "How did Burials come about?" queries Andrews. "Did Jones and Arriaga create it together? Would he call it, with its trek-and-revenge tale of a ranch foreman dragging the cop who killed a Mexican friend deep into Mexico to confront him with the realities underlying his race hatred, a modern western?" 
"I'm not keen on genres, they're labels you stick on films. But if people need a label to convince them to see it, that's fine by me. You could call it a western. By the same principle you could call it a horror film, because there's a dead body, or pornography, because there's nakedness, or comedy, because it's funny as hell. It's about the mechanics of faith, too. So it's a religious-western-horror-pornographic comedy." Whatever it is, it apparently came about by a two-man epiphany. Jones loved the powerful, prize-winning Mexican film Amores Perros and talked to its screenwriter, Arriaga: "He was interested in making movies about his country and I was interested in making movies about mine." So they spitballed ideas for a story about both countries." [More at the link.]
Posted by pride at April 1, 2006 04:27 PM
Comments
Post a comment
Thanks for signing in, . Now you can comment. (sign out)
(If you haven't left a comment here before, you may need to be approved by the site owner before your comment will appear. Until then, it won't appear on the entry. Thanks for waiting.)