Jones has the reputation of being a difficult interview subject, and it's true that he made no small talk and never tried to befriend me or flatter my intelligence. I didn't mind; sometimes it's fun to chat with these people as if they were really your friends, but it's largely a waste of time. He answered my questions clearly and thoughtfully, in the manner of a man conducting his business. On the whole, that makes the transaction cleaner; as Janet Malcolm has observed, the journalistic interview is "a special, artificial exercise in influence and counterinfluence, with an implicit antagonistic tendency," which only masquerades as friendly conversation.

Even when he essentially suggested that I was a weedy New York intellectual who never went outdoors, I suppressed the instinct to protest. What was I going to say? "Hey, I took my kids to Central Park yesterday, dammit!" One could suggest that nobody who discusses his own film as an allegorical or symbolic narrative is in a position to call others overly brainy. That's the thing with Tommy Lee Jones, I guess: You can't outdress him and you can't out-cowboy him.

Given your track record as an actor, you presumably could have made a lot of deals to direct all kinds of movies. This movie happened totally outside the normal Hollywood dealmaking process. Can you explain how that came about?

Guillermo Arriaga and I are hunting buddies, and we both work in the motion picture business. [At this point he gets up to adjust a crooked picture on the wall: "Isn't that maddening?"] And we decided to make a movie. The co-producer's name is Michael Fitzgerald, and he too was a hunting buddy at the time. I don't direct movies for a living. My motivation is a simple desire to satisfy my lust for creative control. So the premise was, we'll make any movie we want to, if we make one at all. And we'll control it, if we make one at all.

We began to consider the things that we had in common. Arriaga likes to make movies about his country and its history; I want to make movies about my country and its history. If you spend much time along the river [i.e., the Rio Grande], you understand that in many ways the two countries are the same. That clearly became the background.

And you were inspired to some extent by a real event, the killing of Esequiel Hernandez Jr. near the border in 1997, right?

We were interested in making a study of social contrasts, a consideration of how things are the same on both sides of the river and how they might be different. And what the emotional, psychological, social implications are of running a border through the middle of a culture and calling it two cultures and enforcing the difference with the threat of violence, under penalty of law. A consideration of that was something Arriaga and I certainly had in common.

Now, in that [Hernandez] case, a kid was killed, a citizen of the United States, some years ago. A kid from a Hispanic family. Their house was less than a mile north of the river. He was killed by the United States Marines, and they got away with it. No one was ever prosecuted; there was no trial. The family was paid some money. I think a lot of people were insulted by that. We didn't make a movie about that, we didn't make a documentary. But, yes, there are some social implications in that incident that we felt might be relevant to our story.

At least superficially, there's a strong similarity between what happened to him and what happens to Melquiades in the film.

I wouldn't call it superficial. The two incidents have a great deal in common. This kid was a pitcher on the baseball team. He did his homework every night. He happened to belong to a Hispanic family, like a lot of people in that region. And like a lot of families over the last 300 years, they keep goats. And like many generations of boys, it was his job to watch the goats. He would turn them loose in the afternoon so they could browse, and then put them back up. He often carried a .22-caliber rifle with him to protect the goats from coyotes, and he took a shot at what he thought was a coyote. They happened to be three Marines in camouflage, on a stakeout. They had been there for a long time. Watching out for dangerous drug smugglers. And when they heard the report of the .22, they decided that they were taking fire. And they stalked the kid for 30 minutes, and then shot him dead. And then disappeared. They stood over him and watched him bleed to death, and managed to call for a helicopter, which had a hard time finding them.

You say you see the two cultures, in Texas and Mexico, as essentially the same. That in itself is kind of a political statement, isn't it? I mean, a lot of people on both sides of the border -- well, certainly on this side -- would disagree.

It's things that are, at least, obvious to me: the food, language, music, spirit, culture. There's gonna be people who live north of us, like maybe in Oklahoma City, or even a senator from Texas, who are going to say our borders are hemorrhaging. There are those, I agree, who would be somewhat paranoid about people sneaking across the river to take our jobs and bloat our school rolls and maybe even blow up our office buildings.

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