Doesn't our president come from that part of Texas, at least officially?

No, he comes from Maine or Connecticut.

Well, he says he comes from Midland. You're not buying that.

Not at all. I come from Midland.

There are a lot of things that conventional movies do that this movie doesn't do. For instance, we don't learn anything, really, about Pete's life story -- has he been married, does he have family, that kind of thing. I'm not even sure we really know what the basis of his friendship with Melquiades is, which inspires such incredible loyalty.

Well, they're friends. They work together. It was never problematic for me. I know a lot of cowboys and I've done a little work on ranches with cattle, and those people become your friends, and keep their word. Back story [long pause] -- this movie's not interested in explaining things that you can see. If that makes any sense.

Well, Pete, on the one hand, is a self-sufficient character, a familiar Western figure. On the other hand, as the story goes along, we come to understand what a profoundly lonely man he is. Is that fair?

Right. Look, the movie has a very old narrative form. The journey, the quest, whatever. The odyssey. The idea is that you have a hero, Mr. Hero. And he starts in a rather mundane place, possibly even an evil place. And circumstances conspire to compel him to take a journey wherein he travels through various other places, some of them threatening or dangerous, some of them funny, some of them mysterious, all of them arduous, until ultimately he arrives at a good place, where he knows who he is and is able to relate more gracefully to the world around him. It's a very old story. We thought it would serve us well.

Probably as a requisite, our characters who start out rather mundane take on some kind of allegorical, maybe metaphorical aspect as they travel along. They remain specific, but they begin to stand for things, they begin to mean more than what they appear to be. As we go along, we look at alienation from more than one angle. We begin to think, as we sit in the audience -- if we do think -- that swimming the river is not the only way to become an alien. Most of the characters are alienated or lonely. It's the theme of the movie.

Yeah, the characters in Van Horn seem alone too. The waitress who Melissa Leo plays, the young woman [played by January Jones] who's married to Barry Pepper's character. They seem like aliens without even leaving home.

Well, the girl [Jones] does! She gets on a golden bus, and sweeps the screen. She leaves. But it has been part of her life to be entirely alone at the shopping mall, and those are things I wanted to dramatize and photograph.

You know, in Western history, there's this contrast between the myth of the West -- the idea of the self-sufficient man, carving out his homestead in the wilderness -- with the reality that the West was largely settled in communities, anchored by women who had very difficult lives. It almost seems like your movie observes both sides of this dichotomy: We start with a comic portrait of a community, and then leave on this mythic, masculine journey. Was that deliberate?

No, I don't think about the myth of the West. It's not the kind of thinking I do. That's more suited to people who live in big towns on the West Coast or East Coast, people who stay under a roof, in a room, all the time.

OK. One of the things that may be difficult to convey to readers about your film is that it's very funny.

Good! That's very important. I'm glad to hear you say that.

Some of the humor may disturb some viewers -- let's say, when Melquiades is being eaten by ants, or when you embalm him with a jug of antifreeze -- but there's persistent comedy, even as the journey becomes more arduous and more mysterious.

Absolutely. There's some thinking to do and some allegories to contemplate, some horrible things and scary things -- and humor makes all of that work better. All of that makes humor funnier; there's just more grist for the mill. I've always been nervous at these screenings as to when somebody's gonna laugh first, because an audience doesn't really know that it's OK to laugh. You have to write them a license. Something has to get the ball rolling. I've argued for hiring a designated laugher to go to each screening. When the first opportunity comes, they giggle. Then the next time, they laugh more energetically, just to infect the audience with humor, get them going. Once they get started, they'll laugh, and the designated laugher can go on to the next screening. He just needs to be there the first 15-20 minutes. We didn't have the budget for it.

Were you and Arriaga thinking specifically about the different ways that North American culture and Mexican culture deal with death?

Well, sure. The Mexicans have a holiday called the Dia de los Muertos [Day of the Dead]. They have a different relationship to death than Anglo society does. They're brave about it and accepting, there's room in the concept of death for humor. You know, I had a Mexican screenwriter, and if you have a Mexican screenwriter -- particularly Arriaga -- there's gonna be a dead guy in there somewhere.

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