Most of us who live in the middle-class United States don't see a dead body very often, and when we do it's a major traumatic event. I suppose this too is a stereotype, but Mexicans may just be on more intimate terms with death.

That could be. I think they have open-casket funerals there. They have a different attitude toward death, certainly. As a child of West Texas, I identify with Hispanic culture every bit as much as I do North American culture. I live in San Antonio, Texas, with a 60 percent Hispanic population. My wife is 50 percent Hispanic.

It's clear in the film that you speak Spanish pretty well. Did you learn it growing up?

I started to. I began my academic study of Spanish in the seventh grade and kept it up for the next eight and a half years. I think it was my junior year of college when I stopped. I've traveled a great deal in Mexico, Spain, Argentina. I work with a lot of people who don't speak English, in the cattle business and horse business. We have property in Argentina. So Spanish is my second language. But that's not my [Spanish] accent, in the movie. That's a northern Mexican accent, that Pete uses. My accent is normally a bit more sophisticated.

That makes sense, I guess. Your West Texas accent in English is not the same as Pete's either, is it?

Well, you can tell that if you look at the movie and listen to me talk. That's Pete up there, that's not me.

Talk about the structure of the film, which is deliberately fragmented in both space and time. I really liked it, but you are making the viewer work, and there's certainly the potential for audiences to feel confused. Did that come from you or from Arriaga?

It came from both of us. We wanted the movie to feel like real life, which is to say confusing. The guy dies, and you don't really know how or why. That's the way life really is. Some of the cast and crew thought there was something wrong with me when I told them: "This is like real life. The past, the present and the future all occur simultaneously. You understand?" They said, "No." But that's the deal.

Well, I can't help thinking about Faulkner, on that question and the themes of this movie generally. Are you a fan?

Well, yeah. We read "As I Lay Dying," of course. But we were not making that story. We had our own story to tell.

"The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada" is now playing in New York and opens Dec. 22 in Los Angeles, for one week only in both cities. It will open nationally on Feb. 3, 2006.

Fast forward: "Happy Here and Now" in a lost New Orleans; "Trapped by the Mormons" in, um, Mormonism
And now for two movies I can heartily recommend to -- well, who exactly? Let's just say those of you whose taste is even more peculiar than mine. Michael Almereyda's "Happy Here and Now" was something of a critical favorite on the festival circuit in 2002, but never found a distributor and has been gathering dust ever since. It's perhaps most remarkable as a sweet, mysterious portrait of pre-flood New Orleans, which Almereyda not incorrectly portrays as a land of wandering, uncertain souls.

There are some similarities between "Happy Here and Now" and Wim Wenders' similarly unreleasable "Land of Plenty" -- in both, a mousy young woman (here it's Liane Balaban) drops in on the eccentric household of friends or relatives she barely knows while searching for a missing person, and in both cases the real discovery she makes is something else altogether. The difference is that Wenders' film is a profound inquiry into post-9/11 America and its neuroses, while Almereyda's drifty, winsome narrative is about -- well, I'm sure it's about something.

Hot on the cold trail of her missing sister Muriel (Shalom Harlow), Balaban's Amelia pursues a handsome Internet cowpoke (Karl Geary) who may have known her, along with a household of willfully colorful alterna-squatter types, including an obsessive music-geek DJ (Nic Ratner) and a Macedonian rapper, actor and termite exterminator (both actor and character are simply called Quintron). She's aided in her quest by her drunken aunt (Ally Sheedy) and her broken-down, ex-CIA boyfriend (Clarence Williams III). All these people for some reason drink and smoke like Sinatra in his worst post-Ava binge days, which I guess reflects their boho isolation. Or whatever.

We haven't even gotten to David Arquette (one of the movie's producers) as the termite tycoon, would-be filmmaker -- he has a softcore porn project about Nikola Tesla in mind -- and just maybe the evil genius behind Muriel's disappearance. Or the subplot about a firefighter (Geary again) who keeps having weird interactions with a dead comrade's wife (Gloria Reuben). There's a significant amount of ambient enjoyment to be had here, from the outrageous cast -- which also includes New Orleans R&B legend Ernie K-Doe and '60s activist turned music impresario John Sinclair as themselves -- to the cheerfully disheveled atmosphere. As for what it's all about, I'm thinking there's a deeply earnest "Donnie Darko"-style, just-say-yes-to-life mysticism going on. But that's just a guess. (Now playing at the IFC Center in New York.)

Finally, if you were concerned that there was only one campy exploitation film called "Trapped by the Mormons," that unintentional silent classic from the 1920s has been remade by a group of Washington hipsters (now relocated to Brooklyn, N.Y.). You don't want or need a learned treatise on this topic, but apparently Mormons were perceived in early-20th century Britain as a murderous cult that abducted young women into polygamous sexual servitude.

The original film (and many others like it) sprang from this paranoid impulse; the new one, starring drag king Johnny Kat -- no, I'm not going to explain that, sorry -- as Mormon seducer Isoldi Keane, springs from the impulse to goofball around in imitation of weird, old stuff. Director Ian Allen (a longtime playwright and stage director) has lovingly re-created the look and indeed narrative style of silent film -- and he's from Salt Lake City, so if he says Mormons are vampires with hypnotic powers, who am I to argue? I suppose this is a one-note joke, more in the style of '70s avant-garde camp than anything else. But, hey, at least it's a funny joke. (Plays Dec. 15-21 at the Pioneer Theater in New York.)

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