 Tommy Lee Jones: Hollywood cowboy
More than 50 films to his name, plus two more due for release this month the famous actor, director, screenwriter and Oscar winer Tommy Lee Jones tells Benjamin Secher how he is really just a Texas rancher at heart.
Tommy Lee Jones says, 'I love cinema, 'looking ill at ease in the chi-chi surroundings of the Beverly Hills Hotel. He again says, 'and I love agriculture'. His clipped Texan growl lends the simple statement a peculiar gravitas. Only moments before, Tommy Lee Jones had arrived at the table looking harried, hunched and - dressed in a pinstripe suit and shades - like a man in disguise.
Tommy Lee Jones removes the dark glasses to make visible one of the most formidable faces in film. His humourless, hangdog features are instantly recognisable as those of Harrison Ford's tireless pursuer in The Fugitive, of the sinister Clay Shaw in Oliver Stone's JFK, of Will Smith's unflappable partner in Men in Black. But, in spite of his international fame and long and distinguished career, it is a face that seems out of place in Beverly Hills.
Tommy Lee Jones has never been like other film stars. He has the swagger, the shades, the Oscar, the multi-million-dollar paydays and the multiple marriages: all those standard signifiers of a Hollywood success story.
Since his debut in Love Story in 1970, Tommy Lee Jones has appeared in more than 50 films, generating a combined total of nearly $2 billion worldwide. And this month, at 61 years old, the famous Tommy Lee Jones can be seen giving two of the finest screen performances of his life: as a world-weary Texan sheriff in the Coen brothers' Oscar favourite No Country for Old Men, and as a grieving father in Paul Haggis's anti-war drama In the Valley of Elah. But, for Jones, cinema remains, as it always has been, only half a life.
Down in the hardscrabble heart of Texas, where Tommy Lee Jones lives with his third wife - Dawn, a camera assistant, whom he married in 2001 - the locals don't think of Jones as a movie man but as 'a rancher, a neighbour' and that suits him just fine.
Tommy Lee Jones says, 'I don't expect any of them have seen my recent films, my home town is very small and very remote and we don't have a movie house. Agriculture is just about the only thing anyone does down there.'  Tommy Lee Jones breeds beef cattle and horses on a substantial ranch in San Saba county, three miles from where he was born. Throughout the interview he refers to the place as 'the headquarters', perhaps to distinguish it from his three other Texan ranches and properties in Palm Beach and Buenos Aires.
For Tommy Lee Jones, a ranch is no millionaire's plaything: he is an expert horseman, a dab hand with a lasso, and a no-nonsense manager of his estates. He says, 'You have got to be careful with those cowboys and those ropes'.
Tommy Lee Jones said, "Fellas, you need to leave those ropes in the bed of that pickup when we ride off from here, unless you intend to hang yourself while you're out there".
This sounds like a punchline, but Tommy Lee Jones delivers it with an unwavering grimace. 'It can be a hostile country,' he continues. 'There's nothing living in those mountains that won't sting or bite or stab you. If you molest the plant, the plant will spike you. If you molest the animal, the animal will bite you. If you disrespect the country, it will cripple you. But I am very comfortable there. It's my home.'
It is also the backdrop for Tommy Lee Jones's latest screen role, in the Coen brothers' masterful adaptation of No Country for Old Men. The film, based on Cormac McCarthy's gripping novel, is the story of a three-way pursuit across the inhospitable Texan borderlands, a chase that begins when Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) stumbles on the bloody scene of a drugs deal gone wrong, and flees with a suitcase full of money. Two very different men are soon on his tail: Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem), a terrifying serial killer set on retrieving the cash at any cost; and Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones), the old-school sheriff determined to get to Moss in time to save him.
Co-director Joel Coen says that Tommy Lee Jones was really the only candidate for the role of the sheriff: 'Bell is the soul of the movie and also, in a fundamental way, the region is so much a part of him, so we needed someone who understood it. It's also a role that requires a kind of subtlety that only a really, really great actor can bring to it. If you put those two criteria together you come up with Jones'.
Tommy Lee Jones hesitated before accepting the part - he felt he had been cast as an officer of the law too many times before - but ultimately he couldn't resist the opportunity to act as a mouthpiece for McCarthy's words. 'Cormac's language is perfect,' he says. 'He is in my view the greatest living American prose stylist'.  Tommy Lee Jones never had much trouble figuring out who he was. He was born in San Saba, west Texas, on September 15, 1946, into the kind of rough, uncosseted world that soon turns boys into men. 'It wasn't unusual to settle one's conflicts with physical violence,' he says. 'If you got into an argument you settled it very quickly.'
When Tommy Lee Jones was 13, his father took a job in Libya and sent him on a sports scholarship to St Mark's boarding school, Dallas. Jones says now that the choice to stay behind was his own: a precocious athlete, he dreamt of a sporting career, and 'going to Libya didn't seem a very bright idea for somebody who wanted to play football'.
Jones's natural gifts as a sportsman - playing American football, soccer and baseball, riding horses and throwing discus - helped him settle in.
After graduating from Harvard in 1969, Tommy Lee Jones moved to New York where it took him a mere 10 days to find a role on Broadway. 'They put that in Ripley's Believe it or Not,' he says, bemused. 'I don't know why. By the time I got to New York, I'd done almost 40 plays, two summers of repertory theatre and I'd played to large audiences in difficult roles from Shakespeare, the Greeks, Brecht and Pinter, so I knew what the challenges were. It wasn't as if there was anything in New York to intimidate me.'
After seven years in New York, mostly spent appearing in 'mindless television shows that paid the rent', Tommy Lee Jones moved to Los Angeles in pursuit of a fully-fledged film career, and almost immediately found himself cast opposite Laurence Olivier in The Betsey. A decade of lucrative television roles, and the odd movie, followed, including an Emmy-winning run as Gary Gilmore in The Executioner's Song.
Then in 1991 his spectral performance in JFK brought him his first Oscar nomination and rocketed him into Hollywood's major league. 'I started to make more money, and after a while it dawned on me that I could live anywhere I wanted to,' Tommy Lee Jones says, 'so in my wisdom, I went home to Texas.'
Tommy Lee Jones' big-screen directorial debut, a hard-bitten western called The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (scripted by Babel writer Guillermo Arriaga) premiered at Cannes in 2005 to some acclaim, and he is now writing the script for a second film, based on Ernest Hemingway's posthumously published Islands in the Stream. 'In the 1970s it was made into a bad movie,' he says. 'I reckon there's a good movie in that book and that's the one I want to make.' |
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