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'Everybody is an alien — a stranger in a strange land'

When you ask Harvard cum laude graduate Tommy Lee Jones a question, it's best if you're armed with a quick follow-up.

Otherwise, the interview might well go just like this one went at times:

Sony Pictures Classics (enlarge photo) Tommy Lee Jones in 'The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada.' Movie review

Q: You altered the script to insert your own line in "The Fugitive," answering Harrison Ford's plea of innocence with "I don't care!" Do you remember the original line in the script?

A: No.

Long ... pause ...

Jones, 59, is notorious for sometimes being curt in interviews and appearances. Some media types claim he's downright ornery.

At the El Paso, Texas, premiere of his new film "The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada," filmed on rugged land he owns nearby and opening today in metro Atlanta, Jones verbally roughed up fans at a post-screening Q&A who'd paid $100 each to be there.

"Is that the best you can do?" the actor said to one attendee who addressed him, as reported in the San Diego Union-Tribune. "Is there an intelligent question out there?"

Maybe it's that so many questions from journalists and others fall into the range of the idiotic?

"That can happen," Jones says during a recent phone interview with the AJC for "Three Burials," which the Oscar-winning actor not only stars in but directs.

Jones was once asked during a press conference for "Men in Black" whether he believed in aliens. He immediately rose from his seat and left the room.

On this day, Jones is giving no indication that at any moment he might just decide to hang up the phone. He's in a good mood, calling from Wellington, Fla., where he and his wife have traveled from his West Texas ranch near San Saba to attend the U.S. Open Polo Championship. Jones raises polo horses and is known to invite Harvard's polo team to practice on the pristine, green fields he's had constructed at his ranch.

He thoughtfully addresses most every question.

"I'm trying," he says.

He suddenly drops the name of Georgia writer Flannery O'Connor, the subject of his cum laude thesis at Harvard.

I talk about her short story, "Everything Rises Must Converge."

He corrects me, "'Everything That Rises Must Converge.' "

He says in making the low-budget "Three Burials," which was financed for about $15 million, he was influenced by Jean-Luc Godard's crime drama "Pierrot Le Fou," Akira Kurosawa's fantasy "Dreams" and Sam Peckinpah's violent "Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia."

I say, "You're talking about aspects that seem to have evaporated out of mainstream American cinema."

"Maybe so," he responds. "Maybe they are condensed in mine."

"Three Burials," which won best actor for Jones and the screenplay award at last year's Cannes Film Festival and made a handful of critics' Top 10 lists, is not like most films playing at the megaplex these days.

The story bounces around with flashbacks. A good portion of the film is in Spanish with subtitles. And frequently, Jones' modern-day cowboy, Pete, hauls out the body of his slain friend, Melquiades Estrada, and tends to the corpse, combing his hair, brushing off the ants crawling across the dead man's face or tossing powder on the deceased to fend off the smell of decay.

In "Three Burials," written by Guillermo Arriaga ("Amores Perros," "21 Grams"), Estrada is a Mexican cowboy working in Texas who is slain by a border patrol guard (Barry Pepper). When an investigation into his death never happens, Jones' Pete kidnaps the guard, makes him dig up Estrada's body and then forces the guard to join him on an expedition through deserts and rugged Southwestern terrain to Estrada's homeland for a proper burial.

The film is inspired in part by the real-life case of Ezequiel Hernandez, a high school student killed years ago by members of the U.S. Marine Corps sent to the Rio Grande region to hunt up drug smugglers.

Tending his family's goats, Hernandez reportedly shot at a coyote. "The Marines decided they were taking fire from a dangerous drug smuggler and stalked the kid for an hour," Jones says.

Hernandez was shot to death. But there was never a trial — only a small cash settlement to his family, according to Jones.

"When Arriaga and I decided to make a movie having to deal with the Rio Grande Valley and the social contrasts between Texas and Mexico, when we decided to consider how things were different and the same on both sides of the river, I suggested he familiarize himself with the case of Ezequiel Hernandez," Jones says. "I gave Arriaga the minutes of the congressional hearing on it."

In the film, Pete's reaction to his friend's death magnifies his own sense of isolationism.

"It's a very poetic idea here," Jones says. "Kind of a kaleidoscopic look at alienation that affects everybody in the film. Everybody is an alien — a stranger in a strange land."

With its deserts, poisonous rattlers and redemptive spirit, "Three Burials" seems biblical.

"It's a lot biblical. It's allegorical. Metaphorical, if you will," Jones says.

The redemptive nature of the film is echoed in its memorable final line — simple, yet nearly poetic words uttered by Pepper with unexpected beauty.

"We were looking for a moment of grace," Jones says, "and [what Pepper says] is about as simple and straightforward as it gets."

The final line was suggested by French filmmaker Luc Besson ("La Femme Nikita," "The Fifth Element"), whose Europa Corp. bankrolled "Three Burials."

"We made the deal to make the movie on the stern of a dive boat over a reef in the Bahamas," Jones says. "And after we shook hands, Luc said, 'You want to change ze last line.' And I said, 'OK, Luc. Anything you want, man.

"'If your check don't bounce, you can have any line you want.' "

"Three Burials" was passed over by Oscar voters (Jones thinks few, if any, Academy members actually saw his film) but was royally received at the Cannes Film Festival.

"I think it's more intellectual," Jones says of the festival. "My experience there ... the last time was awfully good. Fifteen-minute standing ovation after the end of the movie. And they gave me a little prize. To see all those very bright, elegant and demanding people stand up and clap for 15 minutes is overwhelming. If you can get 3,000 people brought together as one single, happy mind, that's what you live for. That's pretty much what you are put on the earth for."

The French boo pretty easily at Cannes, too, he's reminded.

"Yeah, it's a great relief to escape that," Jones says. "They are a tough bunch."

Takes one to know one.