Guillermo Arriaga interview

The 'Amores Perros' writer tells Dave Calhoun about his latest film, 'Three Burials'.

Mar 31 2006

Screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga likes to write car crashes into his scripts. It's a road accident in Mexico City that unites the three separate stories of Alejandro González Iñárritu's 'Amores Perros', and another that wipes out the children of Naomi Watts's character in Iñárritu's second film, '21 Grams' – which somehow makes it all the more worrying that Arriaga is now telling Time Out about his new film, the Tommy Lee Jones-directed 'Three Burials', while at the wheel of a car in his home country of Mexico. 'Don't worry,' Arriaga reassures me, 'I'll be careful.'

'The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada' – to give it its full title – is a cruel but also compassionate and intelligent revenge tale set in the unforgiving desert between Texas and Mexico. It won Arriaga the prize for best screenplay after its world premiere in Cannes last year, where Jones also picked up the best actor award. So how did a famed Mexican screenwriter hook up with a celebrated Hollywood actor to collaborate on the latter's directing debut?

'I was driving once and my cellphone rang and it was Tommy Lee Jones,' Arriaga begins. 'He said he'd seen 'Amores Perros' and that he would love to have a conversation with me. We had dinner together in Los Angeles, and, you know, in cinema I think it's very important to work with people who have similar tastes. We talked about our favourite writers, our favourite films, our favourite actors. He has an impeccable taste. Well, he has the same taste as me.'

They discussed their shared love of the novelist Cormac McCarthy, the filmmaker Akira Kurosawa and the painter Edward Hopper. Jones then invited Arriaga to join him on his ranch in west Texas. The pair went hunting together – a suitably male pursuit for a film whose main character is Pete Perkins (played by Jones), a no-nonsense, rough-hewn ranch foreman who seeks to avenge the death of his friend and ranch-hand, Melquiades Estrada (Julio Cesar Cedillo).

'At one point, while we were hunting, Tommy Lee said, "Guillermo, I would like to make a film with you." We shook hands. It was a contract.'

Jones assured Arriaga that he would have complete freedom with his script; the only condition was that he wanted both to direct the film and to star in it. 'We spent some more time together in Texas and the next day I saw some coyotes eating something and I imagined that they might be eating the corpse of an illegal Mexican. I told Tommy this idea, and he said "great", but then he told me the story of how a Mexican American had recently been accidentally killed by the Marines. It was perfect for our story.'

The image of a pack of coyotes feeding off a human body became the opening scene of their film. Such brutality and grotesquery defines 'Three Burials'. A significant episode later on involves a grim, horseback journey across the desert on which Perkins takes his buddy's rotting body (partially preserved by anti-freeze and salt) and a terrified captive, the dim cop Mike Norton (Barry Pepper). We see that men, animals and the landscape can all be equally unforgiving.

'For me the landscape is almost a character,' Arriaga says of the film's investment in wide, captivating shots of dunes, cliffs and open plains, astoundingly photographed by Chris Menges. 'It's the landscape that shapes the behaviour of these guys. It's not only the landscape itself – it's the light, it's the harshness, it's the roughness of the terrain. That inevitably would shape your way of seeing life.'

It's this same landscape that sees thousands of Mexicans attempt the tough, outlawed journey into America every year. The experience of the Mexican immigrant is central to 'Three Burials'. We see a group trying desperately to make it across the border before being herded up and ill-treated by border guards. We see how Mexican labour is central to the area and how widely Spanish is spoken. We hear Melquiades tell Perkins that it's more than five years since he last saw his wife and kid back in Mexico. Between them, Arriaga and Jones bring both sides of the border to the film.

'One of the good things is that it was written by a Mexican and directed by a Texan, which in a way represents what is happening in the movie. There's a friendship that's central to the film between people who belong to different cultures but at the same time have things in common. Tommy Lee lives in the area; he speaks Spanish. He not only speaks Spanish but he speaks it with the accent of the area. He gets along very well with Mexicans naturally. That's important for the film. It's not fake. He has this love for Mexico.'

Does this love for Mexico come at the expense of sympathetic American characters? Certainly, most of the film's Texans, apart from Perkins, are simple, even stupid: Mike Norton and his wife Lou Ann (January Jones) are TV-addicted simpletons and the local sheriff (Dwight Yoakam) is utterly ineffective. 'If I present one character as a basic person, it's not as a representation of all Americans,' Arriaga insists. 'Barry Pepper's character is a guy who's alienated, who just wanders in life and has no direction. He's a primitive character, but it doesn't mean that all Americans are primitive to me.'

Did he find it refreshing, as a Mexican, to write rounded Mexican characters for American cinema, which so often depicts his compatriots as either criminal or impoverished? 'I was happy that I could describe Mexicans as we are, you know? And I wanted to show Texans as they are too. I didn't want it to be cartoonish. I don't want to make cartoons of anyone. That's not the intention of my writing.'

'Three Burials' opens today.

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