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Tommy Lee Jones

THE HOMESMAN directed by Tommy Lee Jones, written by Jones, Kieran Fitzgerald and Wesley A. Oliver from the novel by Glendon Swarthout, with Jones, Hilary Swank, Miranda Otto and Grace Gummer. A Mongrel Media release. 122 minutes. Opens Friday (November 21). For venues and times, see Movies.


Tommy Lee Jones has built a reputation as a difficult interview over the years, but if you ask him a question, he will answer it – even if the answer is just “Yeah” or “No,” or “I don’t have any recollection of thinking in such terms.” Eventually he starts following one short, declarative sentence with another and another, and you get a proper answer.

This makes a telephone interview especially tricky since it’s not always clear whether he’s finished a response or just pausing to formulate the rest of his thought. In the course of our 15-minute conversation, he utters fewer than 600 words the average count for an interview of this length is somewhere in the neighbourhood of 3,000.

Jones is doing this round of press in support of The Homesman, a drama set in the American West in the years before the Civil War. In addition to directing and co-writing the script, he plays George Briggs, a Nebraska claim jumper enlisted by settler Mary Bee Cuddy (Hilary Swank) to help her deliver three unhinged women (Miranda Otto, Grace Gummer and Sonja Richter) to sanctuary on the other side of the Missouri River.

A particularly striking element of The Homesman is its bleak landscape, which makes the American frontier feel hostile and alien, suggesting the land itself has driven Mary Bee’s charges insane. I ask whether that was a conscious decision on Jones’s part.

“Oh, I think it’s probably you reading it into the cinematography,” he says. “I think the earth is quite beautiful. The film suggests there might be something inherent in the social organization of these people that drives them crazy.

“I don’t think that country’s bleak, I think it’s very beautiful,” he says. “And I’m also pretty well convinced that society was not structured in such a way to survive happily there without destroying that country.”

There’s barely any structure to the frontier society of The Homesman, just despair at the characters’ isolation. The three women are locked into their own private miseries, and Briggs and Mary Bee respect each other without really connecting.

“Well, yeah,” Jones says. “At first, it does seem more despairing….” He does not follow up on the “at first” part.

Jones is similarly reluctant to discuss his own performance as Briggs – a complex, contradictory character who’s shown to be both comically unethical and deeply principled, sometimes both at once.

“The ups and downs and inconsistencies of the character that you’re talking about make the character look like a human being,” he says.

Sure, I say, but we aren’t allowed to fully understand that character’s choices – which is what makes him so interesting.

“Yeah,” Jones says agreeably. “Well, even today, many people don’t know the full story [about anyone else]. I think you would look a long time before you found someone who knew the full story.”

The Homesman is his second feature as a director, after 2005’s terrific The Three Burials Of Melquiades Estrada. I ask Jones if he’s planning to get back behind the camera again.

“There are three or four scripts on my desk that I’d really like to direct,” he says, “but it’d be unfair to talk about them specifically.”

See? Asked and answered.

Interview Clip

normw@nowtoronto.com | @normwilner

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