The Good News, Bad News No Country
An interview with star Tommy Lee Jones.
Categories: Westerns
By: Henry Cabot Beck 01/02/2008
How did you get approached for the part?
Well, they sent me a script and asked me if I wanted to play Ed Tom Bell, and I read the script and I said yes. It was that simple.... I think Cormac is our best living prose stylist.
No Country is unique, though. It’s less dense than his other novels.
You couldn’t say that Blood Meridian is an easy book. But he’s not a simple man. He doesn’t have a simple mind, and he’s a truly great writer, and capable of just about any style. He’s entirely original every time he goes to work.
There’s some discussion as to whether No Country and Three Burials are really Westerns, since they’re contemporary.
Well, I don’t have anything to say about Westerns because I don’t know what they are. I assume it’s kind of a generic term to indicate a movie that’s got big hats and horses—and maybe some dust in it.
And I’ve never been able to really think about motion pictures in terms of genre, you know. You can talk about Romantic Comedies and Musicals and Situation Comedies and try to come up with some way to use the word genre as it applies to motion pictures and the best you’ll ever do in that endeavor is demonstrate a firm grasp of the obvious. So I don’t really have anything to say about the Western because I’m interested in making good movies about the life and times of my own and that inevitably is gonna involve big hats and horses, but I don’t have anything thematic to say about the so-called Western. I don’t think life, and I don’t think cinema, is that simple.
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super super movie..much more engrossing than the original..kinda like it has been fleshed out and filled in..keeps you on the edge of your chair...