In December, Barry Pepper talked about the influence of the Bible and the works of Flannery O'Connor on The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, written and directed by Tommy Lee Jones. Now Jones himself discusses the subject in the Boston Globe:
Flannery O'Connor matters to this movie first because Jones wrote his cum laude thesis at Harvard on her. Second, family members of the film's coproducer, Michael Fitzgerald, are executors of O'Connor's literary estate. ''So we both knew our O'Connor rather well, and it was just a natural approach for me."
''O'Connor is important to the way this movie is constructed," he continues. ''What you do is you consider some so-called religious thinking without the didacticism of the classical approach. You look for the allegorical intentions of what we're taught in the Bible, and then find some way to have it revealed or expressed by common experience. You'll find this happening over and over again in O'Connor, who was a rather classical Catholic thinker who wrote about nothing but backwoods north Georgia rednecks."
''Ecclesiastes is essential to the movie as well," he says. ''It has to do with the passage of time. You want to start thinking as an actor that the past, the present, and the future are occurring simultaneously, and God requires an accounting of all three."
And on this NPR interview Jones says:
People ask me to describe Huey Calloway, the character you just heard, and I've found it convenient to describe him as a Buddhist soul in a Calvinist world, and I haven't yet thought up a catch phrase for Three Burials, but it has something to do with the consideration of the mechanics of faith.
And from there he starts talking about Flannery O'Connor again.
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