Tommy Lee Jones names his favourite directors of all time: “A good friend and heroic character”
In keeping with his unfussy nature as an actor, Tommy Lee Jones very quietly and unassumingly established himself as a talented director. The majority of his work offers a good impression of his inspirations, without the star having to name them out loud.
His debut came in 1995’s made-for-TV western The Good Old Boys, in which he also played the lead role alongside a top-tier ensemble that also featured Frances McDormand, Sissy Spacek, Sam Shepard, and Matt Damon. It was far from a splashy arrival, but it was accomplished enough to let anyone who actually watched the thing on television know Jones had chops behind the camera.
It would be a decade and a half before he returned, though, with The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada winning Jones a ‘Best Actor’ trophy at the Cannes Film Festival. More than that, the neo-western marked a clear evolution in his style and ambition, deploying flashbacks and different perspectives to colour in the gaps in what was a complex morality play.
HBO exclusive The Sunset Limited took him out of his preferred genre trappings in favour of a character-driven two-hander where he sparked in opposition to Samuel L Jackson before Jones returned to familiar ground for his fourth – and so far final – effort, The Homesman, another well-received western.
He’s taken the reins on four feature-length productions, and three of them were westerns, so it goes without saying the dusty plains have loomed large in the Academy Award winner’s mind whenever he’s contemplated getting back into the directing business. By extension, the filmmakers who influenced him the most are largely cut from the same cloth.
“Well, I admire Sam Peckinphah’s work, and Clint Eastwood is a good friend and heroic character,” he told the BBC. “I really admire his style of working and I learned a great deal from working with him, and there’s many things he does as a director that I try to do because they’re the right things to do.”
Peckinpah and Eastwood are two of the western’s greatest and most famous purveyors, so it was inevitable that they’d make their mark on Jones when he followed suit. However, the elephant in that particular room is always John Ford, so did he also make the cut? Of course he did.
“There are other important directors that have had an influence on me,” he continued. “I would say Akira Kurosawa and Jean-Luc Godard, John Ford, Peckinpah, Oliver Stone are all directors that I admire.” Nobody can make a western without acknowledging Ford, and the genre itself owed a huge debt of gratitude to Kurosawa, but it wouldn’t be rude to claim that the fingerprints of Godard and Stone have never exactly been obvious on Jones’ endeavours.
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