Apparently, TLJ is a fan of the devout Catholic writer.
His directing technique can be startling. He told [Actor Barry] Pepper to prepare for his part by camping out alone in the mountains above the south Texas moonscape where he filmed the movie -- much of the film was shot on Jones's 110,000-acre ranch (which he has since sold) near Van Horn -- and by reading Flannery O'Connor and Ecclesiastes.
''It seemed so random at times," says Pepper. ''Like, 'Why am I reading your Bible?' But it's a very generous, brave way for a director to work."
Jones said that he told Dwight Yoakam to read Camus's ''The Stranger" -- ''especially the preface, which is just as good as the text of the book. Alienation is an important theme in the movie."
Jones was in town last week to screen [The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada] for a benefit at the Harvard Film Archive, which he has supported generously over the years. He entered a Cambridge hotel room trailed by an assistant who handed him a beer, and then he sat in the dwindling late afternoon light -- no one bothered to turn the lamps on -- as he answered questions, often monosyllabically. He has no control over questions, and you know he just hates that. . . .
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."
