I’ve heard that Tommy Lee Jones isn’t the most pleasant interview – but I could care less about him and his junket persona if The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada is an indication of where he will go with his sophomore project. Until now, we thought he was sailing away on the Ernest Hemingway book-to-screen translation of Islands in the Streams, but instead he’ll be switching over to another legend American writer’s work directing Cormac McCarthy’s The Sunset Limited that…
was first produced by the Steppenwolf Theatre in Chicago on May 18, 2006, and it traveled to New York City later that same year. The play was published in a paperback edition about same time that it opened in New York. Some consider it to be more a novel than a true play, partly because its subtitle is “A Novel in Dramatic Form”.
The play involves only two nameless characters, designated “White” and “Black”, their respective skin colors. Offstage, just before the play begins, Black saves White from throwing himself in front of a train, the Sunset Limited. All of the action takes place in Black’s spare apartment in urban New York, where the characters go (at the behest of Black) after their encounter on the platform. Black is an ex-convict and an evangelical Christian. White is an atheist and a professor. They debate the meaning of human suffering, the existence of God, and the propriety of White’s attempted suicide.
Variety reports that the Tommy Lee Jones and Cormac McCarthy connection is growing stronger (Jones starred in NCFOM and adapted Blood Meridian. HBO has set Jones and Samuel L. Jackson to star in the pic – with Jones also wearing the director’s hat. Production begins next month in New Mexico – a terrain extremely familiar to Jones and I imagine the production will move to the NYC subway system at some point in the production. Barbara Hall (exec-producer on All Good Things) will produce, and Jones will be executive producer.
