These include "The Executioner's Song," for which he won an Emmy Award, and "Lonesome Dove" on television; and "Coal Miner's Daughter," "JFK," "The Fugitive" (he's got a supporting-actor Oscar from that), "Natural Born Killers" and the "Men in Black" comedy blockbusters moviewise, among many others.
Perhaps it's "The Missing's" setting - the New Mexico frontier, circa 1885 - that makes this lifelong Texan so happy to gab about it. Maybe it's the complexities of his role - an artist named Samuel Jones who comes back into his resentful adult daughter Maggie's (Cate Blanchett) life after abandoning her decades earlier to live with the Apache - that he feels need explication.
Once Jones gets talking, you realize that, yeah, he has some comments on those subjects. But they're not at all what you might expect him to say. Unlike most actors trying to sell a movie, his thoughts are very carefully considered. And uniquely his.
Back at the ranch
The obvious first question goes something like: You're a real-life cowboy who owns two ranches, so it must've felt great to make a full-blown movie Western (as opposed to TV's "Dove" and his own cable-directing debut, "The Good Old Boys"). The obvious answer is: Heck yeah!
The Jones dissertation is much more interesting.
"Well, I like the good movies, and I don't like the bad ones," he said of what you or I may refer to as the horse opera genre. "Genre is a literary term to me; I don't easily apply it or find much meaning in the term as it applies to cinema. There have been some awfully good so-called Western movies: 'The Angel and the Badman,' the first 'Stagecoach,' 'The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance,' 'Rooster Cogburn.' All those movies have some originality to them, or they did when they first came out, and they are very dear to my heart.
