There is a curious scene halfway through The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, the award-winning film written by Guillermo Arriaga starring, and directed by, Tommy Lee Jones. Pete Perkins, a taciturn Texan rancher played by Jones, has kidnapped Mike Norton, a Border Patrol hothead, and literally dragged him across the US-Mexico border. Mike has killed an illegal Mexican immigrant (the title’s Melquiades) and now Pete is meting out his own version of rough justice.
As they wind their way through the parched landscape, the two men come across a party of Mexican cowboys who are watching an American soap opera. One of them – tall, gruff-looking – offers the newcomers food and drink. He points compassionately at the carcass of a bear they have hunted down, and explains that they had to kill it because it was attacking their cattle.
There is humour in the apparent incongruity of a posse of Mexicans, stuck in the middle of nowhere, engrossed in a television series they can’t understand. The episode is noteworthy, too, because it features the film’s scriptwriter, Guillermo Arriaga, in a cameo appearance as the cowboy who welcomes Pete and Mike.
“What do you mean by cameo appearance?” Arriaga jokes when I mention his first ever on-screen role. “My performance was crucial to the film.” Crucial to the film or not, that moment speaks volumes about the Mexican who walked away with the Best Screenplay award at last year’s Cannes Film Festival for his work on The Three Burials.
Arriaga, who owes his notoriety to scripts for the gritty films Amores Perros and 21 Grams, claims that his experience as a hunter informs his writing. “All my characters are hunters. They are searching. Hunting brings you close to life and death, to cruelty and beauty. When you hunt you feel you belong in nature, in the world, no longer protected by the city’s cocoon. There you are amid the mud, the cold, the blood, death, life.”
He is in London to launch the English translation of his third novel, The Night Buffalo. It tells the story of Manuel, a university student in Mexico City, whose best friend and schizophrenic blood brother, Gregorio, has recently committed suicide. Manuel’s grief is tinged by the guilt of his affair with Gregorio’s girlfriend, Tania. As the lovers cling to each other, trying to make sense of the tragic loss, they are haunted by Gregorio’s memory and by a mysterious cache of letters he left behind.
“I am very interested in the weight of the dead over the living,” says Arriaga, who trained as a historian, when I ask about the themes running through his work. “This is true in my earlier novels as much as in my film scripts. I am also very interested in love as the only feeling that can reveal our human essence.”
Judging by his often bleak work, I say, he doesn’t strike me as a romantic. “On the contrary, I’m an incurable romantic. And I’m an optimist about human nature. So much so that I can guide my characters through some very dark passages, at the end of which they are always able to make some sense of their lives.”
There are other similarities between The Night Buffalo and Arriaga’s urban scripts. Like Amores Perros, the novel is steeped in violence. The violence is often directed towards animals, a stand-in for repressed violence among humans.
“I used to fight a lot when I was a kid,” he says (he lost his sense of smell at the age of 13, after being beaten up). “Violence is absurd, but it’s always there and we can’t forget it. The only way to avoid it is to be aware of it. That’s why I’ve always distanced myself from Quentin Tarantino. I don’t think he’s ever experienced real violence, which is why he makes movies as gratuitously violent as Kill Bill. I know violence has consequences. I’ve seen people damaged by violence.”
Back on the topic of films, I ask how The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada came about. Tommy Lee Jones called Arriaga and suggested that they work on a remake of some old movie. “I told him I only do original work. Still, he invited me to go hunting on his Texas ranch. He said: ‘I’d like to do a film with you. You can write about whatever you like, as long as I get to direct it and act in it.’ Shaking my hand he said: ‘This is our contract. Let the lawyers take care of everything else.’”
Shortly afterwards, Jones told him about a Mexican boy killed by US Marines. He was tending to his hares and scaring off a predator. The Marines thought they were being shot at, fired back, and got away with murder. That, Arriaga decided, was the tale he wanted to tell. He added parts of stories that he had hoped to direct himself some day.
“I imagined a barren, open landscape. I wanted to write about the border and its dynamics. So you have those American cowboys listening to Mexican radio stations they don’t understand, and those Mexican cowboys watching American soaps they can’t make any sense of. That’s how the border is.”
It isn’t a revenge movie, Arriaga explains. It’s about justice. “Justice can only be attained when you understand the world of the people you have inflicted damage upon.” In his quest for justice, Pete makes Mike wear Melquiades’ clothes, drink from Melquiades’ cup, and walk around in Melquiades’ boots. “Pete doesn’t punish Mike. He is trying to show him something.” From that quest for justice comes some form of redemption.
The film is also about reclaiming identities. Pete’s efforts to ensure Melquiades has a decent burial is an attempt to redefine his friend as an individual, to single him out from among the invisible, huddled mass of “wetbacks” and illegal aliens and unnamed Border Patrol casualties. As hundreds of thousands of undocumented migrants rally in the streets of the US’s big cities these days, the dramatisation of a particular case becomes all the more effective.
“Fiction, by which I mean movies and literature, can be more powerful than sociological or political analysis. Fiction humanises the problem. It adds substance. Migratory issues can be better understood through this medium than through numbers and statistics.”
Arriaga considers his work as a screenwriter to be part of a thematically and stylistically consistent body of work that includes his novels and short stories. Even in a collaborative medium such as film, he defends his authorship fiercely. “I don’t write on demand. I’m not a hired hand. I like to have authorial control.”
Publicity for The Three Burials indicates that the film is “by the writer of Amores Perros and 21 Grams”. This, he hopes, shows that movie audiences are increasingly aware of the author’s craft. “A writer can bring his entire inner world to a movie. People go to watch films scripted by David Mamet or Charlie Kaufman, irrespective of who directs them. That’s what I aspire to.”
These aspirations may go some way to explain why Arriaga’s fruitful collaboration with his fellow Mexican Alejandro González Iñárritu, director of Amores Perros and 21 Grams, is coming to an end. Their last movie together, Babel, starring Cate Blanchett and Brad Pitt, is in post-production.
“We’re parting amicably after that,” he says with a grin, “before things stop being amicable. “We were a great team, but the collaborative process can be difficult. Each of us wants to do things his way.”
He goes as far as saying that he may, in the future, quit movies altogether for literature. For now, however, Arriaga seems happy to bask in the warm glow of the 18-minute standing ovation that The Three Burials received at Cannes, and of the award he picked up.
“It was the most gratifying experience of my life,” he confides. “I keep telling the people who work with me: you have to work your asses off, because experiencing that is priceless. Priceless.”