[projector & typewriter] [ding] - NARRATOR: "On Story" is brought to you in part by the Alice Kleberg Reynolds Foundation, a Texas family providing innovative funding since 1979.

[typing] [wind blowing] [witch laughing] [sirens wailing] [shots fired] [water dripping] [typewriter] [suspense music] [telegraph beeping] [piano strum] - NARRATOR: "On Story," presented by Austin Film Festival.

A look inside the creative process from today's leading writers and directors.

[ripping] - NARRATOR: This week's "On Story," Academy Award winner Tommy Lee Jones, and "The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada."

- We didn't have a conventional narrative structure.

The past, present, and future all kind of get mixed up, and the suddenness of our editing style, that I think works to our advantage, because we're trying to create states of minds that you wouldn't conventionally expect in a movie audience.

[paper crumples] [typing] [typewriter ding] - NARRATOR: In this episode, Tommy Lee Jones and crew discuss the challenges of bringing the acclaimed film to the big screen.

[typewriter ding] - Guillermo Arriaga and I are hunting buddies, and he's a good writer, a good teacher of screenwriting at the university, there, in Mexico City, and he's an avid hunter.

He likes to kill things and eat them, [audience laughs] and we were hunting out on one of our ranches, and I looked around and I said, "There's a lot of talent in this pickup, we ought to make a movie about Texas and Mexico," and he said, "Okay, where do we start?"

And I said, "You should, I'll give you the congressional minutes of the hearing about the death or you can say murder of Ezekiel Hernandez in Redford, Texas in the '90s," and I thought that'd be a good place to start, exploring the concept of a border between two countries where the borders may not exist all the time, and sometimes, it may, and then it leads to questions about and an interest in the concept of borders between the heart and the mind and desire and reality, and it just goes on and on.

We thought it'd be a pretty good basis upon which to make a movie, because I'm a Texan, he's a Mexican, and we wanted to make a movie about our country.

- But I've never crossed people from this side to that side.

Especially on horses.

- Okay, take us.

- What about the price?

- What price?

- The price to cross, 1,000 a person.

- I don't have a thousand dollars.

- $3,000.

A thousand for you, a thousand for the gringo, and a thousand for the dead guy.

- I'll find a way to get across.

[typewriter ding] - The international border is illegally in the precise middle of the flow of the river.

If the river moves, the border moves.

That's important to know, and if you go more than halfway across the river, you've entered, you've probably illegally entered a foreign country, but we were able to fix that with an old movie trick.

You just move the camera to the other side of the line where people are traveling and it looks like, when they're on this side, they're going away.

When you're on this side of the camera, they're coming toward you, [audience laughs] so we cheated in an old and honorable way, photographically, and then it, it worked and we didn't have any trouble out of the border patrol that I knew about.

- I would speak to Tommy in Spanish even off set, and what was, I'm just going to mention it because it's to his credit, he speaks fluent Spanish, and the Spanish that he speaks isn't the Spanish that you see in the film.

It's much more eloquent, he's much more of a Spanish speaker, so even he is able to capture an essence of that area.

[speaking Spanish] [speaking Spanish] - I myself had to pay attention too, and that had a lot to do with where I'm from, too, because I'm not, I have family in Ojinaga, Chihuahua, which is right there, literally, and so I know that whole area.

So it was easy to kind of get into that kind of tone, but other than that, it wasn't over-thought, it's just that's how people speak.

- Well, this movie takes place in North Mexico and South Texas, and we have, we're a bicultural society and we have two languages.

Both crucial, and both convey a lot of poetry.

[typewriter ding] - I'm from Mexico, so that's as much research as I probably needed.

[audience laughs] No, no, no.

It's funny 'cause I'm very fortunate to be in this film because there was so many talented people.

I didn't do anything.

All I did was work at a ranch, and while these gentlemen were making a movie, I was digging posts and fixing plumbing and I had the good fortune of being invited by Señor Jones and he invited me to his home and opened up his home to me, and I got to work.

I never rode a horse before.

I do have family who have ranches in Mexico, but it's a different kind of world.

This is very much from the perspective of being in Texas, but he put me in char- well, he had two men in charge that took care of me on his ranch, and they were from Mexico, and so as they would, as I began to have a relationship with these men who were teaching me how to put on my boots right and how to ride a horse and do all these things, I was slowly becoming a ranch hand.

I wasn't an actor, and I think what was happening is the more I was giving myself up to the work, and when you talk about the landscape, I mean, we could sit here and intellectualize everything, but when you get up and go to work, the last thing you want to do is get up and put mousse in your hair.

You know what I mean?

You're going to work, so I had about a month to be on this ranch and kind of catch up, and I would never become what these men represent, but the more and more I got in it, the more I just sort of became this person.

- Ya, ya, ya, hey, hey!

[speaking Spanish] [speaking Spanish] [typewriter ding] [music] - That place doesn't exist.

- Yes, it does.

[music] - There is no [beep] Jimenez, man!

- Actually, we didn't have time to get that establishing shot of Jimenez.

We were running out of time, we were running out of call sheets, it was the end of the day, we had a matter of minutes to shoot a half a day of work, Chris and I looked at one another, and I said, "We'll just send the stills department up the hill "with a camera and a hydraulic head and a couple of, two or three sled dogs that help," and I wound up sending my wife, who was the stills photographer on the show, to the top of the hill to get that slow pan from left to right that establishes the town of Jimenez.

It's a very important shot in the movie, and that's one of the ways we managed.

We were, we often found ourselves in desperate situations, looking for last minute brilliant solutions to possible problems.

- I mean, I think for, the biggest challenge for me was trying to get these guys to try to shoot the night-time, all the night desert.

The big struggle we had was Chris would complain he can't light the desert at night, so I think you noticed we basically came up with the philosophy to shoot everything in a dusk-for-night feel, which I think really played out, but every one of those scenes, we only had seven minute windows to shoot them all.

So I think that became a real challenge, when the producers come out and ask what you're doing for three or four hours in the afternoon.

- It saved a lot of money on the lighting.

We didn't have to light the desert, which Chris didn't want to do and it wouldn't have looked as good if we had to light the desert.

- So that's the real trick, not just timing it right, it's getting all this gear and people out in the middle of nowhere, 'cause there's, Tommy likes to take us as far away from civilization as we can go.

[typewriter ding] - See, this movie's about borders between countries, as I said earlier, and there's a place in this guy, Melquiades' head, where there's heaven, or the most wonderful place in the world, the land of the heart's desire, nirvana, and there's a border, and the photograph for him is somehow kind of the key.

[music] [speaking Spanish] [speaking Spanish] [speaking Spanish] - There's a border between your feet in the dirt and your imagination, and the movie really does take all of these separations seriously and invites consideration of that within a dramatic narrative context, if that doesn't sound too far out, and the pictures, the photograph, the little Polaroid is a key, it's a thing, an object, a token.

[speaking Spanish] [speaking Spanish] ♪ ♪ [speaking Spanish] [speaking Spanish] [speaking Spanish] [music] [typewriter ding] - NARRATOR: You've been watching a conversation with Tommy Lee Jones on "On Story."

[typing] [typewriter ding] Next up, filmmaker Roy Rutngamlug and his short film Formosa, Texas .

- My name is Roy Rutngamlug.

I'm the writer-director of Formosa, Texas .

The idea for the story of the film kind of came from my childhood and growing up in a small town in America, not looking like everybody else, and kind of being aware that there's a bigger world out there that I wanted to participate in.

So the film is a little bit about that experience.

So the film is an identity piece, and it is about being stuck between two perceived cultures.

I think one of them is America, and the other one is being, maybe, an immigrant Asian, and so what I hope audiences take away from the film is this experience is probably a lot more universal than people might realize, just seeing it through the lens of this particular character.

Coming up is my film, "Formosa, Texas."

I hope you guys enjoy it.

[traffic, cars passing] [traffic, cars passing] [footsteps] - Hi, how was everything?

- [speaking Mandarin] Sorry.

[beeping] [singing, music] ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ [brakes screech to a stop] [engine running] [music] ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ - [speaking Mandarin] [scuffling] - What?

What?

What?

I can do the front!

- No, we need customers!

[speaking Mandarin] [clanging] [chair scoots] [door creaks] - Hi!

- Hey.

- Do you know what you'd like?

- Oh, um...

I haven't really looked.

[laughs] - I can make some recommendations, if... - Is there anything to do around here?

[crumpling] - [giggles] [food sizzling] - [speaking Mandarin] Delivery [speaking Mandarin] - Order to go.

- Did you just tell her I smell?

[upbeat music] ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ [door creaks] [door slams] - Hey man.

Been waiting on you.

What you got going on, Lon?

[footsteps] [money crumples] [footsteps] - Neat place, isn't it?

- Yeah, it's pretty cool.

- They've got places like this where you're from?

- Kind of.

[slow music] - [laughs] - I swear, I had nothing to do with that.

- Well, do you know how to dance to this?

- Of course I do.

So, it's two-stepping, so it's two quick steps and two slow steps, quick, quick, slow, slow, and I start going forward with my left foot and then right foot.

So it's quick, quick, stop, slow, quick, quick, slow, step.

[slow music] - It's pretty simple.

[slow music] ♪ - [giggles] [slow music] ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ [footsteps] [door creaks] [door slams] - Sorry!

- Oh, no, no, I apologize.

[smack] - [speaking Mandarin] [footsteps] Clean up!

- Hey.

[bus engine running] I gotta go.

[bus engine running] Hey.

[bus engine running] [bus engine running] [bus door closes] [bus driving off] [crickets chirp] [crickets chirp] [quiet hum from empty room] [quiet hum from empty room] [quiet hum from empty room] [quiet hum from empty room] [quiet hum from empty room] [quiet hum from empty room] [quiet hum from empty room] [bowl scrapes across counter] [quiet hum from empty room] [quiet hum from empty room] [quiet hum from empty room] [spoons clink on bowls] [slow music] ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ - NARRATOR: For more On Story, check out our free podcast at onstory.tv, or search the iTunes store, and get the book today, "On Story: Screenwriters and Their Craft," on Amazon.

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ [projector & typewriter] [dings]