Thomas Jane has quietly crept up the Hollywood ranks in the past couple of years. He made his breakthrough in the HBO biopic 61* and went on to score prominent roles in films like Deep Blue Sea, The Punisher, and The Mist.

Jane’s fame has now only grown with his role as teacher-turned-prostitute Ray Drecker on the new HBO comedy/drama Hung. Now, the 40 year-old actor seeks to flex a different muscle into the world of directing with his first film Dark Country, which will be released on DVD.

Dark Country is about a couple, played by Thomas and Laura German, who’s discovery of a dead body in the desert leads to a nightmarish experience. The most amazing aspect of the film is how quickly adept Jane seems to be behind the camera, however, he claims it’s not as effortless as it appears.

“We try to make it look easy, but sometimes, it’s just not easy,” he says, “The 3D, the budget, the micro-budget, we had 25 days to shoot it, all the old school tricks of shooting the car on green screen and putting it in the backgrounds later and making it like this world, they were all real challenges, there were a lot of challenges to take on for a first-time director. It was a big, huge mouthful to bite off.”

“I think there’s strength in not knowing. I think an older guy would never attempt what a younger guy attempts,” Thomas continues, “And often times, the younger guy gets away with a lot more than the older guy thinks that he could. And that’s kind of the case here. A more experienced director would never attempt what I did. I was foolish enough to try and pull it off. And that’s why some of it really works, you know.”

The film was shot simultaneously in both 3D high-definition, as well as 2D high-definition. We asked Thomas if his intent was to go full out gangbusters for his directorial debut.

“Gangbusters in the sense of what I wanted to achieve and I was pretty clear about what I wanted to achieve,” Jane claims, “First, it was one of the first 3D movies to pitch in Hollywood. I started pitching this as a 3D film, no one knew what the hell I was talking about, you know what I mean, with the red and the blue glasses. And I was like, no, no, it’s a whole other thing now. And Sony finally kind of got and said yes, but they’d give me this tiny amount of money to try and do it. And that was kind of part of the challenge because the other 3D now is kind of considered to be a big budget thing. So could I take 3D down into the real, low budget, independent world. That was one thing, and then, I had a specific look and tone that I wanted to capture, which was not easy to do on no money.”

However, Jane says his ambition was not merely limited to creating a 3D spectacle on a low-budget film, but to provide a film that he feels Hollywood has neglected in the past 40 years, the sci-fi mystery.

“I wanted to make the movie that, it seems to me today that all these movies are geared toward the mass population,” Thomas explains, “They’re all 50 to 100 million dollar movies and there doesn’t seem to be a hell of a lot underneath that going on right now. When I grew up, there were movies that had something for everybody. There was a musical, there was a western, and there were strange movies. I liked The Twilight Zone and this movie’s very influenced by The Twilight Zone, a film noir of the forties, and by David Lynch and by The Coen Brothers.”

“When I grew up, there was a small pocket of people that I knew that liked strange movies and they were sort of the “B-movies” of the horror world,” he adds, “They were Val Lewton films like Cat People. Kitschy, cult, and I know there’s people still out there that enjoy this kind of thing and I wanted to make a movie that didn’t cater to the mass masses, but it was built for people like me who do like the out-of-bounds movies, kids like me who used to stay up and watch The Outer Limits. Those are the kids that I like and a lot of those kids love comic books like I do. There’s a very graphic novel feel to the thing.”

Thomas says though that The Dark Country film is not the only adaptation of the story he is making.

“I’m going to make a graphic novel out of The Dark Country based on a short story that was written by Tab Murphy, who wrote the screenplay,” he says, “ I’m going to take his short story and adapt that into a graphic novel, instead of doing a film adaptation of his short story. I look forward to that.”

Jane says his desire to make the graphic novel stems from his founding of a comic book company. He says his childhood love for comics has already played a hand in shaping his budding directorial style.

“I have a fantastic storyboard artist and I have a graphic novel company called Raw Studios,’ Thomas reveals, “I’ve been reading comic books since I was eight. So in a way, you’re right, I do have some oddball, strange shots in my head and I was able to pour some of them out and work them into this film. I tried to make the odd shots make sense in the context of the story and not just make them because they’re cool shots.”

“I tried and I wasn’t always successful, but if I tried to have a really cool shot in there, it made sense in the context of the film,” he continues, “It’s weird, we want both. As a director, you want people to notice that you’ve really created an interesting visual, but you also want people to be interested in the story enough that it feels like it’s part of the story. We want credit and yet, we don’t want credit for the shots that we create.”

Thomas went on to share with us some of the work he has done over at Raw Studios.

“The website is rawstudios.com,” Jane says, “And we got a forum and we’ve got a pretty dedicated following of kids who love science fiction and horror stuff. And that’s what we do. We’ve done two sci-fi books, one’s called Bad Plane, the other’s called Alien Pig Farm 3000: Rednecks Vs. Aliens. I wrote Bad Planet and produced the other ones. I’ve got a graphic novel sensibility.”

What is most refreshing about Dark Country is its sense of mystery. Jane explained to us how keeping the mystique of the story in the film going will make it repeatedly enjoyable for audiences.

“By the end, movies you can’t explain,” he believes, “You know how it’s happening or why it’s happening, but it’s left completely mysterious. “If you were to watch the movie, you could pick up on a couple more little clues that would give you a little bit more insight into why this stuff is going on, which I also thought was interesting. There is an answer that fits into this. There’s a key, there’s a master key that’s not in the film that you can construct, which will unlock the mystery of the movie and why these strange things are happening.”

“It’s a darn interesting movie,” Jane adds, “And I’m surprised of people who have been responding to it. I was sure that nobody was really going to respond to it, but so far, I’ve gotten really interesting reviews and people are digging the way it looks. They like some of the weird oddball-ness of it and that’s great, because there’s not a lot of weird, oddball movies. Me and Tab worked really hard for the people who would want to go back and try to sort out what this is that we answer, that we created a logical world that if these things did happen, this is the result.”

However, keeping the mystery of the twist ending in an age of 24/7 easy-access Internet media proved to be difficult for Jane in promoting the film.

“It’s hard,” Thomas says, “Even in the big movies, we say don’t give it away. In this one, we just laid it out there. Today, with the internet, it’s just so hard. It’s even harder now today. If anybody wants to read anything about the film, chances are they wouldn’t have to dig very deep before somebody spoils the reveal for them.”

“I screened the film a few times and I’ve been real lucky to screen the film to people who knew nothing about the movie, but who did know me and did have relations to me, but I did not tell them anything about the film,” he adds, “And they were shocked. They got the impact of the twist of the film, which proved to me that the less you know about the movie, the better it works. It’s one of those movies that does work if you try not to read anything about it or know anything about it. I love that. It’s fun.”

Thomas says that ultimately Dark Country is a labor of love for him because it’s an amalgamation of all the kinds of science fiction and mystery he grew up reading and watching as a child.

“It’s stuff that I loved like Twilight Zone and Edgar Allen Poe and the O. Henry story,” he says, “The O. Henry stories always had a great twist at the end of them, the great classic short stories of O. Henry. I was always fascinated by that kind of stuff and that’s why I like it. I also like the mystery that revolves inside the film, that we don’t try to explain it, we don’t try to posit theories about what’s going on.”

“We just let it happen and let the viewer kind of come up with their own interpretation of what’s going on out there in the desert,” Jane continues, “And there are clues and there are, if you were to think about it and watch it again, I’m pretty damn sure you could come up with what the idea is. “

Jane explained for us the kind of mystery he hopes to reignite in science-fiction and horror with Dark Country.

“I call it a wound,” Thomas believes, “There’s a wound in the desert out there. That time and space could actually, like the Bermuda Triangle or like these things that we hear about there, out there in the blackness of the desert, away from all the power lines and all the influences of man and magnetic fields and shit, out there away from all that, when the Earth is just the Earth, there could be little wounds, little pockets that are wound in the fabric of space-time that you can sort of fall into. And once you fall in, fat chance of falling back out, because of the loss. Plus, the lightning that is displayed throughout the movie is also a clue to sort of where those wounds are when they occur.”

With his directorial debut in the can, Thomas says he is itching to go back to his primary role as actor on Hung

“HBO signed us up for another season,” Jane announces, “We are going to go back to work in February or maybe January and we’ll shoot another 10 or 12 episodes and we’ll run them in the summer. I’m real excited to go back to work with Anne Heche and Jane Adams.”

We asked Jane what has made Hung one of the most popular new TV series this year.

“You mean, it’s not my penis?” Thomas replies, “I guess outside of my penis, I would think it would be Ray’s vulnerability. I think it’s a pretty honest portrayal of a regular guy and I think it’s been a while since that’s been done, where you really try to take a normal man, a regular guy with all these insecurities and not very good with women and divorce.”

“He’s not a hero in any way and he’s got all kinds of problems,” he adds, “I think that’s the appeal of the show myself. His kids got problems, he’s got problems, and there’s a lot of insecurity and doubt in Ray’s life. I don’t know. That’s my guess.”

However, Thomas says that the one thing fans should not be expecting, at least not right away though, is a penis reveal a la Boogie Nights.

“Certainly not at the end of season one,” Jane remarks, “I think we have to wait till at least season four or five for that.”