Thornton bares it all in return to director's chair

• Thornton doesn%27t miss the attention from a celebrity marriage
• %27Mansfield%27 is set in 1969 Alabama and is a tribute to Thornton%27s father
• Director lets his Southern drawl flow

You remember Billy Bob Thornton of years gone by, the rude, crude Arkansan who was public in his scorn for the press and in his love for his wife, which he symbolized by wearing a necklace containing her blood?

Thornton, who returns to the screen in two films in the next few weeks, would like you to know he's the same guy. Minus the plasma.

"My life is pretty much the way it's always been, except I'm not in a celebrity relationship," Thornton says of his 2003 divorce from Angelina Jolie, who would later couple with Brad Pitt. "And I feel pretty good about that. I don't miss it."

Nor, he says, does he miss the scrutiny that came with that three-year marriage, in which he and Jolie made headlines for wearing DNA-dappled pendants — the press called them vials of hemoglobin, while Thornton said they were lockets containing a drop of each other's blood.

Either way, Thornton says, he feels a certain freedom from the flashbulbs since the split from Jolie, who was his fifth wife. He has moved into the more secluded environs of Los Angeles' San Fernando Valley, where he lives with makeup artist Connie Angland and has a 9-year-old daughter, Bella.

And he's directing his first feature film in more than a decade, the dark comedy Jayne Mansfield's Car, which opens in theaters Friday.

Like being in paparazzi crosshairs, directing is a lifestyle he swore off, shortly after studio disagreements forced him to cut more than an hour from his 2000 Matt Damon drama All the Pretty Horses. (His 2001 film Daddy and Them, which introduced him to then-fiancée Laura Dern, was shot before Horses.)

Still, Thornton is fond of saying there are three reasons to make a movie: For fun, for money or because you have something to say. Thornton has something to say.

Set in Alabama in 1969, Mansfield tells the story of disparate families brought together by the passing of a mother who dies suddenly.

If 2000's The Gift was an homage to his mother, Virginia Roberta, an Arkansas psychic — Thornton wrote the supernatural story starring Cate Blanchett for director Sam Raimi — Mansfield is a tribute to Thornton's father, William Raymond "Billy Ray" Thornton.

In Mansfield, Robert Duvall plays Jim Caldwell, a World War I vet trying to keep the peace between families and his WWII veteran sons Jimbo (Robert Patrick), Carroll (Kevin Bacon) and Skip (Thornton).

The story mirrors Thornton's life. His father, Thornton says, was a Korean War vet who rarely spoke of battle and was quick to raise a hand. Like Duvall's character, Thornton's father dreaded personal conversations with his kids, though he was fascinated by car wrecks, including the 1967 auto accident that killed pinup star Jayne Mansfield. As Duvall's character does in the film, Thornton's father took his three sons to see the car, paying 50 cents a head to look at the wreckage.

"He loved car wrecks," Thornton recalls of his father. "It's about the most personal thing we did together. I wanted that in the movie."

Emotional vulnerability, Duvall says, has prompted him to do six films with Thornton, whom he considers a Hollywood rarity: a director free to speak in his natural Southern cadence.

"I felt like Tennessee Williams was in the back seat" of Mansfield, says Duvall, who lives in Virginia. "(Thornton) loved the novelists of the South, and you can tell it in his dialogue. I don't know if it's because we had such an oral history south of the Mason-Dixon line, or it was economics, or what. But you don't get as many Southern storytellers in Hollywood. He's one."

Thornton, 58, has never been afraid to let more than his drawl show. He bared all in a steamy love scene with Halle Berry in 2001's Monster's Ball, and as a randy, invective-spewing Kris Kringle in 2003'sBad Santa.

He gets to lay it bare again in Mansfield, in which Thornton earns the film its R rating with a scene of him pleasuring himself to the sight of his nude stepsister, dancing and speaking in her British accent.

"I've never been that uncomfortable with that kind of thing," Thornton says. "If you're going to cuss at kids in Bad Santa, there's no reason to hold back, or people aren't going to believe you."

He goes for a different type of believability in Parkland, the drama re-enacting the days following the assassination of President Kennedy in 1963. Thornton plays Forrest Sorrels, the real-life Secret Service agent serving in Dallas at the time.

Thornton says he took the film (out Oct. 4) to play "someone I could disappear into, that people didn't really know."

"Billy knows that area, knows those people," says Parkland director Peter Landesman. "He's the kind of person you hire when you want something to feel real, which is what we were going for. He's not afraid to look and be authentic."

Not that Thornton has to worry as much about appearances.

"I still have friends who I feel sorry for because photographers are in the bushes, wondering where they'll go, who's having a baby, (expletive) like that," he says. "I'm happy now, just having TMZ take my picture at an airport, going to work or coming home from it. Because that's my life."