Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1062452
48 DGA QUARTERLY CONTINUED ON PAGE 92 my mother was very guilt-driven, which is very traditional, very much about guilt. And about God as a guy with a rifl e; any little thing you do, POW! You know what I mean? He will punish you. So it's a little primitive. And childish. I was raised on a Catholicism that was based on fear of the devil, through the judgment that will come from the Sec- ond Coming—that God will come and will judge the good and the bad. So yes, there's a lot of those kind of destiny things about guilt in the first films. I have changed. I'm a completely di erent person in the last 10, 15 years. I have evolved. In my questioning and in my understanding. And it's not that I never believed. I always ques- tioned. Q: In some ways your career could be viewed as the fi lms you did with Guillermo Arriaga, and those you did after. After those first three films, you were no longer doing those interlocking, non-chronological stories, and the narrative was more linear as opposed to kaleidoscopic. Was that just a sign of creative growth? A: Yes. I think when we finished Amores Perros, we started working on 21 Grams, where one accident a ects three di erent lives in a di erent way. It was really three stories again. But they were interlocked very di erently. And when we were fi nish- ing that, I thought, "Well, I did one in my city (Amores), I did one in another country (21 Grams), and I would like to keep exploring this structure to make films as a mosaic, but now on a global basis (Babel). It was a tempting experiment to say, "Okay, let's go from the local to the foreign to the global." And I started work- ing from that. The experiment with 21 Grams was that every scene will never have any rela- tion with the next one. And if you see it, when we cut, there's no relation with [the previ- ous scene]. And [the challenge was] how we can have a cohesive emotional journey without actually narratively having that connection. And in Babel, the experiment was how we can create a story where characters will never physically see each other; they will never touch each other; they will never even know about [these other worlds], but their lives at that moment will be absolutely impacted by one another, even when they don't know about it. So it was in the middle of 21 Grams when I realized we should do a triptych; let's try to close the cycle—to explore di erent ways to narrate stories in di erent geographies and di erent modes. And it was exciting in that storytelling sense. But when I finished Babel, I was abso- lutely exhausted by the method of it. Because you end up with very little screen [time] with the characters. Even if it's four stories in Babel, you have 35 minutes (each). So you end up doing kind of short stories. And then you have to find a way to inter- lock them, which is a very di cult task, by the way. I was tired, exhausted; I didn't have anything more to say than that. And then I was starting to be criticized because it was "Oh my God, the same shit now, just reversed." And in a way it felt [done], it was enough. And then I challenged myself by doing my fi rst linear, orthodox, classic fi lm. Q: With Biutiful. A: With Biutiful. And as Orson Welles said, to do a genius picture is very easy. But doing a right picture is very difficult. And I said, OK, I'm going to do a traditional, narrative, one-character storyline. And I found myself really much more challenged in that one than in any other. Because the other ones, in a way, you have more ability to play with characters. You have three sauces. And [with Biutiful] you have one. And there are no tricks. There's no smokescreen. It's clear as it has to be. So I found myself very challenged. Q: There's an interesting conflict between First World and Third World in Babel, and the way Westerners view the people of Morocco or the way the people of the United States view people from Mexico. And part of the tragedy of that fi lm is the inability of people to see each other as fully formed human beings. A: Absolutely. That was the whole point of the thing—not seeing the human dimension and just qualifying people or labeling them, for Arabs, Muslims, Mexicans or "gringos" or whatever. And I think that has been amplifi ed in the recent years, unfortunately. So what is happening now on the border, by calling these [migrants] "invaders," when you see moms with kids, barefoot. I mean, that kind of thing is exactly what I was talking about before—just by being from a foreign country or by believing in some god or religion, you are already attached to a way and you cannot escape. That has been enhanced. Q: I just saw The Revenant again recently, and it's very vivid in my mind—that scene toward the beginning where the fur trappers get attacked by the Arikara warriors and have to retreat to the riverboat. How did you approach this scene? A: I started preparing this fi lm in 2010, and I scouted in 2011. Then it was delayed because we were waiting [for Leonardo DiCaprio to fi nish] the Martin Scorsese fi lm… In accepting his second consecutive DGA Feature Film Award for The Revenant, Iñárritu gave an emotional speech, mentioning his father, who had passed away two years prior, adding that "this embrace that you're giving me today, it goes to a whole country (Mexico), to a whole Latin American community in this country." PHOTO: ALBERTO E. RODRIGUEZ/GETTY IMAGES FOR DGA "IF YOU START DOING FILMS BY DEMOCRACY, THEN YOU ARE FUCKED. THERE'S A MOMENT THAT IT'S IMPORTANT TO BE CLEAR IN WHAT YOU WANT THAT NOT EVERYBODY WANTS."