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When I think about growing up, I feel most affected by two travels that I made working in cargo boats when I was 16 and 18. One of them crossed through the Mississippi and Baton Rouge and Mobile, Alabama, and another went all the way to Europe.
As a Third World citizen, I always feel that I need to express my point of view. Sometimes the points of view of Third World countries are never expressed. We don't have that possibility, sometimes, to spread what we feel and how we see things.
Very little is known about Hugh Glass as a real guy that existed 200 years ago, except that he was attacked by a bear, betrayed and left for dead, and has to survive in the winter. I said, 'What really drives a human to survive those conditions?'
All my films I have shot in chronological order - always. And the reason is that there's a moment that the screenplay is the notion of the film. But when you start doing a film... the work itself starts being transformed, and you have to surrender.
You hear about bombings in other countries, or numbers like "10,000 people died" - you hear that number and you think, "Well, I saw that yesterday in a film, and that didn't look so bad." Younger viewers, in particular, lose perspective on reality.
Sad music, I always thought, is more beautiful than other music. But at the same time, I am in my personal life a very happy guy. I have a sense of humor. I am not the kind of depressed guy all the time brooding. No. I am very enthusiastic about things.
'Babel' is about the point of view of others. It literally includes points of views as experienced from the other side. It is not about a hero. It is not about only one country. It is a prism that allows us to see the same reality from different angles.
The problem with the screenplay is that it's not literature, and it's not a film. It's a very weird, technical kind of blueprint that will be absolutely transformed into something else that is not that, you know? Honestly, a screenplay is no literature.
How can [actors] learn their lines and be honest in front of 30 people and all the lights? It makes me cry sometimes. I can't understand how they can be joking with me 30 seconds before, and 40 seconds later they're giving me all this incredible feeling.
I love Sam Mendes, but I went to see 'Spectre' with my kid, and the opening scene of the Dia de Muertos party, with this kind of tropical music, in downtown Mexico City, with all these people dancing like it's the Rio de Janeiro carnival... I had to laugh.
One of the reasons why I agreed to do commercials is that they gave me complete freedom. I just had to have the car in it and write a story around it. I wanted to do something serious set in a Latin American country, but again, it was an exercise in style for me.
I think intelligence basically can be in a way defined by the possibility of having two opposite ideas living together and at the same time functioning. That's why I think a smart script has two things living in the same place, and they're absolutely contradictory.
Maybe next year the government might impose some immigration rules on the academy. Two Mexicans in a row is suspicious. [On Mexican immigrants in the US] I hope they can be treated with respect of the ones who came before and built this incredible immigrant nation.
The actors make the film. They're the ones that take this theoretical movie that's in your head and make it real. The success of a film is entirely on their shoulders. I admire them, because acting is such a difficult thing to do, and I personally can't understand it.
There's nothing better than being in a film that translates to audiences and makes people think and feel good and walk away with great revelations in their own life of some kind. But when the process and the experience and the fun of that matches, it's a good feeling.
I understand when there's no money for the arts in the government, but it should maybe pressure private companies to support more filmmakers. These exhibition and distribution companies are huge, and there might be incentives for them to invest more in Mexican cinema.
When you are shooting in a conventional way, you put nets around yourself. It's very hard to fall and hit the ground. You can always manipulate things to make it not embarrassing. If the scene is a little bit bad, you can polish it or even take it out. You can hide your mistakes.
I want the camerawork to fit the narrative and tell the story from the point of view of the character, but sometimes, to be interacting with the sensations of the story, you almost become like a ghost, you know? Like, someone that is floating, observing, not really judging what's going on.
I began to learn about the camera and the actors. That gave me a lot of the skills. At the same time, advertising gives you a lot of vices, for example, an obsession for a superficial look, but at the same time, it gives you the capacity to synthesize the story - tell a story in one minute.
I have dark skin. My nickname is El Negro. They call me El Negro in Mexico because even in my country, the dark skin is evidence of Indian blood, a sign that one technically belongs to a third class. Even my grandmother had some kind of differentiation with me, because I was darker than my siblings.
In a world where irony reigns, where you have to separate, protect and laugh at anything that is honest or has an emotional charge, I bet for catharsis. I like to invest emotionally in things. And catharsis, when it touches the emotional vein, can open the doors of even those who protect themselves.
I've listened to music all my life. I've always felt that music tells more stories sometimes than films, with more possibilities. Every time you listen to them, songs bring different images and moods - depending on where you are in your life, you can listen to a song and it means something different.
I've listened to music all my life. I've always felt that music tells more stories sometimes than films, with more possibilities. Every time you listen to them, songs bring different images and moods - depending on where you are in your life, you can listen to a song, and it means something different.
We are the only alive creatures that are mortals; the animals are immortal, which is why they live stupidly. We are the only creatures that know that we will die, but that is a gift. It's important because we know we have to take advantage and squeeze life and understand why we're here in the first place.
Nowadays, a critic has to watch 700, 800 films a year, and I know through experience, being a juror in prestigious film festivals where supposedly the best films are arriving, from twenty films maybe you see two that are good, one that is so-so, and one that is extraordinary. And the other sixteen are terrible.
It's more enjoyable for me to know that life is finite. Knowing that, I would like to go to a party. When you get to the holidays, if you think that the holidays will be forever, you just take it for granted. But, if you know that you have just three days at the beach, you will be so happy to be there every day.
Of course, there's always one theater that shows some kind of European film. Now, fortunately, you have DVDs, so it's possible to get anything you want within a few hours. In those days, it was virtually impossible to get Italian films, or German films, or whatever. So I grew up with very standard, mainstream films.
When you do a film in a foreign language, you know there's a cost in it, that you know, unfortunately, the audiences of foreign language films have not been cultivated. There's a market, but the market has been reduced, unfortunately, and you know that when you're making a foreign language film, you're making a choice.
Actors are exposed in a way that nobody else can understand. They are subject to the likes and dislikes of people their entire life, no matter how successful they are. At the same time, in order to be liked, you have to not be yourself. So it's a very complicated human exercise - an alchemy that I have never understood.
I think, unfortunately, everything is becoming about comfort, you know? A comfortable way to tell a story. The comfortable way, so that the audience will never be lost. A comfortable way to produce a film with green screens or without a lot of physical effort or losing control because of the weather or physical locations.
I remember, the first time I saw a [Andrei] Tarkovsky film, I was shocked by it. I didn't know what to do. I was fascinated, because suddenly I realized that film could have so many more layers to it than what I had imagined before. Then others, like Kurosawa and Fellini, were like a new discovery for me, another country.
As a sensitive filmmaker, I think you have to really be careful in how you explore it. Not that you can't tell any story you want - I'm not calling for censorship or anything. But if you're going to have violence, I think it's important to deal with the consequences of that on a human level, not just to make people laugh.
For me, it is especially important to maintain my interior life. My spirituality, my connectedness. That is the way I think. That is the way I deal with life and tough moments. I keep in touch with something bigger than me. And I connect with people who have an interior life - a connection with something bigger than them.
Two words guided the making of 'Babel' for me: 'dignity' and 'compassion.' These things are normally forgotten in the making of a lot of films. Normally there is not dignity because the poor and dispossessed in a place like Morocco are portrayed as mere victims, or the Japanese are portrayed as cartoon figures with no humanity.
In the creative process, my ego has always been a huge tyrant ... a dictator and kind of rude and very misleading, because sometimes when I'm doing something, I say, "This is great! This is fantastic! Very genius!" And 20 minutes later, I feel like a dead jellyfish. "You are a stupid a**hole. This is a piece of sh*t. Nobody will care about it."
I was aware of the possible biases you could get as a commercial director, like being too concerned about the technical aspects of the form rather than anything of substance. If you keep working in commercials, you can get trapped in a very superficial way of thinking. I always used commercials as an exercise for filmmaking, like going to the gym.
My country has been wracked with violence for a long time. Just to see all the violence on the news makes you sick. It's true that violence is in our nature, but I try to explore deeply where it comes from and where it goes and what it creates. Not in a moralistic or preachy way, but just to observe the real consequences of violence in a human being or in a society.
I think movies in general should have more respect for the audience than they do. Too many films are afraid to confuse people, so all the information is given to them right away, and there's nothing left for the film to do. It ruins many stories, because everything becomes obvious and predictable. I want my films to engage people more and make them more actively involved in the story.
When people laugh and applaud as characters are killing each other, and you never see the body that's lying there, or you never see the family that suffers, then it turns into a cool thing to do, like a videogame. Then, when you watch the news and see that 15 soldiers were killed, you start to see them as just numbers, material, information, images. We lose the real weight and real value of one simple human life.
Actually, when I think about growing up, I feel most affected by two travels that I made working in cargo boats when I was 16 and 18. One of them crossed through the Mississippi and Baton Rouge and Mobile, Alabama, and another went all the way to Europe. On the last trip, I stayed in Europe for one year with $1,000, working everywhere I could, doing everything. Those years shaped me a lot and taught me the value of exploring different things.