Jose Luis Picon |
Málaga (EFE).- About to turn 60 and after winning four Oscars, the Mexican filmmaker Alejandro González Iñárritu assures that in his work he has had “the fortune of being absolutely independent and free.” “All the shit in my movies is mine, I can’t blame anyone.”
“I’ve always had the last call, and it didn’t matter where the funding came from. I have had absolute freedom and that is a privilege”, affirms in an interview with EFE the director, who this Saturday will close Verdial, the Fiesta de las Letras y la Cultura Iberoamericana, organized in Malaga by the cultural center La Térmica.
He admits that he is in a “reflection phase” when he turns 60 this August, “because, like it or not, there is less to go than what you have been doing behind.”
“I feel like I’m starting to be a lot more selective. I start to think about impermanence, about how much time is left and what I want to spend it on and with whom. Between each film I take a lot of time because I want life itself to feed me with what I can do, without looking for one project after another”.
The system is a mental concept
Despite his four Oscars and having worked in international productions, he does not believe he has been absorbed by the system, and believes that this system “is a mental concept”, because for him “it has never existed”.
“I started filming in Mexico, I filmed ’21 Grams’ in the US, ‘Babel’ all over the world, ‘Biutiful’ in Barcelona, ’Birdman’ in New York, ‘The Revenant’ in Canada, and ‘Bardo’ in Mexico. I have finally been able to have collaborators from all over the world in a global orgy of beautiful creativity.”
For this reason, he cannot “find a pattern in that system”, since each film has “very particular characteristics”, and he has tried “not to belong to a system because each film demands something different”.
“I think that if you enter a kind of factory where you produce the same thing, it could be a case,” adds Iñárritu, who points out that he and other compatriots such as Alfonso Cuarón or Guillermo del Toro coincide in being “very curious” and always “observing otherness”, and that “cultural curiosity” has “freed them from being able to enter a Hollywood factory system”.
Regarding cinema in his country, he points out that “now a group of young directors is coming, especially women, like Tatiana Huezo, Alejandra Márquez or Natalia Beristáin, with a visual power and a sensitivity that was needed”, something that Iñárritu “celebrates”. .
“I feel that there is a very powerful Mexican visual tradition. Since pre-Columbian times, the Mayans or the Aztecs, our ancestors reinvented the way of seeing the universe. From that visual expression we have a tradition that comes from a culture and we are part of it”.
He was a go-go boy in Torremolinos
Upon arriving in Malaga, he recalled his trip through Spain in the early 80s, when he slept in the streets of this city with three friends and was hired as a go-go boy to dance at the mythical Piper’s nightclub in Torremolinos.
“We slept on the street for two days, because we had no money, waiting for permission to travel to Marrakech. We got hired at Piper’s nightclub, which I don’t know if it’s still open, but it was the worst night on duty and we lasted less than 24 hours on the job.
ur waitress friends lent us the money to go to Madrid”, she recalls.
On that crazy trip he also worked in the grape harvest in La Torre de Esteban Hambrán, a town in Toledo near Madrid. “I have very good memories of that stay when I was young, when you have everything with nothing. Growing up, having everything, sometimes you think you have nothing. You have to learn again.”
In the edition find the film
Returning to his work as a filmmaker, he admits that, when he is editing a film, he tries to “find the best version”, because it is in the editing stage that “you finally find the film”.
“Once it’s over, I don’t want to see it again. I haven’t seen any of my movies and I’m not going to, because she brings me post-traumatic stress. You remember everything you see there.”
It happened with his last film, ‘Bardo’, because he finished it, the next day he went to Venice, to see it “with 2,000 people”, and he realized that “there was still work to do”, something with which he did not has “no problem”.
“I think about movies in time, I don’t care about the box office or the critics. You have to make films thinking that they are going to stay in time. There you have to invest your gaze, in the long term, not in immediate retribution ”.