I know how to work with people. I’ve worked with the same people for 10 years. I’m not that kind of auteur. I hear ideas.
Yes, I am a Mexican, and I have a past and a culture. But what matters is the film itself, not where it was financed or cast.
I can’t understand the conditions of a corporate product being designed and getting millions. I admire it, it’s great, but I don’t know how to do that. I have to have the wheel.
I have never directed anything for the stage. I studied for three years in the theater, and it was a very, very scary experience to direct live, being so vulnerable without the possibility to control things, to be so exposed.
That incredible bubble and high expectations built at festivals can work against a film.
If you stretch tragedy, it will always become comedy.
If I had been at an assembly line for films, I don’t know if I would be the best driver. I think I would have crashed the car.
I can’t imagine David Lean justifying why he went to the desert to shoot ‘Lawrence of Arabia.’
When we are looking for validation, that will never satisfy us. When we are looking for affection, for love, a little bit of that will be enough to be complete.
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.
To think that we can understand everything is such stupidity because our senses are so limited. We are so limited that to feel that we can understand the creation scientifically is a little bit naive. It’s very childish.
I didn’t have a normal academic career. I never studied cinema. I learned from life.
‘Birdman’ came from a very beautiful side of me, from a part of honesty and surrender about things.
I started off writing TV adverts. I saw those as rehearsals for a feature film.
Fear of the unknown is a great creative partner.
You can better embrace life, you can enjoy it more, when you are conscious that it will end. You bite life.
All of us want something in life, all of us have flaws, and all of us have strengths. So, I always try to discover those things in a character and then try to expose it in one way or another.
‘Ikiru’ is existential but with a lot of tenderness.
I personally think that you have to get lost to find something really worthwhile, at least sometimes.
Cinema is a mirror by which we often see ourselves.
When you live in a city, as I do, where violence is really in the streets, and people die every day, there’s nothing funny about it.
I define myself from a vision, from a point of view of life.
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 think that in order to be a film director, one has to be a warrior who shouldn’t be defeated by the daily onslaught of problems.
I have always considered myself to be spiritual in a way that has less to do with religion and more with an awareness that you have, and the consciousness you have of being alive and the consciousness that you will be dead.
If art doesn’t move people, then art has failed.
It’s harder to make real audio than special effects audio.
Everything is reason. If you don’t have reason, you have nothing.
‘Biutiful’ is a tough film. It doesn’t make concessions to the vulgarity of light entertainment. It’s not the kind of film that you see every day in the Cineplex. But as an artist, it’s the thing that I needed to do.
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 don’t know if I have a career or not, or where it ends or it begins. I have been working, doing what I do for a long time. But my creative process has always been so tortuous.
There was so much fear after 9/11, and that fear caused people to make the wrong decisions.
I learned there are ways to approach life. You can never change the events, but you can change the way you approach them.
We try to show that violence has a consequence – when you create violence, it turns against you.
I can be unbearable sometimes asking for so many takes.
I leave the story room to grow into what the movie is driving me to do.
I think that the best things come from thought, without thinking. I think that’s the smartest use of the intelligence that we all have.
I have a notebook, and I know what decisions will be made in pre-production. Everything is pre-determined in the pre-production period. I visually design the whole thing, and I know when things will happen.
I think there’s nothing wrong with being fixated on superheroes when you are 7 years old, but I think there’s a disease in not growing up.
My duty is to make probable the improbable. If I tell you how I did it, I will ruin your experience.
Films like ‘Babel’ can transcend the one point-of-view formula that has reigned for so long.
‘Biutiful’ is not about death. It’s about life. It’s a hymn to life.
I think when you turn 50 you get a little melancholic in a way.
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.
My mom had very low expectations for me, and she really had a point. I was a big problem at seventeen. If I had a kid like me, I would have those same expectations.
I am not a depressive person at all.
Too much knowledge and analysis can be paralysis.
We want to conquer the world and have 1,000 likes, 1 million likes, but at the same time, we are depressed. We are lonely, but we have 10,000 followers. We are all bipolar.
I don’t have a career. I have a life.
It’s different if you’re self-fed by a culture such as the U.S. where it’s so rich, you don’t have to look outside. Everything’s already there. But when you grow up in the desert, you have to be looking all over for inspiration.
You have to make millions on Friday night, because there are another 600 films waiting behind you, with explosions and everything.
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?’
I think we are all connected in this world.
When I talk about sad things, I talk about sad things.
Freedom comes with a lot of responsibility. When you are by yourself, you have to develop a third eye.
When there’s a good script, everybody circles.
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.
Pages: 1 2
