Alejandro González Iñárritu Q&A

The Mexican director discusses his globe-trotting new film 'Babel'.

Jan  4 2007

Alejandro González Iñárritu is the director of 'Babel', which stars Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett and extends the 43-year-old Mexican filmmaker's earlier criss-crossing narratives – 'Amores Perros' and '21 Grams' – to a global scale, incorporating stints in Japan, Mexico, Morocco and the US as a cast of characters unknown to each other find their lives colliding. 'Babel' has divided critics since its premiere at Cannes last May, with its detractors quick to highlight its glossy treatment of tragedy and hollow pleas for profundity. On the day that Iñárritu spoke to Time Out, 'Babel' received seven Golden Globe nominations, prompting comparisons with 'Crash', last year's Oscar-winner that took a similar battering from reviewers on its release.

The awards season involves a lot of campaigning, interviews, appearances, massaging of voters. Are you happy to do all that?

Nobody's happy to do it, it's tough work. To speak about a film is always painful. When I find myself trying to verbalise the film, I feel I'm failing. I feel that I tend to make superficial comments, and there are things words can't describe very well.

Are awards worth working for?

At the end, no matter how much work you do, I don't think you get awards for the work you do promoting a film. I think all films promote themselves and try to reach more people. I don't think the promotion alone brings awards.

This is your third collaboration with the writer Guillermo Arriaga. What were your first ideas for the film?

I first thought of it when I was making '21 Grams' and originally I wanted to make a film in five continents and in five different languages. I mentioned this to Guillermo and he liked the idea and started to put together some ideas, some storylines.

When you had that first idea of five continents and five languages, was there an element of wanting to do that simply because you could? Because it's your third film, you now have more support, more money…

I never thought about money, I always thought that this thing should be cheap, which it is. Coming from the third world, we're very conscious about economy. For me, it was more a fact of coming first from 'Amores Perros', a film that dealt with parents and children on a local scale, which was my city in Mexico, and then making '21 Grams' in America, and then, after that, wanting to do a film on the same themes and with parallel stories on a global scale. It felt like natural growth to explore that same territory that we started with 'Amores Perros', you know?

Both you and Guillermo Arriaga are Mexicans who are familiar with the US. But 'Babel' includes stories of Morocco and Japan. How did you and Guillermo assume to know about these countries?

I like a challenge. I like difficulties and the possibility of failure. If I didn't feel that, I'd be bored to death. I always thought it would be challenging because a lot of the characters never see each other, are never linked physically, and so I'd need to find a way to link all these stories dramatically and emotionally and find a visual grammar, a language to make a unity of many different and diverse elements – four stories, five languages.

You've said before that you and Guillermo Arriaga won't be working together again. Do you feel that's because your use of this structure of filmmaking – of parallel, interlocking stories – has reached a natural end?

Yes, I think so. I hope that I won't be branded by these structures, which I feel are very different from one film to the other. 'Amores Perros' and '21 Grams' are very different structurally. I think that's only a choice you make, a dramatic tool you decide to use, but I won't have any problem using it again when it's needed. But I think, yes, for the purposes of this trilogy, it's come to a natural end.

You think of 'Amores Perros', '21 Grams' and now 'Babel' as a trilogy?

Yeah, completely. Because I think that the three films, no matter what, deal with stories of parents and children. I'm exploring the same themes in three films.

Isn't there a danger of dilution when you tell these different, parallel stories in one film? A danger that characterisation will suffer?

It's a matter of choosing what to show, of choosing which bits of these people's lives to focus on. Not all human lives are very interesting, but they all have moments that are really very interesting. You have to choose which story to tell and which part of their life to address and then hone in on that moment and then leave when it's not interesting any more. It's a difficult choice. When you go to a dinner and talk to a guy for two hours, you have a pretty good idea of who he is after just talking to him for that length of time. That's enough to know most of his life. And that's what can be accomplished in a film too.

'Babel' opens on Jan 19.

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