Alejandro González Iñárritu

Preface and Acknowledgments

Preface and Acknowledgments Considered by many critics as a trilogy, Alejandro González Iñárritu’s first three feature films have burst onto the scene of early-twenty-firstcentury cinema. Released at the dawn of the new century, Amores perros (2000) inaugurated one more renaissance of Mexican cinema and effortlessly inscribed itself within the parameters of global art cinema. Although in many ways very different from each other and from their predecessor, 21 Grams (2003) and Babel (2006) confirm the consistency of Iñárritu’s filmic world and his ability to connect with a contemporary Weltanschauung. The Mexican filmmaker has become one of the most powerful voices in the cinema of the new century on the basis of only three films. At the time of this writing, his fourth feature, Biutiful, was in the last stages of postproduction and slated to be released in 2010. While most of the creative team from his first three films collaborated on Biutiful, one key player was missing: the scriptwriter Guillermo­ Arriaga. Not long after the release of Babel, a bitter argument abruptly ended what had been a fruitful collaboration. The release of The Burning Plain (2008), Arriaga’s first venture as director, revealed striking differences , in spite of a comparable narrative structure, with Iñárritu’s three films, suggesting that the separation might constitute a new beginning for both filmmakers. It is impossible to speculate on the direction that the director’s oeuvre is going to take in the future. In our interview with Iñárritu, he confirmed that Biutiful is a linear, single-protagonist story that focuses intensely on the main character’s subjectivity and that it will have little to do, at least in conceptual and structural terms, with his earlier films. In any case, the impact of his output as a feature director and the sophistication, intricacy, and manifold reverberations of his first three filmic texts have proven sufficient to situate him at the forefront of world cinema. Born in Mexico City in 1963, Iñárritu started as a deejay at a radio station while he studied filmmaking and wrote the musical score for several films. In the 1990s he worked for Televisa, Mexico’s foremost television company, where he was one of its youngest producers. He then spent most of the decade making hundreds of TV commercials, as well as a short film, Detrás del dinero (1995), produced by Televisa and starring the Spanish singer Miguel Bosé. Iñárritu wrote and directed his own commercials and, in his own words, probably spent more time on the set than any other director. Seen in retrospect, this was a period of feverish activity that sharpened his cinematic skills in preparation for his film work of the next decade. Toward the end of the decade, he met Guillermo Arriaga during a project involving a series of one-minute films, with different protagonists and stories, all revolving around a single incident, in this case a fire. The series never materialized, but it gave the filmmakers the idea and the creative impulse to make Amores perros. After the critical and commercial success of his first feature film, Iñárritu would return to work as a director of commercials in a very different project: a series of shorts commissioned by BMW from renowned directors, all starring Clive Owen as a driver, to appear on the Internet (later gathered in a promotional DVD for the car company). The series was called The Hire, and it featured filmmakers like John Frankenheimer, Wong Kar-wai, Guy Ritchie, and John Woo. Iñárritu’s short, “Powder Keg,” involved a war photographer in a Latin American country (Stellan Skarsgård) whom Owen’s U.N.-drafted driver attempts to rescue from hostile territory. The open political commitment found in this short film reappears in the director’s other important piece from between his first two feature films, his collaboration in the portmanteau movie 11’09”01— September 11 (2002). In this collection of shorts about the impact of the tragedy of the Twin Towers in different places around the world, Iñárritu’s was perhaps the most radical: eleven minutes and one second of mostly black screen, with Gustavo Santaolalla’s sumptuous and plaintive score taking center stage and, from time to time, flashes of light in the middle of the screen briefly showing people falling from the windows of the buildings. More effectively than many of the other short films, Iñárritu captures the darkness and dramatic absurdity...