The two-time Best Director winner goes deep on his new film.
What do you do after winning the Best Director Oscar two years in a row?
Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu took a couple of years to figure out his answer.
Alejandro González Iñárritu directing Daniel Giménez Cacho on ‘Bardo.'.Limbo Films, S. De R.L. de C.V. Courtesy of Netflix
WhenBardopremiered at the Venice Film Festival earlier this year, it was three hours long.
Check out an edited version of our conversation below.
So I think that experience really has a lot to do with this film.
Daniel Giménez Cacho in ‘Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths.'.Limbo Films, S. De R.L. de C.V. Courtesy of Netflix
As I say in the film, I’m a “first-class immigrant.”
My experience is 0.00011 percent of what millions of people go through.
Yeah, I think this film navigates between reality and fiction and imagination.
Daniel Gimenez Cacho in ‘Bardo.'.Limbo Films, S. De R.L. de C.V. Courtesy of Netflix
I think the world we are living in now is navigating, unfortunately, between those two worlds.
You don’t know exactly what is real, what is fiction.
I found it refreshing thatBardo, by contrast, is rooted in the present day and current worries.
Silverio Gama (Daniel Giménez Cacho) confronts his harshest critic in ‘Bardo.'.Limbo Films, S. De R.L. de C.V. Courtesy of Netflix
Did you ever consider making one of those movies about your childhood?
What made you want to engage with the present instead?
No, I barely remember my childhood.
I envy people who can fundamentally rebuild their lives from that foundational time.
I don’t have that access, unfortunately.
I remember elusively, and I do not claim truth, or this being any autobiography at all.
I think autobiographies are a lie, and they are hypocrisies.
I build this by thoughts, reflections, fears, and dreams.
That’s why the fabric of this film is elusive, but it’s emotionally truthful.
That’s the best way I can share where I am now without any certainty, by the way.
Your name is everywhere in the credits of this film.
In addition to directing, you wrote, produced, edited, and even worked on the score.
What was the collaborative process like for such a personal film?
What did your collaborators bring to it?
The level of collaborators that I had was amazing.
Without them, it would be impossible.
Was this your first time working on the music of one of your films?
What was that like, working with Bryce Dessner?
It was amazing because Bryce did the third act ofThe Revenantand we became very good friends.
It’s very particular and only as a Mexican can you know those sounds.
Another collaboration I’m interested in is the one with your star, Daniel Gimenez Cacho.
You’ve obviously worked with a lot of great actors over the course of your career.
What was it like working with Daniel and building the character of Silverio?
His circumstances are very similar to mine in his own life.
It was kind of a cosmic encounter.
All the relations he built from his experience, like the relationship with the two kids.
He has two kids the same age as mine.
He really embraced Silverio as a character, and he went through a very personal process during the film.
But the version that’s coming to theaters this weekend and Netflix next month is about 22 minutes shorter.
What was that editing process like?
What made you want to go back and edit it more?
The first time that I saw it with audiences was in Venice.
I would have loved to have even more time, but I couldn’t.
You have to release the film because of a festival date or the scheduled release.
Do you think you’ll keep fiddling with the film?
Yes, if I could.
A film never is finished it’s an endless process.
Yeah, this happens to me.
There’s always a way to make it stronger.
So again, it’s an endless process, and I had the opportunity to do it.
It reminded me a bit of the critic character inBirdman.
No, I think I can be harsher with myself than anybody else.
The mind is relentless in every human being, and I have been very conscious about it.
I like to observe those two natures.
So the film is very dialectic in every sense.
You are a father, you are a son.
You go through death, life, success, failure, fiction, reality.
I approach this film through dualities, and that is one of them.
How did you think about the more surreal elements?
I think this film is a walk in the consciousness of a character.
It’s a story without story.
The fabric of the film is made of these very elusive things that form us.
It’s our rational mind trying to get everything into a rational world.
That emotional conviction is the one that I depart from.
Then you’ve got the option to liberate yourself from it.
As the character said, “People are gone, the ideas are what stays.”
That’s how I did it, and that’s what cinema exists for.
As Godard said, “Life is a film badly made.”
Even as the characters in the film are struggling with their national identity are we Mexican?
there’s this shadow of multinational corporations that are becoming more powerful than national sovereignty.
What were you thinking about there?
I think that’s the world we are living in now.
I don’t think we are too far from that.
I don’t think we are too far from films being made by artificial intelligence with no human intervention.
I already saw one six-minute film made by computers, and it was awesome.
People will be happy about that, to belong to a corporation more than governments.
There’s a humor about that; there’s an irony and a contradiction about that.
When you read the news, the internet is a bardo between fiction and reality.
Another scene that really stands out I think is that conversation with Cortes.
How did you approach that scene and build that giant mountain of corpses that they’re standing on?
It took me a lot of work.
I think this film visually has been the most challenging film that I have done.
It’s an immersive, brutal, cinematic experience.
That’s why I want people to see it in the theaters.
You should see it in IMAX because scenes like that are so big and brutally visual.
I shot it in the plaza in the Zocalo, which is the heart of Mexico City.
I don’t know if you have seen pictures of Teotihuacan, but it was the Venice of America.
It was only water channels it was beautiful.
And to build that, I had to storyboard everything because it was very precise.
And then most of it is physical.
Everything is very physical and then obviously with some visual effects.
And we had an amazing morning, full of Mexican dark clouds.
It was a very lucky day to get exactly the mood that I needed.
We are all made of those kinds of big events and the most intimate events.
It was kind of a Whac-A-Mole exercise to get the whole thing in there.
This film is a state of mind, this film is an atmosphere.
