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Alejandro González Iñárritu shares his experiences with young filmmakers

Clara Sánchez/ Translated by Vicente Castañar

[imagen]Yesterday at Pinacoteca Virreynal Iñarritu held a fruitful discussion with a group of young filmmakers, they asked the renowned director about his career in short and long feature films.

González Iñárritu was really interested in hearing the opinions of the documentary makers because it is a creation he deeply admires.

Fiction…
“I believe that while one is filming there exists a parallel reality at the set, and sometimes it is even more interesting than the short film itself. Terrifying symmetry, fiction is a reality in the making.”

Short films...
“I made this short film, right around the WTC New York incident, it was called September 11, I thought it lacked a point of view, but I enjoyed making it. I created a theater room, all dark, no lights at the stairs or anything, so I could make the viewer reach catharsis, and they could cry. The screen was black too, and at some moments it was all white. Audio is really vital too, through music, sounds, screams and cries, it is a sad flashback, it was a very deep and emotional short film. It was a sort of purge, like cronos: “La luz de Dios, ¿nos ciega o nos ilumina? (God’s light blinds us or lights us?)”

21 gramos
“An example of a parallel story is what happened to me while I was looking for Benicio del Toro’s house in Memphis. I had a clear idea of what I wanted, an indoor pool with a tunnel. I saw hundreds of pictures of many houses but none were just right. Finally we found this abandoned house, it was the perfect hunted house but we just couldn’t find its owner. So this one day one of our producer people broke into the house and it was a dead stinking abandoned house, you just couldn’t go in. So I also went inside and it was perfect, it was all I had dreamt, it was all there, rooms, space, everything. It was full of rats and it just really stank. We soon found out there was a dead person under the bed. It was all really crazy because it was a movie about dead people and HE was there. It took a really long time to clean up and to prop it up to film.”

The thin line between fiction and reality
“I am seduced by documentary and working in small modules. I hate that my movies look too under control, I hate artificial lighting, cranes, presumptuous props, I try for my films to be as real as possible, with no design control.
The best things you can shoot just happen, they are unplanned. Feeling is more important than a paper script. Making a sensitive film lies within the stomach, to feel those things that are happening.
How real is real? How hard can you try?
Bob Richardson (Kill Bill’s cinematographer) gave me some advice: whatever you do, don’t turn the camera off, and it is so true, one can film so many beautiful things.

[imagen]Documentary
“Instead of reality we should talk about the truth. A reality show isn’t real, reality is pasteurized? Is that real? Making a documentary goes beyond turning on a camera. One is searching for the truth, for one truth that will convince the viewer. That is different than shooting a piece of reality out of a mobile’s cam. Some documentaries control too much, they become reality shows.”

-- Pedro Daniel, a young native man from Chiapas and also a film maker told him:
We are presenting a reality that isn’t real anymore. We recorded this one party which lasted an entire week. My creation only lasted half an hour. At my town I presented my short film, the people from my hometown told me that it wasn’t real, they inquired about the rest of the party days. So then we made two versions, a short one and a five hour one.

“People already know the magic is gone, so if we s