Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu
That incredible bubble and high expectations built at festivals can work against a film.
You have to make millions on Friday night, because there are another 600 films waiting behind you, with explosions and everything.
As the camera, I try to subordinate every word to be truthful and honest to each character's context.
'Russian Ark,' I adore - I almost cried at the end of that film, it's so beautiful.
The way films establish the order of scenes is very artificial.
I think we do good things and bad things, sometimes simultaneously - or they may be the same thing.
I think films are bigger than structure.
I think I want to talk about life from the point of view of death.
I think when you turn 50 you get a little melancholic in a way.
I learned with 'Birdman' that it's liberating when you just lose yourself and go after something that terrifies you. The experience was so good.
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.
At a very young age, I was influenced enormously by Julio Cortazar or Carlos Fuentes. In that literature, there's always an exploration of different perspectives, points of view.
Fear is the condom of life. It doesn't allow you to enjoy things.Collection: Oscars
I think every beautiful tale in the world hides the truth and reveals it little by little.Collection: Beautiful
I think movies in general should have more respect for the audience than they do. Too many films are afraid to confuse people, so all the information is given to them right away, and there's nothing left for the film to do. It ruins many stories, because everything becomes obvious and predictable. I want my films to engage people more and make them more actively involved in the story.Collection: Thinking
I remember, the first time I saw a [Andrei] Tarkovsky film, I was shocked by it. I didn't know what to do. I was fascinated, because suddenly I realized that film could have so many more layers to it than what I had imagined before. Then others, like Kurosawa and Fellini, were like a new discovery for me, another country.Collection: Country
Every time that I'm challenged with a film I think that I haven't learned anything, that every film is different and that every thing that I have learned is useless in this new adventure.Collection: Adventure
In the creative process, my ego has always been a huge tyrant ... a dictator and kind of rude and very misleading, because sometimes when I'm doing something, I say, "This is great! This is fantastic! Very genius!" And 20 minutes later, I feel like a dead jellyfish. "You are a stupid a**hole. This is a piece of sh*t. Nobody will care about it."Collection: Stupid
When people laugh and applaud as characters are killing each other, and you never see the body that's lying there, or you never see the family that suffers, then it turns into a cool thing to do, like a videogame. Then, when you watch the news and see that 15 soldiers were killed, you start to see them as just numbers, material, information, images. We lose the real weight and real value of one simple human life.Collection: Real
My country has been wracked with violence for a long time. Just to see all the violence on the news makes you sick. It's true that violence is in our nature, but I try to explore deeply where it comes from and where it goes and what it creates. Not in a moralistic or preachy way, but just to observe the real consequences of violence in a human being or in a society.Collection: Country
The actors make the film. They're the ones that take this theoretical movie that's in your head and make it real. The success of a film is entirely on their shoulders. I admire them, because acting is such a difficult thing to do, and I personally can't understand it.Collection: Real
There's nothing better than being in a film that translates to audiences and makes people think and feel good and walk away with great revelations in their own life of some kind. But when the process and the experience and the fun of that matches, it's a good feeling.Collection: Fun
All people know that they will die, but they don't actually believe it.Collection: Believe
I was aware of the possible biases you could get as a commercial director, like being too concerned about the technical aspects of the form rather than anything of substance. If you keep working in commercials, you can get trapped in a very superficial way of thinking. I always used commercials as an exercise for filmmaking, like going to the gym.Collection: Exercise
Really, I'm a neurotic perfectionist. Every single word in the script is the one that I want.Collection: Want
For me, it's not about masochism to talk about death. For me, it's about observing life through death, from the last point of it.Collection: Lasts
It's more enjoyable for me to know that life is finite. Knowing that, I would like to go to a party.Collection: Party
Of course, there's always one theater that shows some kind of European film. Now, fortunately, you have DVDs, so it's possible to get anything you want within a few hours. In those days, it was virtually impossible to get Italian films, or German films, or whatever. So I grew up with very standard, mainstream films.Collection: Italian
I was a street kid, basically. But really, Mexico City has always been this big, complex monster of a city that has always had real problems and needs, and I've always found my way through it in different ways.Collection: Real
As a sensitive filmmaker, I think you have to really be careful in how you explore it. Not that you can't tell any story you want - I'm not calling for censorship or anything. But if you're going to have violence, I think it's important to deal with the consequences of that on a human level, not just to make people laugh.Collection: Thinking
How can [actors] learn their lines and be honest in front of 30 people and all the lights? It makes me cry sometimes. I can't understand how they can be joking with me 30 seconds before, and 40 seconds later they're giving me all this incredible feeling.Collection: Light
When you get to the holidays, if you think that the holidays will be forever, you just take it for granted. But, if you know that you have just three days at the beach, you will be so happy to be there, every day.Collection: Beach
I hate superficial violence. It's shallow and stupid, and the impact on the audience is really bad.Collection: Hate
All my films have always been released in the autumn, maybe because they're more melancholy to people.Collection: Autumn
I just wanted to show the migrants as complex humans with flaws and weakness, with good and bad things, and show that they're parents and family men. I wanted to show them with everything, as they are.Collection: Men
I think the arts should get big support, but my country has a lot of needs more important than film. Medication, education, food... The poverty is overwhelming. There are simply more important things to be attended to.Collection: Country
I always think politicians and even my dentist have more egos than actors.Collection: Thinking
You hear about bombings in other countries, or numbers like "10,000 people died" - you hear that number and you think, "Well, I saw that yesterday in a film, and that didn't look so bad." Younger viewers, in particular, lose perspective on reality.Collection: Country
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.Collection: Song
I personally can't handle frivolous violence. I overreact to it.Collection: Violence
One of the reasons why I agreed to do commercials is that they gave me complete freedom. I just had to have the car in it and write a story around it. I wanted to do something serious set in a Latin American country, but again, it was an exercise in style for me.Collection: Country
Actually, 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. On the last trip, I stayed in Europe for one year with $1,000, working everywhere I could, doing everything. Those years shaped me a lot and taught me the value of exploring different things.Collection: Growing Up
I understand when there's no money for the arts in the government, but it should maybe pressure private companies to support more filmmakers. These exhibition and distribution companies are huge, and there might be incentives for them to invest more in Mexican cinema.Collection: Art
Mexico City is very different now than when I grew up, but I was in the streets all the time - though I was born to a middle-class neighborhood where there weren't a lot of gangs and things. I was always comfortable.Collection: Class
I saw what I could [in Mexico City], but we rarely got anything other than big, mainstream American films.Collection: Cities
I made commercials for corporations like Volkswagen and Coca-Cola, but I was always the one to write them, too, which was a very good exercise, because I learned to tell little stories.Collection: Writing
I don't have anything against commercials, and I really like BMWs.Collection: Bmw
I respect BMW for not interfering in these projects. They're just trying to support short films with their brand, which I think is great.Collection: Thinking
In the United States there's not a lot of people interested in foreign language films. Every time, it's more difficult for foreign language films to survive here.Collection: People