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Sunday, Nov 22, 2009
Hot director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu talks about "21 Grams," his wrenching new film about three strangers linked by death, hope and destiny.
Nov 19, 2003 | Alejandro González Iñárritu's new film, "21 Grams," takes its name from the inexplicable loss of weight a body undergoes at the moment of death and focuses on the events leading up to and away from an accident in which several people lose their lives. But don't suggest to Iñárritu that his film is about death.
"I think it's about hope," he says -- the struggle to find hope in the face of loss.
Stretched taut between those extremes, the film -- starring Sean Penn, Naomi Watts and Benicio Del Toro and featuring cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto's unsettling hand-held-camera work -- strikes an edgy, unrelenting chord. Its confrontation with death throws life into sharp relief.
Though it can be difficult to watch, "21 Grams" is a truly remarkable film, and Iñárritu -- whose only other feature film, the equally brutal and profound "Amores Perros," nominee for an Academy Award and a Golden Globe for best foreign-language film in 2001, and winner of a host of other awards, including those from the British Academy of Film and Television Arts, the New York Film Critics Circle, and the London Film Critics Circle -- is a truly amazing director. Born and raised in Mexico, the 40-year-old Iñárritu now lives in Los Angeles, but he was in New York recently to promote "21 Grams" when it screened during the New York Film Festival.
Speeding through the streets of Manhattan in a hired car, Iñárritu stole a moment between engagements to chat with Salon on his cellphone about life and death, fate, tragedy and the state of cinema today.
"21 Grams," like "Amores Perros," uses a car accident as a focal point from which to view three different interwoven stories. What is it about car accidents that you find so compelling? Are they just a convenient device or a metaphor for something more?
Its a metaphor about how incredibly fast something unthinkable can happen when we don't expect it. In an instant, our whole lives can be changed forever.
So it speaks about randomness. But does the fact that we see these accidents and then find out what leads up to them address the concept of fate?
Fate, yes. But more than that, I think it's about hope, about how you can find something to hold on to in order to survive. All these characters are basically dealing with loss, struggling with loss: loss of health, loss of a family member, loss of faith or beliefs or dreams. In order to survive, we must confront that loss and find hope, principally in ourselves.
What about the way that you play around with time in your films? In both "21 Grams" and "Amores Perros," you move the audience back in forth in time.
Well, I believe in the audience. I think that many films have a fear that they will lose their audience and I think the audience is tired of being told everything in the first 15 minutes for fear that they won't follow. I think that the most beautiful stories in the world always hide the truth and little by little reveal that treasure. You have to discover the truth through a very beautiful narrative, which creates tension and a dialogue with the audience and the characters. I think this structure allows the audience to really interact better with and penetrate deeper into the characters. I think it's more proactive and more entertaining and I think people feel alive in the theater and not dead eating popcorn.
Were you worried that the audience might not be up to the task with this film -- not just in terms of rolling with the time changes and figuring out the information, but also dealing emotionally with the huge topics that you confront?
To tell you the truth, no. I was very careful that this would not just be an intellectual exercise that people would feel like, "Oh, what smart guys these guys are." I wanted people to have an emotional ride. That's the object of any art expression. And I was really more interested in the emotional order of the facts than the chronological order. I'm not making journalism; I'm creating an atmosphere, and I think that if people get the atmosphere, they should not be lost. Maybe they will be, like, trying to find out for the first 20, 25 minutes what's going on, but I think every little piece of this architecture gets you to someplace that you believe that something will happen. And every little piece by itself has a beginning, a middle and an ending, and it's moving along, it's moving along.
About these "huge things" that the film deals with, I think that they are not such huge things. They're very basic, common things -- very ordinary and primitive. I think that this film is going to connect with people because it deals with things that every human being has been through in some way.
I mean, everybody has lost something in their life. Life is an interminable chain of losses, and hope is all around us and we have to find hope in everything. We have to give meaning to our lives every day, and I think that death and loss, revenge, guilt, hope, faith, passion and redemption, ultimately, are present a lot of times in a year. Ultimately, these are things that we learn from, and sometimes the process is painful, but they make us better and more human. When we deal with them, we can enjoy and see life more deeply and profoundly.
Do you think that film is particularly well suited as a medium for dealing with these basic issues: birth, death, hope?
Yes. There are several channels, but I think that there's a lot of these cartoon stories in film today that I don't relate to. I don't relate to these heroes that are huge and unreal and kill people and laugh and make love with the most beautiful woman and have a great joke and a great line every moment; they are completely inhuman. I mean at some point, cinema should be a mirror and should talk about ourselves and create a catharsis in ourselves and we should be able to see ourselves in that. I love this story because of that.
