It is the opening day for Paul Thomas Anderson’s “A battle after the other,” And Alejandro González Iñárritu is worried about how it will play with the audience. “I’m just crossing my fingers that people go in millions,” he told me. “I hope, because it’s so important.”
We talk in Zoom, and of course Iñárritu is root for PTA: He is a colleague AUTEUR who makes expensive original films with movie stars. (BTW, the movie of $ 130 million opened for $ 22 million.) For its part, Iñárritu just head photography in April on an untitled comedy ensemble led by Tom Cruise and produced by Legendary For Warner Bros.
The Mexican filmmaker is directing his first English -language film since 2015’s “The Revenant”, which won “a battle after the second” star Leonardo DiCaprio his first Oscar. The untitled cruise comedy, shot in 35-millimeter vistavision of Three times Oscar winner Emmanuel “Chivo” Lubezki, should come out sometime next fall. The director is in the editing room.
“We will end in February, March,” he said. “We still have a long way (in) post -production.”
Although both Iñárritu and Cruise are powerful and control perfectionists on a movie production, “it was the most amazing, unexpected, sweet, mild relationship I have had on a set,” said Iñárritu. “His way, his understanding, his passion and his integrity and how he prepares. He loves the process. Film creation has been his life for 40 years. I have never seen anyone so devoted. I was happy to share with him that passion. And at the same time we built an incredible relationship of mutual trust. He will never surprise the world. Humans will see a new type of thing.
But we don’t zoom to talk about cruise. This can, to celebrate the 25th anniversary of “Amores dogs,” Iñárritu’s Daring Triptych debut function, shot in Mexico City and introduction Gael García BernalDirector screened the restored 4K version at Cannes to a packed house. The film keeps up: it is lively, high, attacking and violent, from the visceral dogfights (no animals injured) to the glam model (Goya Toledo) which is forever limestone in a car accident. A brand new 5.1 surround sound mix by Jon Taylor at NBCUNIVERSAL studio post improves intensity.
The director hesitated to look at film at the Cannes Classics show. He had undergone the careful criterion’s restoration for the 20th anniversary 2020 with Kinematographer Rodrigo Prieto, but had only seen the movie in pieces.
“I hadn’t seen the movie complete in 25 years,” he said. “The film is shot in a pale-bypass process, or silver retains, which is a very corrosive thing, because silver stays in the negative. So we have to restore a lot of things. (I thought) what young man did it? And all that I was for all of us who did the movie, the amount of work, given the little money we have, and so small.”
“Amores Perros” played Cannes 25 years ago, but not in competition, where it was rejected before it went to the selection committee. Fortunately, it was invited to the Critics Week, won the Grand Prix and landed a North American edition in 2001 from Lionsgate. The rest is history. It launched careers in Iñárritu, 19-year-old García Bernal and Prieto, among others. After the show, a grateful and tearing García Bernal said: “It is a movie that we all turned, and even how in Mexico we were perceived, the films were transformed.”
“Even when we were a very small independent film in a very small episode that is not even official, it became the movie that everyone wanted to see,” Iñárritu said. The film was nominated for the best foreign language film Oscar; The author, director and producer continued to win the best director for “Birdman” and “The Revenant” and original script and best picture (“Birdman”).
When they made “Amores Perros”, the filmmaker explained, the Mexican film industry produced only five to seven local films from the same few directors, with a nationalist taste, subsidized by the government. Maybe you would end up in theaters. “Every director I knew at that time, they (had) just made a movie,” he said. “And they were already 50 years old. A movie was considered a one -off opportunity, and you should make sure you put everything you have to say there.”
Also based in Mexico City, novelist Guillermo Arriaga wrote script for “Amores Perros”, “an incredible, solid, complex script,” said Iñárritu. “Mexico City is a complex city with incredibly ancient culture with visual traditions. It has the third most museums in the world. And we were middle class, educated. So we can see and observe: low, high, where. We had access to many things.”
The “Amores Perros” team had worked with making commercials and videos for seven years. They were already quite sophisticated. “We were all Chilango, so we knew exactly how that city smells and feels,” Iñárritu said. “There was a new government that threw out the party dictatorship of 70 years. So there was hope and a feeling that we need (ed) to shake who we were, how we talk about ourselves, how we see ourselves. This movie came in at the right moment.”
Iñárritu has written an essay on making the film for Mack Books’ just published “Amores Perro’s” book, which also shows invisible set of photography, critical essays and production documents. And “Sueño Perro: Alejandro G. Iñárritus celluloid installation” makes the rounds, starts at Fondazione Prada in Milan and Lagoalgo in Mexico City and then moves to Lacma in Los Angeles in February.
Already in 2020, “Amores Perros” was edited, which runs two hours and 37 minutes, from 1 million feet material. “It means 15,000 foot film with 35 millimeters,” said Iñárritu, “So 985,000 feet were disclosed. I experimented with handheld and lenses, and Rodrigo and I was on fire.”
The director found out that his 1 million feet of diaries was in storage in Mexico’s national autonomous university archive. “I started exploring,” he said. “It was beautiful to see how, when I started to see everything (it) was left out, how many films were there in the movie and watched this material with a new look. When I edited, I saw with the feature of finding the pieces in the puzzle to serve the story. But now I saw the flow and the beauty of the pictures itself, so without the poetry. The poetry for the story, I start to collect. And that is what will see the flow and beauty in the pictures, so without the dictation of the story, I start to collect this beginning. A maze of dark rooms, with these great guys who project material as a magical lantern
The essay reveals the context of the “Amores Perros” production, the director’s aesthetics and philosophy about filmmaking and how he creates cards for each sequence in a movie. “My obsession is the grammatical film language,” he said. “Those cards integrate everything that in should know when whatever challenge of the movie comes – in crisis, in production, in depression. Those are my bricks that sustain some clarity during (film Homework that goes deep for me to Understand what i’m dealing with. What is the Purpose of the scene? What is the Purpose of That Character, what does the Other Guy Want, and what will be the conflict? “
Badly Will be released this month in theaters all over Latin America and make it available globally on its streaming platform on October 24. While the filmmaker never made any money on the film, which he invested in, he now owns about 75 percent. “Mubi buys the rights over the next ten years,” he said. “They are one of the few streamers who support independent filmmakers. We’re in the right hands.”
While a filmmaker’s life is peripathetic at best, Iñárritu and his wife, with their two children out of the nest, try to decide where to live. They have lived in Los Angeles. “We’re gypsy,” he said. “I made ‘Bardo’ in Mexico. So I lived in Mexico City for a year and a half. Then I stopped shooting the last movie at Warner Bros. It’s a hard moment in the world, and that decision is important to us. Things have changed a lot, as you know.”
