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| Interview: Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu Babbles about "Babel" |
by Peter Sobczynski
The internationally acclaimed director of "Amores Perros" and "21 Grams" talks about his highly touted new film, the multi-cultural epic "Babel."
The highly anticipated new drama “Babel”is the third collaboration from screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga and director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu whose previous films were the highly acclaimed “Amores Perros” (2000) and “21 Grams” (2003). Using the same fragmented narrative structure as their earlier collaborations, the film juggles a globe-spanning quartet of loosely-connected stories involving a couple of young Moroccan brothers who cause a tragedy when they go out to test-fire a rifle recently acquired by their father, an American couple (Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett) who find themselves on the wrong end of that rifle while trying to heal their marriage, an undocumented Mexican maid who gets into trouble when she journeys from L.A. to Mexico with the two children she is looking after and an emotionally disturbed deaf-mute Japanese teenager (Rinko Kikuchi, in the film’s most affecting performance) living with her distant father in Tokyo. Since premiering this past spring at the Cannes Film Festival, where Inarritu scored the Best Director prize, “Babel” has been receiving acclaim from all over the world and is now on virtually everyone’s Oscar shortlist.
On the festival circuit prior to the official release of “Babel,” Inarritu stopped off in Chicago (where the film was the centerpiece of the recent Chicago International Film Festival) and sat down with me, along with a couple of colleagues, to discuss the sentiments behind the film, the challenges of putting together such a formally complex work and the sudden resurgence of filmmakers from Mexico this season.
Films tend to be simplistic now but “Babel” is a complex film about complex issues–how were you able to get something like this made and sold?
Normally, what I do with my projects–I did it with “21 Grams” as well–is to start by financing it myself and once I have the main draft done, I start casting and finding locations. Once I have that entire package, I find somebody who believes in the project. It sounds like a crazy thing–four languages and three continents and four short stories–but fortunately enough, I had enthusiasm from several film studios for distribution in English-speaking countries. The rest of the world was financed by different small distribution countries in every European and Asian market. We pulled together a lot of people that wanted a piece of it and that was fortunate because it gave us more freedom.
I think that maybe these people are tired of making the same kind of films and maybe they felt like the package made sense. They trusted the elements like the story, the director and the actors and they liked the way I pitched them. I think these people are bored sometimes with doing the same thing and that may be what drives them to bet on something like this film.
What was it about the idea for the film that you liked?
All the things that I talk about in the film are things that I am very committed to and want to talk about. In some way or another, I want to discuss them and it is a great privilege that I am in a line of work where I can express my own fears and anxieties in my work. My life and my work are not very separated–making films is a need that I have and an extension of what I really believe. In the beginning, I conceived this project as some kind of commitment to say things that I needed to talk about. That is the only thing that can drive me to finish what is a difficult mountain to climb.
Like your previous films, “Amores Perros” and “21 Grams,” “Babel” features multiple stories that are linked together. What is it about that particular format that appeals to you and do you ever see yourself doing a film that utilizes a single narrative?
We were doing “21 Grams” and we thought that it was an element that was formally interesting to play with and when I was developing that movie, I conceived the idea for “Babel” and I thought that we had to be congruent, not just in subject matter and content but in form, in order to keep it within a body of work that could be called a trilogy. The three films are a body of work that together form something. I think that it is fascinating to be able to deconstruct the narrative and play with the structure and time as a storyteller in order to play with a tool that brings a lot of dramatic tension to some things. I do think that “Babel” is a very linear and chronological story. The order is very symmetric, there are no tricks and it doesn’t demand as much as “21 Grams.”
How long does it take to figure out the proper balance for the structure once the shooting has been completed and the editing process begins? Is it all there on paper from the start or does it change around in any significant way in the editing room once you start putting the pieces together and see how they play?
Filmmaking is a three-act kind of a thing. The first one is the script, where you plan what you want to see. We knew this was the structure that we wanted and calculated it in ways to make it work. I worked with my collaborator Guillermo but then I took that script–which is a strange, grey zone that is like a blueprint that you then have to expose to reality–and took it to my other collaborators and from that, I had to adjust and rewrite and be flexible because the animal is alive. In the end, you are in the editing room and there are all these things that you have to confront. You find yourself shaping and sculpting and editing–you have to take out everything that is not relevant and you find that the film has agin transformed and changed. You change the structure–you take out scenes and then you have to move the other pieces. That is the difficult thing in making a film–you are always moving things around until you find the final film. It is a constant process of transformation.
For a film that deals with so many languages and cultures, one of the elements that stands out the most in “Babel” are the periods of silence–the moments when it is truly international.
In this film, what I really tried to do is find a space in which the realism that I wanted to bring with the non-actors and documenting real faces and places could co-habitat with the imaginary world that was more surreal. I created some islands made by music like the helicopter landing or the wedding or the discotheque. That is what I tried to make happen at the risk of making it seem like a pastiche but I thought there were opportunities to say things without words that were more meaningful about the clash of cultures.
In this film, you are working with a combination of well-known actors and people who have never acted before at all. As a director, do you find yourself working differently with someone like Brad Pitt, a guy who knows his way around a movie set, as opposed to people like the 2 Moroccan kids who have never been before a camera?
Every actor is different but in this case, it was like trying to put together a football team with the best quarterback and a guy who has never seen a football before. It was very difficult to pretend that they played on the same level and I was very lucky to find the right people. Sometimes, you think you find the right person–they have the purity and talent and are great in readings and rehearsals–but when they see the cameras and lights and people, they stop but that didn’t happen to me here. The father of the kids was a carpenter. There was a computer system guy that arrived and I put him in with Brad and Cate. They were not intimidated by Cate and Brad because they did not know them. That was a beautiful thing because they were not affected by this pop-culture of personality that we are living under. They just saw them as humans and that made my life a little easier.
More than any of your other films, “Babel” deals with the fractured relationships between parents and children.
I have two kids and when you have kids, you are more vulnerable–that is when you understand how vulnerable and fragile you really are. That is what all the characters in this film share. The kids in the last few years have been pained by all these stupid things that we adults haven’t been able to solve. In the wars that are going on now, the media will not show us the images of kids that have been dying in Iraq or Afghanistan. As of two days ago, it was something like 600,000 dead and of that, maybe 200,000 are kids. If we could see that, I am sure that things would be different but they won’t show it because it is too scary.
At the time that “Babel” is being released, two of your friends and fellow countrymen are also releasing eagerly anticipated movies–Guillermo del Toro (“Pan’s Labyrinth”) and Alfonso Cuaron (“Children of Men”). To what do you attribute this emergence of Mexican filmmakers right now?
It is a coincidence that both of these people are friends of mine and we are all releasing films in the fall. Both of those films deal with the same subject matter as “Babel”–terrorism and immigration. Guillermo’s film explores the past in Spain, my film deals with the present and I think Alfonso is observing what will happen in the future. It is an interesting kind of trilogy that we never planned that has been done by three middle-class Mexicans. I don’t know how it happened but it happened and it is great.
link directly to this feature at http://hollywoodbitchslap.com/feature.php?feature=1996
originally posted: 10/29/06 14:38:22
last updated: 10/31/06 20:44:07
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