Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
You've only been wo days in Cartagena, right?
Indeed. And I drank more rum in two days than what I had in a year.
I think there were two things in my life that made me want to become a filmmaker, but I don't have the truth, is just the way I interpret it.
One of them happened when I was 17 and 19 years old
I went away and crossed the Atlantic in a freighter, working, cleaning floors
and I crossed over Europe and Africa, very young with very little money
Funnily, I realized later on and this was not premeditated that the countries where I shot my movies were the same countries that had changed my life so many years back.
Like Morocco or Barcelona which was the first European harbor I ever stepped or the first African city I ever visited
The streets... those experiences made me observe humanity, very different types of humanity
And when you are young you get to absorb more those kinds of things
And the second reason that made me think I could do some things was when I studied theater in Mexico with a Polish director
I worked three years with him. And in there was where I really learned.
He transmitted to me the great, sublime and tragic responsibility of being a director. What it implied and the intensity of it.
So I think were those two experiences
The beauty of that project was that there was no pretension or mission of something else rather than doing something we could feel proud of
And since there was no time pressure or expectations of any kind it was very liberating to work like that
You don't have nothing to lose and that's the beauty of a first move, that there's no expectation from anyone not even from yourself
You can afford to fail and fail a lot. You can try everything, so in that sense it was a very free process, a very free script
And we were lucky enough that by that time a new production company was being created called Alta Vista Films and this was their first production
And they just wanted to get in, so it was a moment, a very particular conjuction. Because probably had the script been ready two years before, the movie would have never been made
It was very ambitious, very complex, very risky, but I had the luck that these people believed in the project
I always try to take risks and push the envelop as much as I can. As a friend of mine says:
Give yourself the right to fail. And i love that. That's what gives me the adrenaline
So "Amores Perros" were three stories that converged in an accident
"21 grams" represented the possibility of stepping out of my comfort zone in México
and go to another country, shoot in another language, with international actors within a structure where every scene was disconnected from the previous scene and from the one after it.
That was the mathematic game. How could we build a story where every scene was isolated but in its whole could suggest something, an idea
And "Babel", well, we though that having two previous movies that played a lot with the inner structure
We thought that the third one, could be the closure, where we approached a rather global scale and ended up becoming these four stories with five languages
We wanted to build a story where the characters could not see each other physically, but could have something in common
So finally, those challenges help me to keep the tension and to be clear, and having that awareness.
Producers hate me, they don't want to work with me.
My movies are not very expensive, but I spend the money on making sure that I am able to feel the rhythm and the pulse of the movie while I'm shooting it and while I wear out with the movie.
And allow the characters to create this feeling based on the events unfolding through out the shoot. They discover new things.
And that's the great luxury I give to myself, but it's also a luxury that I give to the movie, to the actors, to all the collaborators,
because everyone learn new things about the movie while is being shot. I mean, it's a journey and it's a learning process.
Babel were 101 days shooting in three countries around the world. It's a family, we lived eleven months together.So we understand the movie little by little and you grow in that process.
You are a very different person when you start shooting or when you are writing the script than when you are one week away of finishing the shoot.
And I think is very important for the movie to absorb that change and to have the chance to show that transformation on-screen.
And I believe that process to be very beneficial for the movie. At least to me.
Every case is different because every actor is like a different psychological patient
So you become a psychiatrist, father, patriarch, enemy, dictator...I mean the relationship between Director-Actor is very complex.
And every Actor brings with himself a method, a sensibility, a way of working that works for him.
I try to be very sensitive to their acting school and I try to be very practical, I try to have a very clear, active emotional objective of what the character wants
And discover the infinite possibilities to access the character and explore alongside the Actor those possibilities, meaning, to find the active verb to get to that.
And, yeah, I just try to help them in clarity. I try to say the least possible
And then, a lot of times...It's important to keep it fresh. There are actors who wear themselves out very quickly, they give you everything they've got in two or three takes, so you have to be very careful
And there are actor who need a lot of time to get inside their characters, and there's a moment where the repetition becomes almost a mantric moment
where that line, that action transcends in such a way that it gets to a point where it stops hurting and then it becomes natural
As I talk to you right now, I'm talking, I'm not acting, I'm flowing. And when you do that with actors, where that line becomes a part of their system,
Then they're not acting, all of a sudden, they are doing it and they don't even know that they are doing it and there's where they really nail it.
There is something that obeys to a system that I don't know how actors do it. I think it's an extremely difficult job.
Repeat lines that are not yours, pretend to be someone you are not, arriving places you don't...
I mean, there is a whole mechanism that is so complex that goes beyond your intelligence. Exists in a place of the understanding of space, of emotions.
You have to cry in certain line, and then turn around and then hold back, maintain the rhythm, do a two and half page monologue...
And for seventy takes, with seventy people around you in a room with lights, microphones, with a make up artist touching your face the whole time, a director screaming at you, another guy fixing your clothes
I do believe it's hard. so when they're good and they do that it's a sort of magic trick. And I admire that a great deal.
I was tired of dramas, i want to stop making people cry. When I was watching the clip you just rolled I was thinking: "Poor people, I got them depressed once again".
There was a character that came to my mind and that I enjoyed writing a lot. I think is the movie that I have enjoyed the most at writing.
Because it talks about a personal reality, a circumstance about the state of the Film Industry. There is a joke, a commentary to Hollywood through a fictional character
It's evidently tragic and as the say, when you stretch the tragedy to the extreme, it becomes comedy. And it's a comedy based in a series of the tragic events of a man who looks to be revalidated.
I did a lot of things that I had not done before. The first one was working with a crew of people completely new
In a genre that I had never touched before, in a city I had never shot which was New York.
I built for the first time in my life a set, I had never built a set before.
So, yeah, yet again, I tried to put my self in a position of non-comfortabilty and it turned out to be an extraordinary experience to me.
Thank you all. Thank you.
You are the adoptive son of this city of film and I want to give you this award, symbol of our festival.