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An openness about death as a fact of life is a characteristic of Mexican culture and one that the country’s celebrated directors share in their movies.
Guillermo del Toro, Alejandro Iñárritu and
Alfonso Cuarón discussed death, metaphorical
and literal, as a theme in their work during recent roundtable conversations which
also touched on their friendship, filmmaking as biography and the politics of
streaming.
“Sometimes it’s a literal death or the
closeness to that death that in most cases is combined with the end of the
journey of a character,” said Cuarón in an extensive Netflix hosted
interview. Where do you think that comes from? he asked
his compatriots.
“It comes from a very primal fear and
consciousness that we all share,” Iñárritu
responds. “No matter what race, nationality, or
political belief, we all will die. Ever since I was a kid, I was always
thinking, we all will be gone. For me, [it’s important] to have the opportunity
to imagine your own death, and to imagine how you can make it not morbid but a
little bit profound . . . that is, when
we confront weakness or fragility,
is when our biggest character [traits] or flaws come out.
Del Toro admits to thinking about dying since he was seven. “I’ve
been a death groupie because I think it makes life make sense,” he
said, adding that he values the “absolute
inalienable right to be fucked up, to be imperfect… Imperfection is one of the most beautiful things.
And that’s why I think those themes are very well represented in the [idea of
the] monster, or in the fear of death.”
The directors are among the most lauded in current cinema. Between 2013 and 2018, Cuarón, del Toro and Iñárritu have
taken home five of the six Best Director Oscars and two Best Picture trophies
between them for a run of work that according
to Deadline firmly established them in the
pantheon of cinema history.
With Gravity, Birdman, The Revenant, The Shape of Water and Roma, they have delivered
their unique visions of cinema with the world. To which you can add this Awards
season, Iñárritu’s Bardo and Del Toro’s Pinocchio which are both
directly and indirectly biographical.
For
Iñárritu the death of his second son and near death of his third born were
profound life-and-death situations. Bardo, he says, “is an allegory of my own
life, a fictional way for me to liberate a lot of things — shame, pain, doubt,
fear. That’s why movies exist for me. It’s a cathartic thing.”
Del
Toro shares that Pinocchio stemmed from the same deeply
emotional place, in his case about fatherhood and being a son.
“To
me, the most beautiful thing I’ve ever written is the final line, ‘What happens
happens, and then we’re gone.’ It’s the essence of the one thing I’ve learned
in 58 years — this little time we have for each other that is important. I lost
my dad after The Shape of Water and my mom right before Pinocchio opened,
and I was able to see them as people, as neither saints nor devils. When I came
up with the idea of Pinocchio having a dialogue with Death, that
was when the movie appeared for me. I thought, It’s about that.”
In
thinking about Roma, Pinocchio and Bardo Del Toro notes
that one of them is pure biography, one is a classic children’s fairy tale, and
the other is obliquely a biography but they all are joined in similar ways.
“Different
approaches, but ultimately the way we have deepened in our own biography within
film is very similar,” he says, adding, “The first part of our career was how
to handle the language of cinema. The latter part of our career is when the
language of cinema and who we are start making contact.”
Cuarón, in the Deadline interview, describes
this trio of movies as simply, “symbolic biographies.”
There’s a
lot of mutual respect, shared history and friendship among the group who have
been dubbed ‘the Three Amigos.’
Iñárritu says that he doesn’t have the same depth of relationship
with other directors that he has with his Mexican peers.
“With others
we] talk about technical things, stuff that is on the surface. But with these
two, the benefit is they know very deeply who I am, and what my motivations
are, and what triggers me. That deep knowledge of what needs to be said, and of
how to say it in a way that is truthful and useful, is a complex
mechanic.
Del Toro
adds, “We have a dialogue that is very real. It’s helpful to have these two
guys to keep me in check, so that I don’t get high on my own supply. We
remember, at the end of the day, that we grew up together.”
Iñárritu
compares their trio to the triumvirate of Spielberg,
Coppola and Scorsese who grew up and made their careers together in the 1970s.
“We
do make very different films, and we do come from different approaches, but I’m
always in awe of what Guillermo and Alfonso can do that I never could,” he
adds. “Like Pinocchio,
for Guillermo: I wouldn’t even know where to start making a film like that. To
see these incredible puppets and the technology he uses, and how he works with
stop motion; there’s something about it I can’t even understand. And yet I
admire it and I learn from that.”
Of
course, love cinema they may, but each of these directors has now made films
funded by Netflix. There is a tension between the epic and cinematic art that
they all aspire to and the screening of their films to most audiences on TV
screens or laptops.
“I love the
experience of going to the cinema, and I go and see films in the theater as
often as I can,” Cuarón defends, “but I’m by no means going to say it’s the only way
to experience a film. There’s a lot of cinema I’m quite happy to watch on a
platform.”
He says he
is less concerned about the ways that people are watching cinema, than he is
about a “dictatorship of ideas” that is driving production decisions in
Hollywood.
“It’s about
the movies that are being made to please that media,” he expands, in relation
to streaming platforms. “If you watch a Fellini or a Godard movie on your
computer, it’s still a great movie. It doesn’t change the power of the idea.
But I think the ideas are being reduced to computer size in terms of ideology,
and I think everybody is participating in that. The reduction of the idea is
what we should discuss, not the possibilities of the medium.”
Del Toro
agrees, saying that for him, “the size of the idea” is more important than the
size of the screen. “Cinema—the marketing and financial side—has always tried
to be constrained by rules. Right now, for example, you hear something like,
“The algorithm says people need to be hooked in the first five minutes of the
film,” but that was true in the ’70s and ’80s. That’s always been true. You
need to have a strong opening sequence.”
He pushes
the conversation wider than streaming versus cinema, espousing that
cinema now is “post-Covid, post-Trump, post-truth cinema, and it’s very
apocalyptic in a way. It’s always interesting generationally that when you
think an artform is dying, what is really dying is the way you understand that
artform.”
Iñárritu
voiced concern about the impact of social media on young filmmakers, something
that his generation did not
have to face.
“It can be
cruel, and it can be paralyzing. To have the courage to be disliked and to fail
at this time is much more difficult than it was before.”
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