The first Latin American nominated for an Oscar in the Best Director category, Alejandro González Iñárritu, is now known not only as a director, but also as a screenwriter, producer, and composer.
The beginning of the creative path
Alejandro González was born into the family of the prosperous banker Hector González and his beautiful wife Maria Inarritu in the last summer month of 1963. According to the director, despite the bankruptcy of his father, his childhood was cloudless and happy, Hector was and has remained an example for Alejandro to follow. In his youth, the future great director was passionately passionate about music and even tried himself as a DJ on the popular in Mexico radio station WFM.
In the late 80s, the young man was already writing music for national TV and cinema (“Tiger Paw”). In the same period, Alejandro González began to study film production, his mentor was the Polish film director Ludwik Margulis, after the end of the course, the future star of world directing had an internship with Judith Weston in Los Angeles.
The youngest director of the company
In the 90s, the 27-year-old Alejandro González Iñárritu, the youngest director of Televisa, became its chief executive producer, and after a while opened his personal film studio Zeta Films, which produces short films, TV programs and commercials. More often than others, the director of the latter was Inyarritu himself.
Without ceasing to cooperate with the television company Televisa, Alejandro removes his debut film "For the sake of money", the main role in which was played by the Spanish singer and actor Miguel Bose. Further, in 2000, according to the script of Guillermo Arriaga Alejandro González, he shot the film “Bitch Love” in the title role with Garcia Bernal. This tragicomedy was showered with many prizes, nominations and prizes, and also had unprecedented success at the box office, ten times higher than the initial budget.
By the way, cinema has an indirect relation to love as a feeling. The fact is that the original name of the film in one of the interpretations sounds like "Love is dogs." Each of the three stories intersecting each other, short stories in the plot narrative of the picture, tells about the role that dogs play in people's lives.
World famous
Having received worldwide recognition and fame, director Alejandro Gonzalez receives an invitation to work on the international project "September 11th". This burning almanac was created together with such eminent directors as Mira Nair, Amos Gitai, Claude Lelouch, Ken Loach, Shohei Imamura and Sean Penn.
The success of Inarritu attracts the attention of Hollywood artisans. Gonzalez is shooting his next project, the drama “21 Grams”, already in the USA, but again according to the script of his compatriot playwright Guillermo Arriaga. If the tragicomedy “Bitch-Love” consisted of three separate short stories, which were interconnected by an associative principle, then in the movie “21 grams” Alejandro Gonzalez, whose films have intricate designs, goes further in search of a new narrative structure.
The director risked confusing the audience with flexible plot tricks, looped by the composition. However, the drama received the highest ratings from world film critics. The main performers - Puerto Rican Benicio Del Toro and the beautiful blonde Naomi Watts - were nominated for an Academy Award.
Nominated for seven Academy Award
The storyline of the most ambitious project of the Latin American director “Babylon” is a chronological unit skillfully tightened in the original authorial manner of Inarritu. Alejandro Gonzalez, along with his fellow screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga, again create a film on the same principle - intersecting stories (now there are four), non-linear course of time. The drama is like a flaky pie of close-ups multiplied by a non-linear narrative structure. Based on these characteristics, you can combine three works - “Bitch-Love”, “21 Grams” and “Babylon” - into a single formalistic trilogy created according to one directorial strategy.
The project involved world-famous movie stars: Cate Blanchett, Brad Pitt, Adriana Barras, Gael Garcia Bernal, Koji Yakusho and Rinko Kikuchi. As a result, according to the Cannes Film Festival, in 2006 he was named the best director Alejandro Gonzalez, the Oscar also became a well-deserved award to the director.
Beautyful
Having parted with his previously irreplaceable screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga, the Mexican director went to Barcelona, ​​where he filmed the wrong side of the tourist Eden, which was so beautifully shown by Woody Allen in the film “Vicky Cristina Barcelona”. According to the author’s vision of Iñárritu, Barcelona turns from beautiful into beautyful, paradise turns into a real hell.
For all the intentionally realistic style of narration, cinema is a story from a position that goes into the world of another soul. The main character is ill with cancer in an incurable stage. Uxbal learns about his diagnosis in the first minutes of timekeeping, and all the rest of the screen time is the way to another world. This work of Gonzalez was awarded two Oscar nominations, two British Academy Prizes and one Golden Globe.
"Survivor"
Alejandro Iñaritta once again demonstrates an interesting twist of author’s creative thought, who received a number of American Academy awards in the parable film “Survivor” for the sparkling chamber “Birdman” in 2014. Having descended from the theatrical stages of the world of illusory dreams, the director rushed to harsh lands in which there is no place for sarcasm and irony. It is here, in a hostile environment, that the main character in the performance of Leonardo DiCaprio will have to survive, at a time when his antagonist scoundrel Fitz performed by Tom Hardy will spark with maliciousness and energetic fervor. The storyline with a light hand Inyarritu appears in the form of an epic realistic mural with fleeting interspersed dreams, visions, memories of the protagonist.