Alejandro González Iñárritu: ‘I know about US culture. They don’t know a damn thing about Mexican culture’

With five Academy Awards to his name, Alejandro González Iñárritu, 62, had few things left to achieve, and this week he crossed one off. The award-winning Mexican director, who will release his ninth film this fall — the dramedy Digger, starring Tom Cruise — has returned to his native city to join the Colegio Nacional de México, one of the most prestigious academic institutions in the Spanish-speaking world. As its new 38th member and the first filmmaker ever asked to join the honorary academy, his entire craft is also entering the institution: an art that has historically played different roles, he says, from “its use by governments for ideologies and repression” to “poetry and inspiration,” and also “entertainment.”

“It is a human mirror with all our virtues and faults, but it is necessary,” summarizes the director of Amores perros (2000), Birdman (2014) and Bardo (2022), who spoke with EL PAÍS a day after his emotional speech.

Question. Yesterday you said that the power of U.S. cinema, its self-sufficiency, had made it provincial. How is Mexico portrayed in films there?

Answer. With profound ignorance. The way many iconic American films portrayed, for example, Native Americans or Mexicans —they have created stereotypes of so many nationalities through an absolutely childish or ignorant idea— has been tremendously to the detriment of Americans themselves as well. Because they have generated a perception that Mexicans wear sombreros, are drunks, are drug traffickers…

Q. Still today?

A. Still. Just look at the ratings of the films that are produced and consumed. Daniela Michel —who is a friend of mine and a great film lover— told me that she gives many talks at MoMA and presents a lot of Mexican cinema, and that when she presented Crepúsculo by Julio Bracho in New York (a modern urban Mexican film from the 1940s), Americans said: “Wait, were there buildings and cars in Mexico in 1940?” In other words, they can’t believe the Torre Latinoamericana existed... They just can’t understand it. The perception is very, very, very narrow, very ignorant.

Q. Are the same prejudices produced in reverse?

A. Yes and no. Honestly, I know more about the literature, music, architecture and society of the United States —from before the time that I lived there— than many Americans know about it themselves. Because Mexico has indeed experienced a cultural invasion. Across the whole world, but more so in Mexico. We grew up with American movies, television series, painting, music. Having a neighbor with 3,000 km of shared border permeates a culture brutally, because Americans conquered culture in the second half of the last century. So I do know about US culture; they don’t know a damn thing about us. In fact, it’s suspicious. If in a film [the Mexican character] does not suffer, is not a victim, is not a drug trafficker or is not an indigenous person, he is suspect.

Q. What is it like for you to live not only between the two countries but between those two mental universes? Yesterday you spoke about the price of uprooting.

A. It’s difficult. It comes with a price and and it is a privilege. It is an opportunity because my condition and economic situation are privileged. But beyond that, there is an emotional and identity cost that is shaken but not lost. On the contrary. The farther away you are, the more Mexican you become, but not in a nationalist reduction, rather in affections and in the perspective that gives you. That’s why I made Bardo. You cease to be in one place and in another; your roots are exposed. The land is missed in a certain way. And I see how suddenly I disappoint journalists because I speak perfect English and they say: “This one isn’t very Mexican, is he?”

Q. Back to prejudices.

A. Exactly. To be Mexican you have to be a certain way, according to them. And those are human prejudices. The Spaniard will have a prejudice about us, and among Mexicans there is also a stereotype about Spaniards. Where there are humans, humanness appears. Sadly, we are often trapped in small boxes of stereotypes. In film those borders exist because American cinema is so self-sufficient that Americans are not forced to watch movies in another language. Reading subtitles for them is almost an intellectual endeavor.

Q. You became emotional when speaking about the 130,000 missing people in Mexico. Is that the major unfinished business of Mexican politics?

A. Yes, it is very striking. It moved me because it’s an issue that has been evaded across different six-year administrations by different parties, for different reasons, blaming one another, but shirking the responsibility… As a government and as a society, we must stop everything and say: we have to find the cause and the solution to this problem. It’s as if they told you, “you have cancer and it’s spreading through your whole body and it will kill you.” And you carry on as if nothing is happening. That is what we are doing: normalizing what we should never have normalized. It causes me great helplessness and sadness; I think all Mexicans feel that.

Q. The situation at the border is no better. They are the two great open wounds.

A. That’s right. Flesh and Sand [a short film of his from 2017] is currently showing in Bilbao. It had been a long time since I saw it, and when I went to see it during the technical run I was much more moved than when I made it 10 years ago. All the images of ICE and everything that is happening now… Before it used to happen in the desert, now it happens in apartments with children, and the violence... What saddens me is the exaltation of cruelty toward others as if it were a point of pride. I mean, it’s no longer concealed.

Q. It has now become everyday politics.

A. Yes, and verbal violence. The suffering of others presented as an ideological triumph in a savage way, and which also yields results —votes. Identification with cruelty toward the other has transformed society in the last 10 years, and also through its economic and political leaders… We have normalized violence.

Q. Yet we are heading into the FIFA World Cup...

A. What FIFA is doing is a brutal act of corporate violence. FIFA stole the spectacle and the people’s game from the world. Doing it in three countries is like saying to you: “Hey, I’m inviting you to my party. —Where is your party? —In three states.” Previously one country proudly hosted it, dressed for the occasion, and people could go to that country and get to know it and travel within it and enjoy the benefits that came to it. Now they have sold the World Cup three times, to three countries that paid three times. FIFA’s investors must be happy, to the detriment of all humanity, which also has to pay $1,000 per ticket here in Mexico. Who can take their children if you have to pay 10,000, 20,000 pesos per ticket? My father took me to see Argentina-England in the famously iconic match with Maradona and the Hand of God. My father had no money, but we were still able to go and buy tickets at the box office.

Q. Have they eliminated the social component?

A. Completely. It’s the vulgarization of a game that belonged to the world. In short, if you ask me, it is a violence we have normalized, once again, because these people show up and become owners of the stadiums in each country, and they are the ones who set the rules.

Q. The World Cup accompanies, to some extent, the moment of external splendor that Mexico is experiencing. Amores perros also propelled it in its day. Is culture more effective than politics?

A. I don’t think it is effective in terms of tangible effects, because culture and art do not make laws, nor do they have the right to be exercised as a practical matter. But I definitely believe that film and art have that virtue and capacity to transcend apparent reality and reveal a deeper reality, perhaps more real than the material reality we see. That image of ourselves helps us understand each other.

When I finally accepted the offer to join the Colegio Nacional and was told I had 40 minutes for the speech, I almost resigned, because it is very difficult to explain yourself, very difficult. My filmmaking process is intuitive. In my life I have gone 200 km per hour without looking in the rearview mirror, and yesterday I had to look at everything behind me. It forced me, uncomfortably, to analyze my subconscious and my intuition more consciously: how do I operate? What is important to me?

Q. I will join Villoro in posing a final challenge. What remains of the Iñárritu who made Amores Perros 25 years ago?

A. Yesterday I said I don’t like to watch my films because it’s like seeing a photo of yourself as a child; you are the sole witness of someone who no longer exists, but who hasn’t yet died, someone who has already disappeared. That is the feeling. When I see a film like Amores perros… When I saw it in Cannes with Gael [García Bernal] I was exhausted. I said, how did I film this movie? The energy in it... I could no longer film in such a muscular way. And when I see pieces of other films, I see myself but don’t recognize myself. What I have enjoyed in life is learning. Some people are very orderly and keep the wisdom of the processes they used elsewhere. I, every time I finish a film, close the folder and throw everything away and start the next one from scratch. This film, Digger, Sabina Berman and I began writing it in 2017. It has taken nine years of writing and rewriting that script. In my life I had never done anything like that, neither tonally, nor aesthetically, nor narratively, nor structurally, nor luminously. For me the pleasure is learning; that is what excites me the most.

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