Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu Quotes

I think every beautiful tale in the world hides the truth and reveals it little by little.

Fear is the condom of life. It doesn't allow you to enjoy things.

I think movies in general should have more respect for the audience than they do. Too many films are afraid to confuse people, so all the information is given to them right away, and there's nothing left for the film to do. It ruins many stories, because everything becomes obvious and predictable. I want my films to engage people more and make them more actively involved in the story.

Life and death are illusions. We are in a constant state of transformation.

I didn't have a normal academic career. I never studied cinema. I learned from life.

I remember, the first time I saw a [Andrei] Tarkovsky film, I was shocked by it. I didn't know what to do. I was fascinated, because suddenly I realized that film could have so many more layers to it than what I had imagined before. Then others, like Kurosawa and Fellini, were like a new discovery for me, another country.

I never deny a true experience in one shot.

Every time that I'm challenged with a film I think that I haven't learned anything, that every film is different and that every thing that I have learned is useless in this new adventure.

In the creative process, my ego has always been a huge tyrant ... a dictator and kind of rude and very misleading, because sometimes when I'm doing something, I say, "This is great! This is fantastic! Very genius!" And 20 minutes later, I feel like a dead jellyfish. "You are a stupid a**hole. This is a piece of sh*t. Nobody will care about it."

When people laugh and applaud as characters are killing each other, and you never see the body that's lying there, or you never see the family that suffers, then it turns into a cool thing to do, like a videogame. Then, when you watch the news and see that 15 soldiers were killed, you start to see them as just numbers, material, information, images. We lose the real weight and real value of one simple human life.

My country has been wracked with violence for a long time. Just to see all the violence on the news makes you sick. It's true that violence is in our nature, but I try to explore deeply where it comes from and where it goes and what it creates. Not in a moralistic or preachy way, but just to observe the real consequences of violence in a human being or in a society.

How can [actors] learn their lines and be honest in front of 30 people and all the lights? It makes me cry sometimes. I can't understand how they can be joking with me 30 seconds before, and 40 seconds later they're giving me all this incredible feeling.

The actors make the film. They're the ones that take this theoretical movie that's in your head and make it real. The success of a film is entirely on their shoulders. I admire them, because acting is such a difficult thing to do, and I personally can't understand it.

There's nothing better than being in a film that translates to audiences and makes people think and feel good and walk away with great revelations in their own life of some kind. But when the process and the experience and the fun of that matches, it's a good feeling.

All people know that they will die, but they don't actually believe it.

I was aware of the possible biases you could get as a commercial director, like being too concerned about the technical aspects of the form rather than anything of substance. If you keep working in commercials, you can get trapped in a very superficial way of thinking. I always used commercials as an exercise for filmmaking, like going to the gym.

Really, I'm a neurotic perfectionist. Every single word in the script is the one that I want.

For me, it's not about masochism to talk about death. For me, it's about observing life through death, from the last point of it.

It's more enjoyable for me to know that life is finite. Knowing that, I would like to go to a party.

Of course, there's always one theater that shows some kind of European film. Now, fortunately, you have DVDs, so it's possible to get anything you want within a few hours. In those days, it was virtually impossible to get Italian films, or German films, or whatever. So I grew up with very standard, mainstream films.

I was a street kid, basically. But really, Mexico City has always been this big, complex monster of a city that has always had real problems and needs, and I've always found my way through it in different ways.

As a sensitive filmmaker, I think you have to really be careful in how you explore it. Not that you can't tell any story you want - I'm not calling for censorship or anything. But if you're going to have violence, I think it's important to deal with the consequences of that on a human level, not just to make people laugh.

I like to make films, but the only reason I do is because I'm a very bad musician.

When you get to the holidays, if you think that the holidays will be forever, you just take it for granted. But, if you know that you have just three days at the beach, you will be so happy to be there, every day.

I hate superficial violence. It's shallow and stupid, and the impact on the audience is really bad.