This interview with Alejandro G. Iñárritu first ran in two different parts in the Race Begins and International issues of TheWrap’s awards magazine.
Alejandro G. Iñárritu would like to get this straight from the start: “Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths” is not an autobiography. Its lead character, played by Daniel Giménez Cacho, is Silverio Gama, a movie director who looks like Iñárritu and who moved from Mexico to Los Angeles early in his career, just like Iñárritu; he also has a family like Iñárritu’s and he and his wife lost a child, like Iñárritu. But “Bardo” is a fantasia, a dreamscape and, insisted the writer-director, anything but a factual accounting of his life.
“It has taken me a long time to make myself clear that this is not an autobiography,” he said. “For me, every autobiography is a lie. Autobiography pretends it owns the truth, that it’s making factual claims. But it’s not. This is fiction that allows me to explore the emotional kinds of truth.”
Inspired by the work of Latin American authors like Julio Cortázar and Jorge Luis Borges, “Bardo” — named after the Buddhist state between death and rebirth — is defiantly nonlinear, slipping from Silverio’s panic attacks over his career to his dislocation as a Mexican living successfully in the U.S. to fantasies about the colonization of Mexico by the brutal Hernán Cortés in the 16th century.
“As a filmmaker, I realize that for the last 20 years, I have been observing the world with my open eyes — capturing, assimilating the outside reality in a way that interacts with my own experience,” Iñárritu said. “You interact and integrate reality with open eyes.
“But in this case, I made this film with my eyes closed. You look inward, and that’s much more unexplored territory, more mysterious. It’s contradictory and sometimes ridiculous and sometimes painful and sometimes humorous. This was an attempt to make sense of all that I found out about the memories and feelings and emotions and images and collective memory of the things that made me who I am.”
He came to the film after the back-to-back success of 2014’s “Birdman,” which won the Best Picture Oscar and was, he said, “the first film where I started exploring the subconscious”; and the following year’s “The Revenant,” which won him his second consecutive Best Director Oscar.
After those films he also made the 2017 VR project “Carne y Arena,” a devastating and immersive experience that puts the viewer in the midst of a group of immigrants crossing the desert to get into the United States.
“‘Carne y Arena’ was, for me, a journalistic work of interviewing hundreds of immigrants and going through that territory,” he said. “I’m a privileged immigrant, but I had the opportunity to get really close to other circumstances. I did it with a radical point of view: If you experienced it through these glasses, you were kind of a ghost in the presence of this reality. This time, immigration was something I explored from a personal perspective.”
Iñárritu’s own trip to the U.S. came after the success of his first film, 2000’s “Amores Perros.” “It was a one-year experiment that turned into 21 years,” he said, laughing. “And it felt like it happened in one second.”
But even after decades of flourishing in Hollywood, albeit with a distinctive and largely uncompromising filmography, both he and Silverio find themselves adrift in certain ways. “The feeling of being an immigrant when you leave your country, there’s a fractured identity,” he said. “You do not belong to either place anymore. Even if you wanted to go back, you can’t go back, no matter how successful your adventure has been. And that’s very hard to explain to people who haven’t been through that.”
“Bardo,” which premiered to mixed reviews at the Venice Film Festival and was subsequently trimmed by 22 minutes, doesn’t try to explain anything to its viewers; it twists and turns, drifting in and out of surrealism and mixing the intensely personal with the political in a way that can be beautiful, confounding and beautifully confounding.
“If you demand logic or structure from this film, you will fight with it and it will be a difficult experience,” he said. “But if you allow yourself to just let go and immerse in these moods, emotions, reflections — and images and sound which I think are the definition of pure cinema — then probably you will experience a state of mind, an emotional state. There are some images that in a way hopefully make sense emotionally for people. No matter if you’re an immigrant or not, if you’re American or German or Japanese, the themes that are there from my personal perspective are universal themes.”
He also delves into some deeply personal matters, including the loss of a child, which in “Bardo” becomes a surreal scene early in the film. “Beauty has its origin in wounds,” he said. “The wound is what creates an emptiness and makes us move forward. That’s where we go to find refuge and transformation and renovation and growth and understanding. Observing these wounds through light and through humor is a way to heal.
“I’m talking about the personal wounds, but also the historical events that are still open wounds in the whole country, like the Spanish conquest or the American war that happened 175 years ago that cost half of our country, or the people disappearing in the streets with no clue where they are.
“This film is all the time navigating between reality and imagination,” Iñárritu added. “When you do a film, you have to betray reality, because you’re looking for a higher truth. Fiction uncovers and reveals what reality is hiding, and it can grasp the truth much better than if you’re trying to be real.
“This movie was me navigating to the emotional truth about these events — about fatherhood, about losing your affections, the relation with time, identity and historical moments and the collective memory of the country. It goes from the most intimate events to the biggest historical events, and as I navigate all these things I do not pretend to say that this is what happened. But there’s an emotional core. The only center of gravity is emotion. And all of the things the character goes though, emotionally I have been there.”
He laughed quietly. “This was not a rational project,” he said. “This was a need.”
Read more from the Race Begins issue here, and from the International issue here.
