Fall Films

Photo By Will Van Overbeek

Alejandro González Iñárritu on 'Babel'

Alejandro González Iñárritu doesn't make movies that go down easy. Both his 2000 breakout film, Amores Perros, and his American follow-up, 2003's 21 Grams, were fatalistic tragedies of circumstance that put their protagonists through almost unbearable wringers of emotion. His latest, Babel, starring Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett, is no different; only this time the sweeping narrative interconnectedness Iñárritu has mastered transcends borders, cultures, and languages, reaching from Mexico to Tokyo, from Morocco to California, to shed light on the geopolitical and interpersonal consequences of miscommunication in a shrinking world. "In Iraq," Iñárritu says, "600,000 people have been killed because George Bush didn't listen to the world. But what's happening on the global scale is happening in our homes, too. We don't have time to listen to our wives; we don't have time to listen to our kids. People are no longer used to human contact. That is what Babel is about"

Shot in five languages on three continents, the movie follows several narrative strains, all linked by incidents of violence and lingering emotional detachment: Pitt and Blanchett play a complacent American couple whose vacation is cut short by random gunfire in Morocco; their two young children get lost in the desert when their nanny takes them on an illegal trip to Mexico; and a deaf-mute Japanese girl searches for comfort after the death of her mother. The movie, like all of Iñárritu's films, is a grab around the throat; moviegoers hoping for a lighthearted night out will probably come away disappointed. The director says this cinematic intensity is a reflection of his approach to life in general.

"I'm a very intense person," he says, "and I have lived my life in a very intense way. But I enjoy life a lot; I have a lot of hope for life. As Oscar Wilde said, 'A pessimist is an optimist well-informed.'" Despite the film's seemingly endless parade of heartbreaking scenarios and emotionally draining images, the director insists there's nothing dark or cynical about his movie or about his own view of the world. "I don't consider myself bitter," he says. "And I don't consider this film bitter. Babel is a film with a lot of light, a lot of shadows and light. And, in the end, I think it's a film about compassion."

What the film is most definitely about is a lack of communication in the world, a problem that extended beyond the confines of the script and onto the set itself, where the award-winning director had to find a way to get the right performances out of his large and disparate cast of Hollywood stars, foreign character actors, and rank beginners, and to do so in several different languages.

"The thing about making a film like Babel," he says, "is you have to get rid of the text [of the script] and the literary kind of language, and you have to find the visual language. Once the actor has the right emotion – I call it the 'river' – if the river is flowing correctly, the words are completely unimportant. The words become the little boats that will be floating in the river. Cinema is what happens between one word and the other."