Outstanding Mexican director Alejandro Gonzalez

2024 Author: Leah Sherlock | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 05:25

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 Gonzalez was born in the family of a prosperous banker Hector Gonzalez 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 remains a role model for Alejandro. In his youth, the future great director was passionate about music and even tried himself as a DJ on the popular Mexican radio station WFM.

In the late 80s, the young man was already writing music for national TV and cinema ("Tiger's Paw"). In the same period, Alejandro Gonzalez began to study filmmaking, his mentor was the Polish director-producer Ludwik Margulis, after completing the course, the future star of world directing trained in Los Angeles with Judith Weston.

The youngest director of the company

In the 90s, 27-year-old Alejandro González Iñárritu, the youngestdirector-producer of Televisa, becomes its chief executive producer, and after a while he opens his own film studio Zeta Films, producing short films, TV programs and commercials. More often than others, the latter was directed by Iñárritu himself.

Continuing to cooperate with the film company Televisa, Alejandro shoots his debut film "For the Money", in which the main role was played by the Spanish singer and actor Miguel Bose. Further, in 2000, according to the script by Guillermo Arriaga Alejandro Gonzalez, he shoots the movie "Love Bitch" starring Garcia Bernal. This tragicomedy was showered with numerous prizes, nominations and awards, and also had an unprecedented success at the box office, exceeding the initial budget by ten times.

By the way, to love as a feeling, cinema has an indirect relationship. The fact is that the original title of the film in one of the interpretations sounds like "Love is dogs." Each of the intersecting three stories, short stories in the storyline of the picture, tells about the role that dogs play in people's lives.

Global fame

After receiving worldwide recognition and fame, director Alejandro Gonzalez receives an invitation to work on the international project "9/11". He has been co-created by eminent directors such as Mira Nair, Amos Gitai, Claude Lelouch, Ken Loach, Shohei Imamura and Sean Penn in this exciting almanac.

Iñárritu's success draws the attention of Hollywood artisans. His next project, the drama "21gram”, Gonzalez is already filming in the USA, but again according to the script of his compatriot playwright Guillermo Arriaga. If the tragicomedy "Love Bitch" consisted of three separate short stories that were interconnected by the 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 intricacies, a looped composition. However, the drama received the highest ratings from world film critics. The lead actors, Puerto Rican Benicio Del Toro and blonde beauty Naomi Watts, were nominated for an Oscar.

Nominated for seven Oscars

The storyline of the Latin American director's most ambitious project "Babylon" is a chronological knot skillfully tightened in Iñárritu's signature style. Alejandro Gonzalez, together with his fellow screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga, is again creating a film on the same principle - intersecting stories (now there are four of them), a non-linear passage of time. Drama is like a layer cake of close-ups multiplied by a non-linear narrative structure. Based on these characteristics, it is possible to combine three works - Love Bitch, 21 Grams and Babylon into a single formalistic trilogy created according to the same directorial strategy.

The project involved world famous movie stars: Cate Blanchett, Brad Pitt, Adriana Barrasa, Gael Garcia Bernal, Koji Yakusho and RinkoKikuchi. As a result, according to the Cannes Film Festival, Alejandro Gonzalez was named the best director in 2006, the Oscar also became a well-deserved award for the director.

Beautyful

After parting ways with his formerly indispensable screenwriter-playwright Guillermo Arriaga, the Mexican director traveled to Barcelona, where he filmed the underside of the tourist Eden that Woody Allen so beautifully portrayed in Vicky Cristina Barcelona. According to the author's vision of Iñárritu, Barcelona turns from beautiful into beautiful, heaven turns into a real hell.

For all its intentionally realistic manner of narration, the movie is a story from a position that departs into the world of another soul. The main character is ill with cancer in an incurable stage. Uksbal learns about his diagnosis in the first minutes of timing, and the rest of the screen time is the way to another world. This work by Gonzalez has received two Oscar nominations, two British Academy Awards and one Golden Globe.

Survivor

An interesting turn of the author's creative thought is once again demonstrated by Alejandro Iñaritta, who in 2014 received a number of awards from the American Film Academy for the sparkling chamber "Birdman" in the film-parable "The Revenant". Having descended from the theatrical stage of the world of illusory dreams, the director rushed to harsh lands where there is no place for sarcasm and irony. It is here, in an environment hostile to man, that the protagonist, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, will have to survive, inthe time when his antagonist, the scoundrel Fitz, played by Tom Hardy, will sparkle with malevolence and energetic enthusiasm. The storyline with the light hand of Inarritu appears in the form of an epic realistic fresco with fleeting interspersed with dreams, visions, memories of the protagonist.