Alejandro González Iñárritu: The Life Story Behind the Oscar Director

Alejandro González Iñárritu was born on 15 August 1963 in Mexico City, and he is the Mexican director who took stories about ordinary people in crisis and turned them into films that won the highest prizes in world cinema. Before he ever directed a feature film he was a radio DJ, a rock music fan, and a student of communications, and those early jobs shaped a director who thinks in sound and rhythm as much as in images. His first feature, Amores Perros, arrived in 2000 and announced a new voice in Mexican cinema, and within fifteen years he had directed Birdman and The Revenant, winning the Academy Award for Best Director twice in a row, a feat no director had achieved in more than sixty years. His films are often difficult to watch, full of accidents, grief, and characters who cannot escape the consequences of a single moment, and that difficulty is deliberate, because Iñárritu believes cinema should confront the audience rather than comfort it.

Mexico City: Radio, Rock and a Restless Young Man

Iñárritu grew up in Mexico City in the 1960s and 1970s, the son of a banker, Héctor González Gama, and a mother, Luz María Iñárritu, who encouraged his interest in the arts, and he has described his childhood as comfortable but restless. As a teenager he worked on a cargo ship, sailing the Atlantic and the Caribbean, an experience that took him away from home and gave him a taste of the wider world that stayed with him. He studied communications at the Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico City, and while he was a student he began working in radio, eventually becoming a DJ at the station WFM, one of the most popular rock stations in Mexico. Radio taught him how sound creates mood, how a song can change the feeling of a room, and how to hold an audience’s attention without any pictures at all, lessons that later showed up in the careful sound design of his films.

At WFM Iñárritu rose to become the station’s director, and he learned to programme music, to talk to an audience, and to think about rhythm and timing, skills that a film director uses every day on a set. He also began directing commercials and working in television, where he learned the practical side of production: budgets, schedules, crews, and the discipline of finishing a project on time. In the 1980s he studied theatre and worked with the Polish director Ludwik Margules, a teacher whose influence Iñárritu has acknowledged, and he began to think seriously about directing films rather than only talking about them. He went to Los Angeles to study film, taking courses and watching how American productions worked, and he returned to Mexico determined to make a feature. The years in radio and advertising were not a detour; they were his film school, and they gave him a craftsman’s understanding of how an audience responds to sound and image.

By the late 1990s Iñárritu was in his mid-thirties, older than most first-time directors, and he had a family, a career in media, and a clear idea of the film he wanted to make. He wrote Amores Perros with the writer Guillermo Arriaga, a collaboration that would continue through his next two films, and the script was built around a car crash in Mexico City that connected three separate stories. The film was shot in the streets of the city, with non-professional actors mixed with professionals, and its raw, handheld style was a deliberate break from the polished look of Mexican commercial cinema. Iñárritu has said he wanted the film to smell of the city, to feel like the Mexico City he knew, and that ambition shaped every choice, from the casting to the music. The debut was ready by 2000, and it changed Mexican cinema in a single stroke.

Amores Perros and a Debut That Shook Mexican Cinema

Amores Perros, released in 2000, tells three stories linked by a car accident: Octavio, played by Gael García Bernal in his film debut, who enters his dog in fights to win money; Daniel, a publisher who leaves his family for a younger woman; and El Chivo, a former guerrilla turned hitman who lives with his dogs. The film’s structure, with its chapters and its repeated crash shown from different angles, was new to Mexican audiences, and its violence, its language, and its view of the city shocked some viewers and thrilled others. It won the Critics’ Week prize at the Cannes Film Festival, was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, and won the BAFTA for Best Film Not in the English Language. Gael García Bernal became a star overnight, and Iñárritu became the most talked-about new director in Latin America. The film’s success proved that a Mexican story, told in Spanish and set in the streets of Mexico City, could travel around the world.

The making of Amores Perros was difficult, and the stories from the set have become part of the film’s legend, because Iñárritu insisted on realism in the dog-fighting scenes and in the crash itself, which was filmed with real cars and real risk. The dogs in the film were trained and cared for, and no animals were harmed, but the scenes are still hard to watch, and that discomfort was the point: Iñárritu wanted the audience to feel the violence rather than to enjoy it as entertainment. The film’s editor, the music, and the sound design all worked to create a sense of a city that never stops, with traffic, dogs, and radios overlapping in a constant noise. The collaboration with Guillermo Arriaga was central, because Arriaga’s writing gave Iñárritu the multi-strand structure he would use again, and the two men shared a belief that a story should be told in fragments that the audience must assemble. Amores Perros remains the film that defines Iñárritu’s beginnings, and it is still shown in film schools as an example of how a debut can announce a director completely.

The impact of Amores Perros went beyond awards, because it helped to start a new wave of Mexican cinema, alongside the work of Alfonso Cuarón and Guillermo del Toro, the other two Mexican directors who would conquer Hollywood in the same years. The three men became known as the Three Amigos of Mexican cinema, and their friendship and mutual support became one of the best-known stories in modern film. For Iñárritu personally, the film meant that Hollywood came calling, and he moved toward English-language films without abandoning the themes that had driven his debut: accident, guilt, and the way strangers’ lives collide. The dog Cofi, Octavio’s Rottweiler, became an emblem of the film, and the image of the crash became one of the most quoted openings in modern cinema. A first film rarely sets the terms of a whole career, but Amores Perros did, and Iñárritu has spent the years since working inside the questions it asked.

21 Grams: Grief Told Out of Order

Iñárritu’s second film, 21 Grams, released in 2003, was his first in English, and it starred Sean Penn, Naomi Watts, and Benicio del Toro in a story about a heart transplant that connects three strangers. The film’s title refers to the idea, popularised in the early twentieth century, that the human soul weighs 21 grams, and the story is told out of chronological order, with scenes shuffled so that the audience must piece together what happened and in what sequence. Naomi Watts played Cristina, a former drug addict whose husband and daughters are killed by a hit-and-run driver, and her performance earned her an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress. Benicio del Toro played Jack, the driver, a born-again Christian whose faith collapses under guilt, and he was nominated for Best Supporting Actor. Sean Penn played Paul, the dying mathematics professor who receives the heart, and his quiet, exhausted performance anchored the film.

The fragmented structure of 21 Grams was a risk, because audiences had to work hard to follow the story, and some critics found the shuffling of time confusing rather than illuminating. Iñárritu and Arriaga defended the choice, arguing that grief itself is not chronological, and that a person who has lost a family does not remember events in order but in flashes, with the worst moments returning again and again. The film was shot by the cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto, who would become Iñárritu’s regular collaborator, and its visual style was raw and handheld, with close-ups that stayed on faces long after other directors would have cut away. The film won awards at the Venice Film Festival, where Sean Penn won Best Actor, and it confirmed that Iñárritu could work with major American stars without losing his own voice. It also confirmed the partnership with Arriaga, although the two men would part ways after the next film, in a split that both have discussed publicly.

21 Grams is a darker film than Amores Perros, because its characters have no dogs, no street life, and no humour to soften the pain, and the American setting, in Memphis and New Mexico, is filmed as a landscape of motels, hospitals, and empty roads. The heart transplant at the centre of the story is a medical fact that becomes a moral question: does the recipient owe something to the donor’s family, and does a new heart change who a person is? Iñárritu does not answer these questions, and the film’s ending is deliberately unresolved, with Paul’s fate left uncertain and Cristina’s future only hinted at. The film’s reputation has grown over the years, and it is now regarded as one of the strongest films of the 2000s, a work that took the multi-strand structure of Amores Perros and applied it to a more intimate, more painful story. It also established Iñárritu as a director actors wanted to work with, because Penn, Watts, and del Toro all gave performances that are still counted among their best.

Babel: Four Countries, One Bullet

Babel, released in 2006, was Iñárritu’s most ambitious film to that point, a story told in four countries and four languages, connected by a single rifle shot in the Moroccan desert. An American couple, played by Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett, are travelling in Morocco when the wife is shot by a boy playing with his father’s rifle, and the film follows the consequences across Morocco, Mexico, Japan, and the United States. In Japan, a deaf teenage girl played by Rinko Kikuchi searches for connection after her mother’s suicide, and Kikuchi’s performance earned her an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress. In Mexico, the couple’s nanny, played by Adriana Barraza, takes their children across the border for her son’s wedding, and the return journey ends in disaster in the desert. The film’s title refers to the biblical story of the Tower of Babel, and its theme is the failure of people to understand each other across language, culture, and distance.

Babel was nominated for seven Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director for Iñárritu, and it won the Oscar for Best Original Score, composed by Gustavo Santaolalla, whose music also shaped Amores Perros and 21 Grams. The film won the Best Director prize at the Cannes Film Festival, and it became a commercial success around the world, proving that a film with subtitles, multiple stories, and no single hero could find a large audience. The production was enormous, with crews working in Morocco, Mexico, Japan, and California, and Iñárritu has described the shoot as the hardest of his life, with long days, remote locations, and the challenge of directing actors in languages he did not speak. The Moroccan scenes were filmed in the Atlas Mountains, the Japanese scenes in Tokyo, and the Mexican scenes around Tijuana, and each location required a different crew, a different style, and a different kind of patience. The film’s scale was a statement: Iñárritu was no longer a Mexican director making Mexican films, but a world director making films about the whole planet.

The success of Babel also brought Iñárritu into conflict with his writer, Guillermo Arriaga, because the film’s credits and its awards campaign became a public dispute about who deserved recognition for the story. Arriaga wanted a writing credit that reflected his role, and Iñárritu insisted that the film was a director’s work, and the two men stopped working together after Babel. The split was widely reported, and it ended one of the most productive partnerships in modern cinema, but both men continued to make strong work separately. Babel’s legacy is not the dispute but the film itself, which remains Iñárritu’s most widely seen work before Birdman, and which introduced Rinko Kikuchi to the world and gave Adriana Barraza an Oscar nomination. The film’s image of a rifle passing from hand to hand across continents is still one of the most memorable metaphors in modern cinema, and it captures Iñárritu’s central idea: that a single act, in a remote place, can change lives on the other side of the world.

Biutiful and the Years Between the Big Films

After Babel, Iñárritu took four years to make his next film, Biutiful, released in 2010, a Spanish-language story set in Barcelona and starring Javier Bardem as Uxbal, a man who makes his living from undocumented workers and who is dying of cancer. The film was shot in Barcelona’s poorest neighbourhoods, with non-professional actors alongside Bardem, and its subject was the hidden economy of a European city: the African and Chinese migrants who sell goods on the street, the families who live in crowded flats, and the men who profit from them. Bardem’s performance earned him an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor, and the film was nominated for Best Foreign Language Film, although it divided critics, some of whom found its misery relentless. Iñárritu has said that Biutiful is his most personal film, because it is about a father trying to provide for his children while knowing he will not live to see them grow up, and that theme, of a parent’s fear, runs through his work.

Biutiful was a smaller film than Babel, and its production was difficult in a different way, because Iñárritu insisted on filming in real locations in Barcelona, with the noise, the crowds, and the unpredictability that real streets bring. The film’s cinematographer was again Rodrigo Prieto, and its visual style was darker and more intimate than Babel’s, with long takes that followed Uxbal through markets, flats, and hospital corridors. The film’s supernatural element, in which Uxbal can communicate with the dead, divided audiences, because some viewers found it moving and others found it out of place in an otherwise realistic story. Iñárritu defended the choice, saying that death was part of Uxbal’s daily life and that the film needed to show what dying felt like from the inside. Biutiful did not repeat Babel’s commercial success, but it kept Iñárritu’s reputation intact, and it showed that he was willing to make a difficult, uncommercial film even after becoming famous.

The years between Babel and Birdman were also the years when Iñárritu’s position in Hollywood changed, because he was no longer an outsider but a director whose name guaranteed attention, and that attention brought both freedom and pressure. He turned down projects, waited for the right story, and developed Birdman slowly, working with a new team of writers after the split with Arriaga. He also began to think about the technical challenges that would define his next films, including the long-take style of Birdman and the location shooting of The Revenant, and he worked closely with the cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki, who would shoot both films. The gap between films was long by Hollywood standards, but Iñárritu has always worked slowly, and the care shows in the finished work. Biutiful was the bridge between the multi-strand films of the 2000s and the single-character intensity of the 2010s, and without it the later films would not have been possible.

Birdman and The Revenant: Two Oscars in a Row

Birdman, released in 2014, is the film that made Iñárritu a household name, a dark comedy about Riggan Thomson, a washed-up actor famous for playing a superhero, who tries to stage a serious play on Broadway. Michael Keaton played Riggan, in a piece of casting that used Keaton’s own history as Batman to give the role an extra layer, and the supporting cast included Emma Stone as his daughter, Edward Norton as a difficult co-star, and Naomi Watts as an actress desperate for a break. The film was shot to look like a single continuous take, with the camera following the characters through the theatre’s corridors, onto the stage, and out into Times Square, and the effect was achieved through long, carefully rehearsed shots stitched together invisibly. Birdman won four Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, and Best Cinematography for Emmanuel Lubezki, and it became one of the most discussed films of the year.

The Revenant followed in 2015, and it was a completely different kind of film: a survival story set in the American wilderness in the 1820s, starring Leonardo DiCaprio as the frontiersman Hugh Glass, who is mauled by a bear, left for dead by his companions, and crawls across frozen country to find the man who killed his son. The film was shot in remote locations in Canada and Argentina, using only natural light, and the shoot became famous for its difficulty, with freezing temperatures, long delays, and a budget that grew far beyond its original plan. DiCaprio won his first Academy Award for Best Actor, and Iñárritu won his second consecutive Oscar for Best Director, the first time any director had won back-to-back directing Oscars since Joseph L. Mankiewicz in 1949 and 1950. Emmanuel Lubezki won his third consecutive cinematography Oscar, and the film won three Oscars in total. The Revenant proved that Iñárritu could make a commercial epic without abandoning his interest in suffering, guilt, and survival.

Winning Best Director twice in a row placed Iñárritu in a very small group of film-makers, and it changed how the industry talked about him, because he was no longer only a Mexican director but a director whose work defined the mid-2010s. The two films could hardly be more different: Birdman is a comedy set in a theatre, shot in a few weeks on a soundstage, while The Revenant is a brutal outdoor epic that took months in the wilderness, and the fact that the same director made both in consecutive years is a measure of his range. Both films share a central character who is trapped, Riggan by his past and Glass by his injuries, and both are filmed with long takes that refuse to look away. The back-to-back wins also made Iñárritu a symbol of Mexican cinema’s success in Hollywood, alongside Cuarón and del Toro, and the three directors’ friendship became a story in itself. The years 2014 and 2015 were the peak of his career, and everything since has been measured against them.

Bardo, Virtual Reality and the Director Today

After The Revenant, Iñárritu turned to a new medium, creating the virtual reality installation Carne y Arena in 2017, which placed viewers in the middle of a group of migrants crossing the desert at night, with border patrol agents, helicopters, and dogs surrounding them. The installation was shown at the Cannes Film Festival and in museums around the world, and the Academy gave Iñárritu a special Oscar for it, the first such award in decades. The work showed that his interest in migration and borders, which had run through Babel and Biutiful, was not a passing theme but a central concern, and that he was willing to use new technology to make an audience feel what a news report could not. Carne y Arena was a short experience, lasting only a few minutes, but viewers who tried it described it as one of the most powerful things they had ever seen, because the virtual reality made the danger feel immediate rather than distant.

His next feature, Bardo, released in 2022, was a return to Mexico and to Spanish, a semi-autobiographical film about a journalist and film-maker who returns to Mexico City after years in Los Angeles and finds that he no longer belongs in either place. The film was shot by Darius Khondji, and it was visually extravagant, with dream sequences, long takes, and scenes that mixed memory and fantasy in ways that confused some viewers. Critics were divided, with some praising its ambition and others finding it self-indulgent, and the film’s commercial performance was modest. Iñárritu has said that Bardo is his most personal film, because it is about exile, about the feeling of being a Mexican who has lived abroad for so long that home feels foreign, and that theme connects directly to his own life. The film’s mixed reception did not damage his standing, because a director who has won two consecutive Oscars is allowed a difficult, personal film, and Bardo is best understood as a film made for himself rather than for an audience.

Today Iñárritu lives and works between Mexico and Los Angeles, and he remains one of the most respected directors working in film, with a record that includes two Best Director Oscars, a Best Picture Oscar, and prizes from Cannes, Venice, and the BAFTAs. His films are taught in film schools, his techniques are studied by younger directors, and his name is mentioned whenever the conversation turns to the Mexican directors who changed Hollywood. He works slowly, and there are long gaps between his films, but the gaps are part of his method, because each project is developed carefully and shot with a precision that takes time. The boy who played records on a Mexico City radio station became a director whose films are shown in museums and in cinemas around the world, and the journey from WFM to the Academy Awards is one of the most remarkable in modern cinema. His next film is always awaited with curiosity, because no one knows what form it will take, only that it will be ambitious.

My Take:

Amores Perros is the film I return to when I want to remember why Iñárritu matters, because it is a debut that already contains everything he would do later, and it does so without the safety net of stars or a large budget. The car crash that opens the film is not a stunt but a thesis: three lives, three classes, three different Mexico Cities, all colliding in a single intersection, and the rest of the film is the slow work of showing how that collision changes each of them. Gael García Bernal’s Octavio is the most memorable of the three, a young man whose love for his brother’s wife drives him to dog fighting, and the film never excuses him, which is why his story stays with you. What impresses me most is the sound: the traffic, the barking, the music leaking from radios, all of it mixed so that the city feels like a character rather than a backdrop. A first film should not be this assured, and the fact that it is tells you that Iñárritu had been directing in his head for years before he ever held a camera.

Babel is Iñárritu’s most ambitious film and also his most argued-about, and I think both reactions are justified, because the film’s reach is extraordinary and its grasp is sometimes uncertain. The four stories are not equal in strength: the Japanese story, with Rinko Kikuchi as the deaf teenager Chieko, is the film’s heart, because Kikuchi’s performance communicates more without words than most actors manage with a full script, and the scenes in Tokyo, with their noise and silence, are among the best Iñárritu has ever directed. The Moroccan story is tense and well made, the American story is affecting, and the Mexican story, with Adriana Barraza as the nanny Amelia, is the most painful, because her mistake is so human and its consequences so cruel. The film’s weakness is that the connections between the stories can feel forced, as if the rifle were a device rather than a truth, but the individual scenes are strong enough to carry the whole. Babel is a film to admire even when you do not fully believe it.

Birdman is the Iñárritu film I enjoy most, and the reason is simple: it is funny, and Iñárritu is rarely funny, so the humour here feels like a release after years of grief and guilt. Michael Keaton’s performance is the key, because he plays a man haunted by the superhero he used to be, and Keaton’s own past as Batman gives every line a double meaning that no other actor could have provided. The single-take style could have been a gimmick, but it works because the theatre is the perfect setting for it: corridors, dressing rooms, and a stage are places where a camera can follow a person without cutting, and the long takes create a feeling of being trapped backstage with the characters. Emma Stone is excellent as Riggan’s daughter, and Edward Norton’s performance as the arrogant actor Mike Shiner is one of the funniest things in the film. Birdman won Best Picture, and for once the Academy’s choice felt right, because the film is both entertaining and serious, and it rewards a second viewing.

The Revenant is a film I respect more than I love, and that distinction matters, because the film’s achievements are technical and physical rather than emotional. Leonardo DiCaprio’s performance is a feat of endurance, and the bear attack, the freezing river, and the long crawl across the wilderness are filmed with a commitment to realism that few films have ever attempted. Emmanuel Lubezki’s cinematography, shot only in natural light, gives the film a cold, grey beauty that makes the landscape feel both magnificent and indifferent, and the long takes force the audience to stay with Glass through every moment of his suffering. My reservation is that the story itself is thin: a man wants revenge, a man walks a long way, a man gets his revenge, and the film’s two and a half hours do not always earn their length. The final scene, in which Glass looks directly at the camera, is powerful, but it also feels like the film asking for applause. The Revenant is a great achievement and a flawed film, and it is possible to hold both thoughts at once.

The partnership with Guillermo Arriaga is the great what-if of Iñárritu’s career, because the three films they made together, Amores Perros, 21 Grams, and Babel, form a trilogy of linked lives and accidental consequences, and neither man has made anything quite like them since. Arriaga’s writing gave Iñárritu a structure, the multi-strand story, that suited his visual style perfectly, and Iñárritu’s direction gave Arriaga’s scripts a physicality, a sense of bodies in real places, that the words alone could not provide. Their public split after Babel was sad, because it was conducted in interviews and award campaigns rather than in private, and both men said things they probably regretted. Since then Arriaga has written films and novels, and Iñárritu has made Birdman, The Revenant, and Bardo, all of which are strong, but none of which has the particular tension of the earlier films. Collaboration is fragile, and the Iñárritu-Arriaga partnership is a reminder that the best work often comes from two people pushing each other, and that losing a collaborator changes an artist permanently.

Biutiful is the Iñárritu film that most people skip, and that is a mistake, because Javier Bardem’s performance as Uxbal is one of the finest in his career, and the film’s view of Barcelona is unlike anything else in cinema. Uxbal is a dying man who makes his living from the city’s undocumented workers, and Bardem plays him with a weariness that never becomes self-pity, a man who knows he is part of a system he cannot change and who tries, in small ways, to be decent inside it. The scenes with his children are heartbreaking, because Uxbal is trying to prepare them for a life without him, and Bardem’s face in those scenes carries the whole film. The supernatural element, in which Uxbal speaks to the dead, is the film’s weakest choice, and I can understand why some viewers dislike it, but it also makes sense if you read it as Uxbal’s way of coping with his own approaching death. Biutiful is not an easy film, and it is not a fun one, but it is an honest one, and honesty is rarer than entertainment.

Carne y Arena is the most important thing Iñárritu has made since The Revenant, even though almost nobody has seen it, because it uses virtual reality to do something that cinema cannot: it puts the viewer inside a scene rather than in front of it. The experience lasts only a few minutes, but those minutes, in which a group of migrants is surrounded by border agents in the desert at night, are more frightening than any scene in Babel or Biutiful, because the viewer is standing in the sand, hearing the helicopter, and feeling the lights in their eyes. The Academy’s special Oscar for the work was a recognition that film was changing, and that directors like Iñárritu were leading that change. The installation’s limitation is also its point: it can only be experienced by one person at a time, in a museum, and that makes it the opposite of a mass-market film. But its power is real, and it suggests that Iñárritu’s next chapter may be in forms that do not look like movies at all.

Bardo is the film that divides Iñárritu’s admirers, and I understand both sides, because it is at once his most personal work and his least disciplined. The film is about a Mexican journalist who returns home after years in Los Angeles, and its dream sequences, its long takes, and its visual jokes are often beautiful, with images that stay in the mind long after the film ends. The problem is that the film is also long, self-indulgent, and sometimes obscure, and a viewer who does not know Iñárritu’s life may struggle to follow what is happening and why it matters. I think the film is best watched as a diary rather than a story, a record of what it feels like to be an exile who has succeeded abroad and who finds that success has cost him his sense of home. Seen that way, its excesses make sense, because a diary is allowed to be messy. Bardo will not be the film that defines Iñárritu, but it may be the film that explains him, and that is a different kind of value.

Iñárritu’s visual style is worth describing, because it is consistent across films that look very different on the surface, and it is the reason his work is recognisable even without a credit. He favours long takes, handheld cameras, and close-ups that stay on a face after the dialogue has ended, and he uses sound, traffic, wind, dogs, music, as a way of placing the viewer inside a location rather than outside it. His collaboration with the cinematographers Rodrigo Prieto and Emmanuel Lubezki gave him two of the finest visual partners in modern cinema, and the films they made together have a look that is both realistic and heightened, with natural light and real locations used to create images that feel more vivid than everyday life. The style has a cost, because long takes and real locations make shooting slow and expensive, and The Revenant’s production became famous for its delays. But the style is also the reason his films feel physical, as if the audience had been somewhere rather than merely watched something.

The Three Amigos story, the friendship between Iñárritu, Alfonso Cuarón, and Guillermo del Toro, is more than a piece of Hollywood gossip, because it explains how Mexican cinema conquered the world in the space of a decade. The three directors supported each other’s work, recommended each other for jobs, and celebrated each other’s wins, and their collective success changed what was possible for Latin American film-makers. Cuarón won Oscars for Gravity and Roma, del Toro won for The Shape of Water, and Iñárritu won for Birdman and The Revenant, and together they proved that a director from Mexico could make films in any genre, in any language, and win the highest prizes. The friendship also matters because it is generous, in an industry that rewards competition, and the three men have spoken about each other with a warmth that is rare among directors of their stature. Iñárritu’s career cannot be understood without Cuarón and del Toro, because they are part of the same story.

My honest assessment is that Iñárritu is one of the great directors of his generation, but not a flawless one, and his flaws are the other side of his strengths. His ambition is extraordinary, and it has produced films of a scale and intensity that few directors attempt, but that same ambition sometimes leads him to overreach, as in the more obscure passages of Bardo or the forced connections of Babel. His interest in suffering is genuine, but it can make his films feel punishing, and a viewer who wants lightness will not find it here. What redeems the work is the craft: the performances he draws from actors, the images he creates with his cinematographers, and the sound design that makes each film feel like a place. Amores Perros and Birdman are the two films I would show to anyone who doubts him, because one is the announcement of a talent and the other is the proof that the talent lasted. The rest of the career is the working out of the questions those two films asked.

If a new viewer wants to approach Iñárritu, the order matters, and I would suggest starting with Amores Perros, then Birdman, then 21 Grams, because that sequence shows the arc from raw debut to polished comedy to intimate tragedy, and it avoids the more difficult films until the viewer knows what to expect. Babel should come next, because its scale is easier to appreciate once you understand the method, and Biutiful should be saved for last among the features, because it is the most painful and the most rewarding. The Revenant is best watched on the largest screen available, because its landscapes are the point, and Carne y Arena, if you ever get the chance to experience it, should be approached with an open mind and a willingness to be uncomfortable. Iñárritu is not a director for every mood, but for the mood in which you want cinema to take you seriously, there are few better. His films ask for patience, and they repay it.

One final observation about Iñárritu is that his Mexican identity has never been a limitation in his work, even though Hollywood has often treated Latin American directors as specialists in a single kind of story. His films are set in Mexico, Morocco, Japan, the United States, Spain, and the American wilderness, and they are about people from many countries, yet they all feel like his films, because the themes, accident, guilt, family, and survival, are his wherever the story is set. That universality is the real achievement: a director from Mexico City who made the world his subject without losing his accent. Younger Latin American film-makers now have a path that did not exist before him, and that path is his most lasting contribution.

Frequently Asked Questions

Where was Alejandro González Iñárritu born?

Alejandro González Iñárritu was born on 15 August 1963 in Mexico City, Mexico. He studied communications at the Universidad Iberoamericana and worked as a radio DJ at the station WFM before becoming a film director.

What was Iñárritu’s first film?

His first feature film was Amores Perros, released in 2000. It tells three stories linked by a car crash in Mexico City, starred Gael García Bernal in his film debut, won the Critics’ Week prize at Cannes, and was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.

How many Oscars did Iñárritu win for Best Director?

He won the Academy Award for Best Director twice in a row, for Birdman in 2014 and for The Revenant in 2015. He was the first director to win back-to-back directing Oscars since Joseph L. Mankiewicz in 1949 and 1950.

What is Babel about?

Babel, released in 2006, follows four stories in Morocco, Mexico, Japan, and the United States, all connected by a rifle shot in the Moroccan desert. It starred Brad Pitt, Cate Blanchett, Rinko Kikuchi, and Adriana Barraza, and was nominated for seven Academy Awards.

Who are the Three Amigos of Mexican cinema?

The Three Amigos are Alejandro González Iñárritu, Alfonso Cuarón, and Guillermo del Toro, three Mexican directors who became close friends and who all won Academy Awards in Hollywood. Their collective success helped change how the film industry viewed Latin American directors.

What is Carne y Arena?

Carne y Arena is a virtual reality installation created by Iñárritu in 2017, in which viewers experience a group of migrants crossing the desert at night and being confronted by border patrol agents. The Academy gave Iñárritu a special Oscar for the work, the first of its kind in decades.