Q&A with director of Amores Perros

After a few
screenings of Amores Perros in the Critics' Week section at Cannes,
director Alejandro González Iñárritu went from being an obscure director
to an overbooked and highly-sought one. FilmFestivals.com reporter Christophe
Pinol managed to catch up with Iñárritu at Cannes, back when the buzz
was just beginning.

Since then,
this now-famous Mexican director has won the Critics Week, the Grand Prize
at Edinburgh and (most recently) the Golden Hugo and Audience Award at
Chicago.

FF.com:
Was it difficult to produce such an ambitious film when it was also your
first?



Iñárritu: All that I can say is that we were very lucky. Altavista Films,
a new production company for indie films, believed in us from the start.
They wanted to develop meaningful projects, that would be interesting
to a Spanish-speaking public, but also interesting to an international
public. Basically our project was not very ambitious, but it was so seamless
when we pitched it that the producers signed up right away. The screenplay
by Guillermo Arriaga Jordan and I was also extremely thought-out.

How did
your partnership [with screenwriter Jordán] begin?



Guillermo Arriaga Jordán arrived with the first draft. During the next
three years, we then worked together, to come up with a final version
... 36 drafts later it was finished ... It was thus a long and painful
process to bring to the screen.



Did you insert autobiographical elements?



The scene with the little dog disappearing under the floor, for example,
is an adventure that happened to one of my friends when we were children.
At the time, the story made quite an impression on me and I never forgot
it. I thus tried to include it, but it is thanks to the talent of Guillermo
that it was integrated into the story.

What were
you trying to evoke in this story? The dogs seem to work as metaphor...

This adventure
of the dog stuck under the floor of course evokes obscurity, the narrowness
at the time of the underground. It was also the relationship between the
couple that lived underground and got torn apart -- one imagines the dog
becoming more and more difficult as the days progress. But it was also
a chance to explore a surrealistic side, a "Bunuel" side that
I like a lot.

Why did
you make the dogs central to each scene?

I am passionate
about dogs (laughs). The relationship between man and dog is a long historical
one. We have a lot more to learn about these very noble, very loyal beings.
They are capable of much humility, but also of reaching internal depths.
I think that there are many similarities between dogs and their owners.

What comes
alive in each of the scenes are the dogs and their owners. We return to
the metaphor that we talked about a few minutes ago. In the third scene,
this beast, the dog who killed his opponent -- in a way -- frees this
man from his culpability. This reflection, from one killer onto another,
makes him realize what he has done.

How did
you shoot the dogfights? And overall, how did you arrive at such a degree
of realism?



It was very hard. We filmed in collaboration with an animal protection
agency, one that wanted to make sure not a single dog was wounded. We
chose dogs specifically for the security of other dogs. We made them run
toward each other and approach each other in a way that would seem very
aggressive onscreen. But as these dogs were very used to wearing muzzles,
we had to construct discreet ones that would not show onscreen. The dogs
had makeup to resemble blood and the barking was added by dogs who arrived
later with big open jaws -- this time without muzzles... All this gave
the very heightened sense of reality, but was actually prepared painstakingly
and completed without accidents.



But even so we see the dogs biting very clearly into others …



In certain cases, they were biting fake ears that dogs had already been
trained to bite and rip out.



Mexico seems a very difficult city. Is it something that you were trying
to communicate onscreen?



Yes, completely. I think that we can say Mexico is an ongoing anthropological
study. There are 21 million people living there. You can find all sorts
of things: very different cultures, splendid neighborhoods, incredible
people ... But at the same time, you have incredibly high levels of pollution,
violence in the streets, corruption ... All this is contradictory. And
at the start of Amores Perros, there is a baroque mosque, which
I used to symbolize the city's complexity. But that doesn't work as much
for the film as it does for the city itself. I was trying to make a film
about suffering, human relations, and emotions ... the city plays a very
big role.

Christophe
Pinol