Guillermo del Toro, Alfonso Cuarón & Alejandro G. Iñárritu Discuss Their Careers
181Alejandro G. Iñárritu, Guillermo del Toro, and Alfonso Cuarón are three of the most iconic and influential Mexican filmmakers of the modern era and of all time. The trio, given the nickname of The Three Amigos, recently came together for a special event known as "A Special Evening with The Three Amigos" on January 6 at the Academy Museum in Los Angeles, California. During this hour-long event, which was attended by Collider's own Steven Weintraub, the three Oscar-winning directors and friends played off of one another, cracked jokes, told stories, and delved into their long and storied careers as well as each other's recent projects.
With Cuarón serving as moderator, the event opened with del Toro taking the three of them back to the point where they were 16 years ago in 2007, when all three of them were nominated for Academy Awards (del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth receiving 6 nominations and 3 wins, Iñárritu's Babel getting 7 nominations, including Best Picture and winning Best Original Score, Cuarón's Children of Men getting 3 nominations) and wanted to discuss how the three of them had changed since then. "I think it will be really beautiful to talk about where we were back 16 years ago. It was a really interesting time, we were breaking some ground in some way,” said del Toro. "But none of these were done by design. I think people think of a career as something that you plan, but they just happen to us. We were just looking for a way to make a movie."
To start this travel back 16 years, Cuarón asked Iñárritu how he saw himself as a filmmaker in and around the years of Babel's release and award-winning success, he noted that it was a point of transition for him, saying:
"I felt like I was kind of... I knew that it was a good moment to end something that I have, in a way, explored to the end of what I could explore, and I knew it was the beginning of something that I need to start. It was a paradox moment, in a way, that the film got attention and nominations, but deep inside me, I knew that it was the end of the story. So, in a way, you have to pretend that 'Yeah, this is great,' but I knew that I was about to start something that I didn't have one clue about what to do next... and it was the end of that language and format that I was comfortable in... I knew I had to reinvent it."
On the topic of Pan's Labyrinth, which was filmed in Spain and completely spoken in Spanish, Iñárritu noted that while he spoke of trying to move forward, the first thing he had to do was go back to his roots, which he did with 2010's Biutiful which was his next film after Babel and was his first film in his native Spanish language since his debut feature Amores perros in 2000."I went back to doing something from my roots, my understanding in order to move forward."
Read more on Collider here: https://collider.com/guillermo-del-toro-alfonso-cuaron-alejandro-g-inarritu-interview-three-amigos-netflix/
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