Iñárritu's films, Amores Perros (2000), and Biutiful (2010) each received Academy Award for Best International Feature Film nominations. He earned critical and commercial success for his films 21 Grams (2003), and Babel (2006). He won three Academy Awards for Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Original Screenplay for Birdman (2014). The following year, he received a consecutive Best Director Oscar for The Revenant (2015).[b] Iñárritu was awarded a Special Achievement Academy Award for his virtual reality installation Carne y Arena (2017).
Iñárritu is the first Mexican filmmaker to be nominated for either director or producer in the history of the Academy Awards, the first to win an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay and for Best Picture, the first to receive the Best Director Award at Cannes, and the first to win a DGA Award for Outstanding Directing. In 2019, Iñárritu became the first Latin American to serve as president of the jury for the 72nd Cannes Film Festival.[1] Iñárritu and Mexican filmmakers Alfonso Cuarón and Guillermo del Toro are known in the film industry as "The Three Amigos."[2]
Early life
Iñárritu was born on 15 August 1963 in Mexico City, the youngest of seven siblings, to Luz María Iñárritu and Héctor González Gama.[3][4][5] His maternal grandfather, Alfredo Iñárritu y Ramírez de Aguilar, was a prominent lawyer, judge, and justice of the Supreme Court of Mexico with partial Basque origins.[6] Héctor was a banker who owned a ranch, but went bankrupt when Iñárritu was five.[5][7] A poor student, Iñárritu was expelled from high school at the age of 16 or 17 due to poor grades and misbehavior.[5][7][8] He briefly ran off with a girl from a wealthy family to Acapulco, having been influenced by the Miloš Forman film Hair, but returned to Mexico City after a week.[5][8]
Soon after, Iñárritu left home and worked as a sailor on cargo boats, taking two trips at the ages of 16 and 18, sailing through the Mississippi River and then visiting Europe and Africa. With $1,000 supplied by his father, Iñárritu stayed in Europe for a year on the second trip.[9][10] Around this time, Iñárritu had the opportunity to watch the Palme d'Or-winning film Yol by world-famous Kurdish director Yılmaz Güney.[11] Iñárritu was very impressed by Yol and later said in interviews that this film was the reason he turned to cinema.[11] According to some Turkish journalists, the scene in The Revenant (2015) where Leonardo DiCaprio enters the belly of a dying horse was a reference to Yılmaz Güney and his film Yol, because there was a similar scene in that film.[12][13]
He has noted that these early travels as a young man have had a great influence on him as a filmmaker,[10] and the settings of his films have often been in the places he visited during this period.[8] After his travels, Iñárritu returned to Mexico City and majored in communications at Universidad Iberoamericana.[14]
Career
1984–1999: Early career
Iñárritu began his career in 1984 as a radio host at the Mexican radio station WFM, the country's most popular rock music station, where he "pieced together playlists into a loose narrative arc".[10][14] He worked with and interviewed artists like Robert Plant, David Gilmour, Elton John, Bob Geldof and Carlos Santana. He also wrote and broadcast small audio stories and storytelling promos. He later became the youngest producer for Televisa, the largest mass media company in Latin America.[14] From 1987 to 1989, he composed music for six Mexican feature films. During this time, Iñárritu became acquainted with Mexican writer Guillermo Arriaga, beginning their screenwriting collaborations.[14] Iñárritu has stated that he believes music has had a bigger influence on him as an artist than film itself.[10] In the early 1990s, Iñárritu created Z Films, a production company, with Raul Olvera in Mexico.[15] Under Z Films, he started writing, producing and directing short films and advertisements.[14] Making the final transition into TV and film directing, he studied under well-known theater director Ludwik Margules, as well as Judith Weston in Los Angeles.[16][17] In 1995, Iñárritu wrote and directed his first TV pilot for Z Films, called Detrás del dinero, or Behind the Money, starring Miguel Bosé.[15]
After the success of Amores Perros, Iñárritu and Arriaga revisited the intersected-stories structure of Amores perros in Iñárritu's second feature film, 21 Grams (2003).[14] The film starred Benicio del Toro, Naomi Watts and Sean Penn. It was selected to compete for the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival, where Penn received the Volpi Cup for Best Actor.[22][23] At the 76th Academy Awards, Del Toro and Watts received nominations for their performances.[24] From 2001 to 2011, Iñárritu directed several short films. In 2001, he directed an 11-minute film segment for 11'09"01 September 11 - which is composed of several short films that explore the effects of the 9/11 terrorist attacks from different points of view around the world.[14] In 2007, he made ANNA, part of French anthology filmChacun son cinéma, which screened at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival. Chacun son cinéma, a collection of 33 short films by 35 renowned film directors representing 25 countries, was produced for the 60th anniversary of the film festival.[25] In 2012, Iñárritu made the experimental short film Naran Ja: One Act Orange Dance, inspired by L.A Dance Project's premiere performance, featuring excerpts from the new choreography Benjamin Millepied crafted for Moving Parts. The story takes place in a secluded, dusty space and centers around LADP dancer Julia Eichten.[26]
In December 2013, Warner Bros. hired Iñárritu to direct a live-action adaptation of Rudyard Kipling's 1894 book The Jungle Book. Eventually, Andy Serkis directed the film titled Mowgli: Legend of the Jungle (2018).[49] In 2014, Iñárritu won three Academy Awards for directing, co-writing and co-producing Best Picture winner Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance), starring Michael Keaton, Edward Norton, Emma Stone, Naomi Watts, Zach Galifianakis, and Andrea Riseborough. The film is an existential dark comedy exploring the ego of a forgotten superhero actor, experienced as if filmed on a single shot. It was the first time a Mexican Filmmaker received Best Picture at the Academy Awards. He also won the Golden Globe Award for Best Screenplay, a DGA Award and a PGA Award for the film.[50][51] Iñárritu was also set to direct and produce the tv series One Percent, an organic farming drama which he co-created with Alexander Dinelaris, Nicolas Giacobone, and Armando Bo for Starz.[52] Starz gave the show a straight-to-series order,[53] but dropped out in 2017 as the U.S. broadcaster of the series, with production company MRC shopping the project to other networks or streaming platforms.[54][55]
In 2015, Iñárritu directed The Revenant, initially adapted by Mark L. Smith, before joined the writing process, based on Michael Punke's novel of the same name.[56][57] The film is a remake [58] of the film Man in the Wilderness (1971) and starred Leonardo DiCaprio, Tom Hardy, and Domhnall Gleeson.[59] It is a "gritty" 19th-century period drama-thriller about fur trapperHugh Glass, a real person who joined the Rocky Mountain Fur Company on a "journey into the wild" and was robbed and abandoned after being mauled by a grizzly bear.[57] The film considers the nature and stresses on relationships under the duress of the wilderness, and issues of revenge and pardon via Glass's pursuit of the man who was responsible for his hardship.[56][60]The Revenant took nine months to shoot.[61] With The Revenant being a critical and commercial success, Iñárritu won a second consecutive Oscar for Best Director[62] and was nominated for 12 Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director, winning Best Director, Best Cinematography and Best Actor.[63][64] Iñárritu is one of only three directors to ever win consecutive Oscars, and the first to do it in 65 years. He was also nominated for four Golden Globe Awards, winning three, including Best Motion Picture – Drama and Best Director;[65] received nine Critics' Choice Movie Awards nominations, including Best Picture and Best Director;[66] five BAFTAs including Best Picture and Best Director; and a DGA Award, making history as the first person to ever win two in a row.
Iñárritu at the Cannes Film Festival 2019
The One Percent, originally planned as an upcoming American television drama series created and written by Iñárritu, Alexander Dinelaris Jr., Nicolás Giacobone and Armando Bó, was eventually postponed on early March 2017 due to Alejandro feeling burnt out after the production of The Revenant. The quartet, who also collaborated on Birdman, were to serve as executive producers. Iñárritu was set to direct the first two episodes and set the visual style of the show.[67] Iñárritu's virtual reality project Carne y Arena was the first ever VR installation presented at the Cannes Film Festival in 2017. Carne y Arena was also presented, at LACMA, Washington, D.C., and featured at the Prada Foundation in Milan.[68][69] Additionally, Carne y Arena was awarded the first Special Achievement Academy Award in over 20 years at the Academy's 9th Annual Governors Awards.[70]
2020–present
Iñárritu co-wrote, co-produced and directed the 2022 Spanish-language film Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths, starring Daniel Giménez Cacho and Griselda Siciliani. It is his first film made in Mexico since Amores Perros (2000).[71] It premiered at the 79th Venice International Film Festival, where it competed for the Golden Lion and was later distributed by Netflix. Bardo polarized critics and received mixed reviews.[72][73] Film critic Wendy Ide of The Guardian called the film "occasionally brilliant" and "audacious, bold film-making" but "cluttered with symbolism and bloated with self-regard".[74] Iñárritu described the response from critics as being "racist" saying, "You can like it or not — that's not the discussion. But for me, there's a kind of racist undercurrent where because I'm Mexican, I'm pretentious".[75] It earned a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Cinematography at the 85th Academy Awards.[76]
In 2009, Iñárritu, along with several filmmakers and actors, signed a petition in support of director Roman Polanski, who had been detained while traveling to a film festival following his arrest in relation to his 1977 sexual abuse charges, which the petition argued would undermine the tradition of film festivals as a place for works to be shown "freely and safely", and that arresting filmmakers traveling to neutral countries could open the door "for actions of which no-one can know the effects."[81][82][83]
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