Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu quotes:

I think we are defined as human beings through our families, no matter what kind of family - through our relationships with parents, brothers and sisters.

I am not a depressive person at all, but I reflect a lot on my life, and life in general, from the perspective of death.

Everybody is looking for validation, no matter who you are, and I think that's a need of the human condition - to look for affection or recognition or validation.

Movies become art after editing. Instead of just reproducing reality, they juxtapose images of it. That implies expression; that's art.

Fear of the unknown is a great creative partner.

The way America sees Mexico, if they have any sense of it, is like Taco Bell. Our countries are neighbors, and the only hard food to get in America is true Mexican. It's impossible to find, even in L.A. Why is that?

I've learned to lose with a smile on my face. That's what the Oscar teaches you.

Two words guided the making of 'Babel' for me: 'dignity' and 'compassion.' These things are normally forgotten in the making of a lot of films. Normally there is not dignity because the poor and dispossessed in a place like Morocco are portrayed as mere victims, or the Japanese are portrayed as cartoon figures with no humanity.

At a very young age, I was influenced enormously by Julio Cortazar or Carlos Fuentes. In that literature, there's always an exploration of different perspectives, points of view.

I've listened to music all my life. I've always felt that music tells more stories sometimes than films, with more possibilities. Every time you listen to them, songs bring different images and moods - depending on where you are in your life, you can listen to a song, and it means something different.

Cannes or any other major festival is basically an animal in its own nature, creating very specific perceptions of films in a moment.

In families you can find the source of every human drama. It is interesting because the cell of a society, the cell of a country, the cell of humanity - everything lies in the family.

When we are looking for validation, that will never satisfy us. When we are looking for affection, for love, a little bit of that will be enough to be complete.

It's famous that comedians have a very dark personal state of mind. I think, in my case, it's the same. The only way to get deep is to have a balance, or a counterbalance.

Nowadays, a critic has to watch 700, 800 films a year, and I know through experience, being a juror in prestigious film festivals where supposedly the best films are arriving, from twenty films maybe you see two that are good, one that is so-so, and one that is extraordinary. And the other sixteen are terrible.

It's more enjoyable for me to know that life is finite. Knowing that, I would like to go to a party. When you get to the holidays, if you think that the holidays will be forever, you just take it for granted. But, if you know that you have just three days at the beach, you will be so happy to be there every day.

When you have a fresh point of view that comes from the right side of the heart, it's just so valuable. You can take it or not take it, but just that perspective can give you a lot of strength or make you reflect on a lot of things.

Too much knowledge and analysis can be paralysis.

I started off writing TV adverts. I saw those as rehearsals for a feature film.

The problem with the screenplay is that it's not literature, and it's not a film. It's a very weird, technical kind of blueprint that will be absolutely transformed into something else that is not that, you know? Honestly, a screenplay is no literature.

All of us want something in life, all of us have flaws, and all of us have strengths. So, I always try to discover those things in a character and then try to expose it in one way or another.

Time is what allows stories to spread into people's consciousness.

My mom had very low expectations for me, and she really had a point. I was a big problem at seventeen. If I had a kid like me, I would have those same expectations.

I learned there are ways to approach life. You can never change the events, but you can change the way you approach them.

People talk about the pain of defeat, but I think defeat has a lot of value. I think the wound of victory can be even more damaging than defeat. Very few people really know how to win.

I think that when we wrestle with death... we start fearing life, because then we come to terms with something that is inevitable.

I do think that the emotional weight of 'Biutiful' has blinded some viewers to the beauty and complexity of the film.

I think the most experimental way to a film is to tell the story the traditional way, because everyone is doing the other thing.

Freedom comes with a lot of responsibility. When you are by yourself, you have to develop a third eye.

Movies started out as an extension of a magic trick, so making a spectacle is part of the game.

I think bad movies are made around the world, not just in Hollywood. There are as many bad art films in the whole world as there are bad commercial films.

Amores Perros' is three stories that interconnect in one moment, which is the car accident.

The creative process is mysterious; a conversation, a ride in the car, or a melody can trigger something.

3D is the way we experience life.

I learned with 'Birdman' that it's liberating when you just lose yourself and go after something that terrifies you. The experience was so good.

I think that my films are basically family stories, beyond the fact that they are global and have political and social commentary.

Good directors don't answer questions with their work. They generate debate and create discussion.

I see only one requirement you have to have to be a director or any kind of artist: rhythm. Rhythm, for me, is everything. Without rhythm, there's no music. Without rhythm, there's no cinema. Without rhythm, there's no architecture.

When I was sixteen, I was an absolutely romantic guy. I fell in love every week. I mean, I was in love with everybody, but unfortunately, nobody was in love with me.

To make a film is easy; to make a good film is war. To make a very good film is a miracle.

Cinema is an infinite medium, so we should take advantage of it, I think.

As a city, it is always compelling. But every day in Mexico City, I give thanks that I am alive.

Millions of Mexicans leave their kids in order to take care of other kids. That's a very painful thing.

I think that people would like to, at all times, reject death and disease with technology.

There was so much fear after 9/11, and that fear caused people to make the wrong decisions.

Birdman' came from a very beautiful side of me, from a part of honesty and surrender about things.

Actors are exposed in a way that nobody else can understand. They are subject to the likes and dislikes of people their entire life, no matter how successful they are. At the same time, in order to be liked, you have to not be yourself. So it's a very complicated human exercise - an alchemy that I have never understood.

We have these ambitions that are very hard to accomplish because life puts us in our place. We have this battle with mediocrity.

I think there's nothing wrong with being fixated on superheroes when you are 7 years old, but I think there's a disease in not growing up.

Really, Mexico City has always been this big, complex monster of a city that has always had real problems and needs, and I've always found my way through it in different ways.

21 Grams' is only one story told by three different points of view, but they are really physically connected - literally, with the heart.

Yes, I am a Mexican, and I have a past and a culture. But what matters is the film itself, not where it was financed or cast.

I think that in order to be a film director, one has to be a warrior who shouldn't be defeated by the daily onslaught of problems.

That incredible bubble and high expectations built at festivals can work against a film.

The expected vertical line of Ikiru's narrative breaks when Kurosawa does a flash-forward in the middle of the film.

I think Kurosawa was one of the first storytelling geniuses who began to change the narrative structure of films.

I have a lot of what you might call creative self-loathing - I have pretty high expectations, and they seem to consistently be higher than what I'm able to accomplish.

When you have critics filing on Twitter, it leaves no time for thought and perspective.

Look, I'm no purist - there are good superhero films, and there are bad ones.

What good is making a jewel if nobody see it? But cost depends on the story. To get those performances in 'Biutiful,' you need that time. You need 60 takes in a scene and a year to edit. It's not realistic to do it any other way.

Who cares about my opinions?

Irony became the head that bit its tail and then there is no way out.

I'm less interested in reality. I'm more interested in perception, the truth of the universe that we see.

It was liberating to do comedy. It felt like playing in a jazz band.

I define myself from a vision, from a point of view of life.

I think I want to talk about life from the point of view of death.

My responsibility is to make a film and find my dramatic language; I don't have any political or social responsibility.

When I was about to turn 50, I went into a kind of personal revision and observed my own priorities and what led those priorities in my life. And many things that, in a way, were profound.

My kid will come home from seeing the latest 'Transformers' movie, and I'll ask him, 'How was it?' 'Amazing!' 'What was it about?' 'I don't know, but it was amazing!'

I'm telling the same story in every film.

Always when you are doing films, the themes swallow you in one way or another.

I think when you turn 50 you get a little melancholic in a way.

Irony is a great tool to deal with things. It's an intellectualization, a way to go above things, which can work.

It's not anthrax or terrorism or AIDS that is the worst ill in our world: The most horrible disease in the world is hate.

I like to make films, but the only reason I do is because I'm a very bad musician.

I have a bad reputation, I guess.

Americans easily forget that the air they breathe is the same as those in Europe or Africa or Asia; it's the same air as Jesus breathed. I would like them to remember that connection.

You can better embrace life, you can enjoy it more, when you are conscious that it will end. You bite life.

When you are shooting in a conventional way, you put nets around yourself. It's very hard to fall and hit the ground. You can always manipulate things to make it not embarrassing. If the scene is a little bit bad, you can polish it or even take it out. You can hide your mistakes.

In the creative process, my ego has always been a huge tyrant ... a dictator and kind of rude and very misleading, because sometimes when I'm doing something, I say, "This is great! This is fantastic! Very genius!" And 20 minutes later, I feel like a dead jellyfish. "You are a stupid a**hole. This is a piece of sh*t. Nobody will care about it."

For me, it's not about masochism to talk about death. For me, it's about observing life through death, from the last point of it.

Maybe next year the government might impose some immigration rules on the academy. Two Mexicans in a row is suspicious. [On Mexican immigrants in the US] I hope they can be treated with respect of the ones who came before and built this incredible immigrant nation.

I just wanted to show the migrants as complex humans with flaws and weakness, with good and bad things, and show that they're parents and family men. I wanted to show them with everything, as they are.

I don't know if I have a career or not, or where it ends or it begins. I have been working, doing what I do for a long time. But my creative process has always been so tortuous.

I'm scared of horses, and I don't know how to shoot them, but that's what excites me. After 40 years old, if you don't do some things that really terrify you, I don't think they're worth doing.

I learned with 'Birdman' that it's liberating when you just lose yourself and go after something that terrifies you.

The corporation and the hedge funds have a hold on Hollywood, and they all want to make money on anything that signifies cinema.

To direct actors is difficult. To direct actors in another language is more difficult, but directing non-actors in another language is one of the craziest things that I have done and one of the most rewarding experiences I have had.

The way I put together images is a reactive art.

I have a notebook, and I know what decisions will be made in pre-production. Everything is pre-determined in the pre-production period. I visually design the whole thing, and I know when things will happen.

Now that we're poisoned with the culture of superheroes, I think it's important to laugh about it.

I have learned that I am a one-woman man.

When you see things upside down, the ego can be extraordinarily funny; it's absurd. But it's tragic at the same time.

When you have something that is bothering you, and then you articulate, take the time to really express it and see it clearly, to recognize. To acknowledge that is already a liberating energy.

The cavemen, when they saw the antelopes, they had to scratch them on to the caves because they needed to express the immediacy of what they were being affected by - and I love that. That is why I do what I do. I need to express myself.

I like so many different directors: Scorsese, Coppola, Cassavetes, Jarmusch, Gus van Sant, Woody Allen and the greats like Fellini, Bergman, Tarkovsky and among current filmmakers von Trier, Ang Lee, Wong Kar-wai.

Russian Ark,' I adore - I almost cried at the end of that film, it's so beautiful.

You have kids studying master class visual arts who are pushed to make films that will be successful economically; that's what they focus on. So they work for corporate interest instead of artistic expression.

It's harder to make real audio than special effects audio.

Films like 'Babel' can transcend the one point-of-view formula that has reigned for so long.

Amores Perros' is rock, '21 Grams' is jazz, 'Babel' is an opera, and 'Biutiful' is a requiem.

While 'Babel' is a foreign-language film in some countries, in others, it is a local film.

'Babel' is about the point of view of others. It literally includes points of views as experienced from the other side. It is not about a hero. It is not about only one country. It is a prism that allows us to see the same reality from different angles.

When I think about growing up, I feel most affected by two travels that I made working in cargo boats when I was 16 and 18. One of them crossed through the Mississippi and Baton Rouge and Mobile, Alabama, and another went all the way to Europe.

In a world where irony reigns, where you have to separate, protect and laugh at anything that is honest or has an emotional charge, I bet for catharsis. I like to invest emotionally in things. And catharsis, when it touches the emotional vein, can open the doors of even those who protect themselves.

Cinema is universal, beyond flags and borders and passports.

We want to conquer the world and have 1,000 likes, 1 million likes, but at the same time, we are depressed. We are lonely, but we have 10,000 followers. We are all bipolar.

'Biutiful' is not about death. It's about life. It's a hymn to life.

Life and death are illusions. We are in a constant state of transformation.

When I have been exposed to so many films that are so bad, my soul gets crushed. I just feel intoxicated.

I always have considered Michael Keaton to be a phenomenal actor because he navigates drama and comedy.

Antonio Sanchez is from Mexico City. I met him at a Pat Metheny concert. He did a solo, and I thought, 'This is an octopus man!'

Many Mexican directors are scared to shoot in Mexico City, which is why there are many stories in Mexican cinema about little rural towns, or set a hundred years ago.

To shoot a conventional film means that you are always covering yourself. You are putting nets and, in a way, letting bad decisions take over.

Biutiful' is a tough film. It doesn't make concessions to the vulgarity of light entertainment. It's not the kind of film that you see every day in the Cineplex. But as an artist, it's the thing that I needed to do.

I am not a depressive person at all.

Now is a time where there are so many social networks, such need for validation... you don't have to be a star or a politician to want to have likes or dislikes. Now there is a disease of popularity in the whole society.

You have to make millions on Friday night, because there are another 600 films waiting behind you, with explosions and everything.

I have been very lucky to have final cut in all my films; everything that is wrong in them is my fault.

Directing non-actors is difficult. Directing actors in a foreign language is even more difficult. Directing non-actors in a language that you yourself don't understand is the craziest thing you can possibly think of.