Article published January 14, 2007
MOVIES
3 directors fuel Latin film renaissance
Cuaron, del Toro, and Inarritu are key parts of Mexican resurgence
Film director Guillermo del Toro's new film is Pan's Labyrinth.
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By CHRISTOPHER BORRELLI
BLADE STAFF WRITER
TORONTO — This is a story of three films and three friends and one country. The country is Mexico, and the films are some of the most assured and powerful of the past year: Babel, Pan’s Labyrinth, and Children of Men.
As for the friends, read on.
The Freak from Guadalajara — as Guillermo del Toro had become known around the office — was back. This was 1987, Mexico City. Alfonso Cuaron was an assistant director for Mexican television, shooting episodes for a Mexican Twilight Zone. “We would call it the Toilet Zone,” he remembers. “We didn’t have the budget for anything more than prosthetic make-up effects.” Cuaron, however, was becoming quietly admired, and del Toro — the aforementioned Freak, himself with a modest reputation as a filmmaker and make-up guy — wanted them to meet.
So Del Toro showed up at the studio one day. Cuaron was told a man was waiting for him.
He knew who it was.
He trudged down the hall.
Both men differ slightly on what happened next, but here’s where they don’t: Cuaron had heard del Toro was a genius in waiting. He heard it so often he became jealous of this (supposedly) voluble, imaginative Freak. What he found himself facing was a large man with wavy hair, his mischievous blue eyes peering out behind oval eye glasses.
Del Toro wasted no time.
He felt Cuaron wasn’t being true. “I qualify success,” del Toro said, “as [messing up] on your own terms.” So he told Cuaron he was ripping off Stephen King. Literally stealing plots. Cuaron laughed. He started to explain.
Del Toro interrupted.
“I said to Alfonso, ‘You stole!’ It was like the first thing I said to him ever. He said, ‘Yeah, I did.’”
Cuaron remembers: Del Toro said, well, if you did plagiarize then why did your episodes stink so much? Then he launched into the reasons it stunk. “As usual, he was right.”
They became friends.
But there’s a third wheel here.
Years later, when Cuaron and del Toro met Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, both Cuaron and del Toro had found a measure of success (and failure) in Hollywood. Del Toro had made a horror film in Mexico called Cronos; after Cuaron persuaded del Toro to cut 20 minutes, the film won the critic’s prize at the 1993 Cannes film festival. He followed it with a giant cockroach movie called Mimic. There was studio interference, something Cuaron understood: after a well-regarded first film in Mexico, he made the underrated children’s picture A Little Princess and then a remake of Great Expectations — and neither was a success.
But Cuaron was making movies for Hollywood studios, and that was enough for Inarritu, who was shooting commercials in Mexico City. He visited Cuaron in Los Angeles. Cuaron became mentor to the filmmaker.
Jump forward a few years and del Toro is handed a video tape of Inarritu’s unfinished first film, Amores Perros. As he did with Cuaron, del Toro spotted talent in need of tuning. Inarritu remembers del Toro calling one day, at 6 a.m. “He said to me my movie was a masterpiece but I should cut it. I told him he was nuts. So he showed up at my home. He was living in Austin, I was in Mexico City, but here he was. He had the eyes of a child. He ate everything in my refrigerator. He drove my wife nuts and stayed like three days. We fought the whole time — it went great.”
They pushed each other.
Some scenes were cut.
Some were not.
In the end, Amores Perros was nominated for an Academy Award for best foreign-language film, and the three friends from Mexico became an intimate fraternity of expatriate filmmakers, though not a society of back-rubbers and sycophants. When del Toro told Cuaron and Inarritu he would make Blade II, a sequel to a disposable franchise, Inarritu drove the filmmaker around Los Angeles for several hours, screaming he was squandering talent. They didn’t speak for months. But Blade II led to Hellboy. And Amores Perros led to 21 Grams. And for Cuaron, the success of his own tiny Mexican picture, Y Tu Mama Tambien (made at the insistence of del Toro, who provided the ending), led to being hired for Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.
It gets better.
This winter their fortunes have converged in a remarkable, (and if you’re a fan of assured filmmaking) thrilling way — a fortune promising to last through awards season. They have made three of the boldest pictures of the last 12 months. Inarritu, 43, was first out of the gate with his acclaimed Babel. Next was Cuaron, 45, whose apocalyptic Children of Men brings to mind one part latter-day Steven Spielberg and two parts Stanley Kubrick. And this Friday, the most celebrated (and masterful) of the three, del Toro’s dark fairy tale Pan’s Labyrinth, opens; it recently received best-picture honors from the National Society of Film Critics.
“What you see is urgency,” said del Toro, 42. “We defined our films by our personalities and each is different. But I think we came together as friends the way we did because there was a sense we had that we may not get a chance to shoot another film. I am the easiest to define — I love fantasy. Alejandro does his own thing. He came into this world fully formed. And Alfonso is the most chameleonic of us. You have to be distinctive to make your mark I think, but we are bound together by survival.”
He’s not kidding.
In a profession where success means fake friends, and in a year that has seen a number of high-profile movies ignored almost entirely because of poor marketing (Little Children) or reduced expectations (The Good German) — or simply a glut of new releases — these three have banded together and willingly linked their films in a selfless, unprecedented fashion. Each commented on the other’s movie during production; del Toro suggested cuts to Babel, Cuaron partially bankrolled Pan’s Labyrinth, and no one finished their script until everyone was happy.
But beyond that, they often do publicity together; two of the interviews for this story were conducted at the Toronto International Film Festival last fall, and one on the phone. When it comes to awards, one or two may step aside to allow the filmmaker who needs attention to shine. (In this case, Pan’s Labyrinth received the biggest push, while Babel is being promoted primarily for its performances, not its direction or screenwriting.) Then there’s the remarkable thematic symmetry of the films, which Cuaron says are about children to some extent but primarily about worlds where ideology and borders have damaged connections with people.
“[This triumvirate of movies] has been one of the most beautiful things to happen to me,” Cuaron said. “We conceived our stories, wrote our scripts, and went into production separately but somehow I made a film with three friends. I am proud of that, proud to be associated with them as Mexican directors — and proud because these movies complement each other so well. I don’t think it’s a coincidence. We’ve stuck our forks in each other’s salads, and the result is better than it’d be individually.”
Something’s up with Mexico.
The water, I mean.
What is in that water?
You want to drink it.
Cuaron, del Toro, and Inarritu find themselves at the fore of a Mexican filmmaker resurgence — and yet, we have been here before. In 2002, studios fell over themselves to push “Latino films.” Movies as varied as the biopic Frida (with Salma Hayek as the Mexican painter Frida Kahlo) and the broad comedy Chasing Papi and the Sundance character study Raising Victor Vargas became emblematic of not only filmmaking talent out there that spoke Spanish but an increasingly Hispanic audience.
Any film that could be placed under the rubric “Latino” was sought. Never mind that not all of these directors were Mexican. The history of the Mexican movie industry is tumultuous. It was synonymous for years with art films and wrestling pictures, and went into a financial decline in the 1970s. And so many of the films hailed as part of the new Latino movie renaissance are not from Mexico. There are young Mexican talents such as Fernando Eimbacke (Duck Season) and Carlos Reygadas (Battle in Heaven) — both of whom received a big boost from del Toro and Co. — but often it’s directors from the wider expanse of Latin America, and even Spain, whom have found themselves bundled together with Mexican directors.
Often the closest American distributors get to Mexico is Brazil’s Fernando Meirelles (City of God, The Constant Gardener) and Spain’s Alejandro Amenabar (The Others) — even Spanish art house fixture Pedro Almodovar.
There’s a couple of reasons for these tone-deaf cultural stabs. The first is modern demographics. If you run a studio, you are aware that Latinos are now 15 percent of the United States population, and many are from Mexico; in Toledo, the population is now 5.5 percent Latino, a number that skyrocketed after 1970. According Nielson Media Research, Latinos are also the fastest growing group of moviegoers; they go to the movies nearly eight times a year, compared with 6.5 times for whites and 6.4 times for African-American movie audiences.
But to be generous, a better reason for Hollywood’s stumbling around Mexican filmmaking is that the pick of the Mexican filmmaking industry at the moment — and that would be del Toro, Cuaron, and Inarritu — are not necessarily interested in Mexican films per se, just as Latino audiences are not necessarily interested in seeing pictures with Latino subject matter.
It’s a Catch 22.
Yes, there is a renaissance of Mexican filmmaking talent. But it’s a renaissance so varied in its interests and aesthetics, you can’t really promote it as a Mexican New Wave. Not in America, and not in Mexico. It’s not that you can’t be a prophet in your homeland, as the saying goes. It’s that you might not want to be. Cuaron’s Children of Men, his first movie since Harry Potter, stars Clive Owen and Julianne Moore and Michael Caine, and it tells the story of a future world where women are infertile and all of civilization is collapsing.
There are no allusions to Mexico. It’s 2027 and England stands alone, which makes it a haven for the disposed, who risk immigration only to be rounded up and sent to camps. England remains a democracy but the population has traded its basic rights for a very fragile comfort.
“I didn’t want to make science fiction,” Cuaron said. “It was always to ask what would come next — what is the state of things now, carry that to an extreme.”
Del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth unfolds against the backdrop of the Spanish Civil War — as did his The Devil’s Backbone. It’s best described as a Gothic take on Alice in Wonderland, about a young girl who escapes the (literal) fascists in her home and finds a fantasy world beneath the floor of her room. Del Toro said he is told often “he is wasting his time. But I am not waiting for my chance to do music of the heart. I love monsters. I love horror. I think you have to do what you want to do and it’s obvious when you are not doing it.”
As for Inarritu, whose films are pointillistic narrative puzzles, Babel is the third in a trilogy of films about children, he said. “But also it’s about borders, ones within ourselves, the most dangerous ones.” It unfolds across Mexico, Japan, and Morocco, and according to Inarritu, what it shares with Pan’s Labyrinth and Children of Men is a distrust of ideology, a queasiness around authority — accidental tourists.
“This is not coincidental,” he said. He and del Toro live in Los Angeles, and Cuaron splits his time between the hills of Tuscany and cobblestones of London. “The reason I made Babel was triggered by being a third-world citizen in a first-world country. It has given me a lot of perspective, and my friends would agree. I would have never made these movies if I still lived in Mexico.”
Del Toro sounds similar: “Borders confine, but roots nurture.”
And Cuaron seconds:
“Am I from Mexico? Yes. I like being categorized, like any animal you can group. But I have learned to completely resent borders. I hope our films reflect that. We are born human and only later do we get a passport.”
Contact Christopher Borrelli at: cborrelli@theblade.comor 419-724-6117.
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