Quotes from Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu

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

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.

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

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.

Do you know the phrase, 'The word 'water' will not wet you?' It's one thing to write down an idea and another thing entirely to execute it.

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

Writing is not an unknown territory for me.

I have a bad reputation, I guess.

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

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.

In hotels, every time I make a reservation and they never find my name, they never can pronounce it; it's so long, and sometimes they confuse.

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.

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.

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.

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

If you stretch tragedy, it will always become comedy.

If you stretch tragedy, it will always become comedy. That's the comedy that I like.

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

On a transcendental level, a film is not going to be better or worse because there's a prize behind it. The work will be what it is, with or without a prize.

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 my films I have shot in chronological order - always. And the reason is that there's a moment that the screenplay is the notion of the film. But when you start doing a film... the work itself starts being transformed, and you have to surrender.

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 think we do good things and bad things, sometimes simultaneously - or they may be the same thing.