Quotes from Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu

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.

Filmmaking can give you everything, but at the same time, it can take everything from you.

The way films establish the order of scenes is very artificial.

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

Who cares about my opinions?

'Ikiru' is existential but with a lot of tenderness.

Sometimes reading scripts is terrible.

Everyone's terrified of being mediocre. Everyone wants to be special.

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

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.

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.

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

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

To question your own process is a necessity. If you don't question yourself, it's impossible to improve.

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

When there's a good script, everybody circles.

Very little is known about Hugh Glass as a real guy that existed 200 years ago, except that he was attacked by a bear, betrayed and left for dead, and has to survive in the winter. I said, 'What really drives a human to survive those conditions?'

I love the three-act theory. It works and works beautifully. But you don't necessarily have to structure a story that way: Cortazar and Borges wrote in different structural styles.

I have dark skin. My nickname is El Negro. They call me El Negro in Mexico because even in my country, the dark skin is evidence of Indian blood, a sign that one technically belongs to a third class. Even my grandmother had some kind of differentiation with me, because I was darker than my siblings.

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

To become a celebrity, a name - and I've actually met some that speak of themselves in the third person - it's scary. They become an object, not a human, complex, questioning thing where the cells are always changing.

The way I put together images is a reactive art.

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

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.