As you will see, Babel director Alejandro GonzĂĄlez Iñårritu amicably disagreed with me on almost every point I tried to make. But even so, it was a delightful exchange, and below Iâve left most of Iñårrituâs charmingly mangled English idioms intact. âAnnie Wagner
ANNIE WAGNER: I understand you worked pretty closely with your screenwriter when you first worked out the story. How did you decide on the locations? Did you build the story from there?
ALEJANDRO GONZĂLEZ IĂĂRRITU: I conceived it as a film that has a central event, or some decisionâsomething that would create this kind of action that would be traveling and would be affecting people around the world. So I invited [screenwriter] Guillermo [Arriaga], and he likes the concept a lot. So basically we start from there, we scrambled some oranges. First we thought it was going to be five [stories], and then you know, one fell down. And then we said I think itâs going to be very difficult to get five in the air, so lets try with four, instead of the three weâve been trying.
So you do think of it as four stories [the Japanese story, the U.S./Mexico story, the Moroccan story, and the story of American tourists in Morocco], rather then three [Japan, U.S./Mexico, and Morocco]? Each of your previous films had three stories.
I thought first about five, okay. I thought about five continents, and five languages. But then we decided to quit one. We had one that we had happening in Sweden. But it didnât work, because then it would be a long film or it would be a very short story that would not be able toâthat we would not have the time to really develop the characters correctly.
So what made you decide to do, um, to break away from the three-part structure? Because it seems thatâ
Do you mind if I smoke?
Oh, no.
Because you know, I really thought there was no other way to do something like that. There was no, um, there was no way. Three stories would be not as global.
This is a pretty political film in terms of thinking about borders and the post-9/11 American response to terrorism around the world. But itâs also very humanistâand maybe we only see the political aspect first because weâre used to film being a humanist project, if you will. Do you see it as a political film?
I think itâs a very humanistic film. Itâs more human than it is political. I have no interest in the politics of the human, if you will. I mean, I was interested in what happens in the microcosmos, in the intimate story, in the intimate borders between the wife and husband. And the intimate borders between the daughter and the father, the complexities of the borders between sisters and brothers and fathers. At the end it is about these four family stories. But I was very interested to see how these individuals, these citizens from different parts of the worldâthe First World, the Third Worldâare being impacted by how the world is now. You know, by the borders that cultures and countries have been building themselves. So I was trying to explore that in a cinematic way. What happened in the global, or what happened in the macro-world, happened in the micro-world. That was my thing. I was not trying toâIâm bored with politicians. I donât like them, I donât trust them, I will not waste my time talking about them, because I donât believe in them. The difference is that when politicians lie they really hurt people. And when cinema lies, it is just to make dreams.
Do you feel that your film is part of a growing genre of movies that really deal with coincidence or serendipity and people being linked? I know a lot of people are bringing up comparisons between Babel and Crash. Do you feel like thatâs a good comparison?
I think itâs a lazy comparison. Because if they have seen Amores Perros maybe they have related to Crash to Amores Perros. When people donât know too much about the career or the work, the body of work of somebody, itâs easy to compare to the last thing they have seen. For them itâs new. But I think Latin-American literature is full of those kinds of references, with writers like Borges. Those people really made that structure a lot. And Rashoman, Kurosawa, and Short Cuts, you know, Altmanâthereâs so many, but I donât see any relation between Crash and these films. I think they are completely different and Babel came from an older point of view and another philosophy.
Did you like Crash?
Mmmmm, I liked some of it. I liked some of it.
So, the initial notion of doing a film thatâs inâI donât know how many different languagesâwas there any queasiness on the part of your producers about doing a film that was going to contain so much foreign language?
Yeah, you know, I started this project by myself, and I start by self-financing. And then I invited [coproducers] John Kilik and Steve Golin to join. But we were pretty far along to begin with. Many people can say that itâs a crazy idea to make a film with so many different languages and how to connect those stories and make a whole. That was my big challengeâhow Iâm going to get rid of the text, and the find the grammar, the visual language that makes sense to make a whole.
There arenât subtitles at the very beginning of the Morocco section.
I try not to put titles when they arenât necessary. Basically this film has a very little dialogue, so when you see the dialogue, itâs very, very few lines. Itâs like a silent film. Especially the Japanese section [about a deaf girl]. For me, cinema is the closest thing to language that everybody can understand. For me the important thing is what happens between one line and the other, thatâs what cinema is for me. Fewer words; Iâm trying to fight against the tyranny of words. I like images and music and sounds to be the main source. Thatâs what I was trying to do.
Itâs interesting that you cite literary sources of inspiration but you reject that in the movie.
I think cinema has been spoiled by narrative. You know, I think narrative has been a big enemy of cinema, of the development of cinema. I think silent films show us how, how beautiful and pure cinema can be. And sometimes I think talk began to spoil that. Then when you canât achieve something in an image, you say it in words. So, Iâm not against words, it is just that the overuse of words can sometimes spoil the possibilities of the medium.
What sort of silents are you particularly excited by?
I have just seen one that really got my attention recently that is called Lonesome [Paul FejĂłs, 1928] that nobody has seen. I saw it with my kids with an orchestra playing live, and there is only one copy of it.
Where was it showing?
Telluride. You know, I remember that I asked my kids to go, they are 9 and 11 years old. They went âOh my god, silent film, black and whiteâno, Daddy!â And they were just amazed by it. I said, this is the kind of thing to learn aboutâhow you can tell the story without words, without any lines. Lonesome is a good example of it. [And] Joan of Arc.
What specifically about Joan of Arc?
Dreyer did close-ups for 90 percent of the film. Thereâs no more interesting map of anything then the face of a human. I find that fascinating.
In Babel there are a lot of close-ups that arenât of faces, but are hands or other unusual close-ups. Especially in sections that are hand-heldâ
I like hand-held things. And, I think in this film, Babel, those are momentsâthe shots of the handsâthat really move me the most. Sometimes, there are things that characters canât explain. And there are no words to explain the emotions, and thereâs no way to breach something between one human and the other but to touch. We haveâI think Westerners haveâbeen overusing our language. I was fascinated by the fact that in Japanese culture, for example, the father would never say to the daughter, âI love youâânever in their life, never. And the reason is because every emotion has to be physical interactions. Thatâs the culture: Thereâs no bad word in the Japanese dictionary. [In the West,] weâre always saying, âI love you, I love youâŠâ It doesnât mean anything. And I like that in the Japanese story they have this possibility of not having words and just showing her eyes, or her reaction, with her body. They need to communicate. And I find that fascinating.
Did you initially think that she was going to be, had to be, deaf-mute in that story?
Yeah, that was my idea from the beginning.
Why was that interesting?
There were a lot of factors, I think, that I was looking for. In 2000 I went to Tokyo for the first time. And I knew since the first time I went there, I need to have a camera there. I want to shoot one day in Tokyo; I wish that to happen. And then when I was developing this project, I traveled to Japan again in 2003. And I kept seeing deaf people. And I was fascinated by their, by their language, their faces, and how they express themselves. They are super-expressive. And I thought about the language of silence. I also found myself fascinated by the fact that sign language is different, is different in every part of the world, that they are not united by a universal sign language.
What do you think of Lost in Translation? It seems like Tokyo is coming to signify this city of isolationâ
I liked very much Lost in Translation, I think that Sofia [Coppola] did a beautiful job and I think itâs a very beautiful, simple little story. The thing is, the thing that I found is that basically that story is told by the point-of-view of tourists, of Westerners. Thatâs why I think it connects so much with Westerners because arguably people sometimes see Japanese like weirdoes. Like funny, almost like cartoons. But I think in fact the storyâs completely justified, because [the characters] donât understand anything. My challenge was to tell the story through the eyes of a Japanese native, a sign-language-speaking young girl. So thatâs what my challenge in every culture I shot was: I didnât want to portray stereotypes. Cartoon-types. Or, you know, prejudices we kind of have since we were kids. I was trying to dodge that sort of thing.
Right. But itâs interesting that she is, by virtue of her deafness, isolated in her own culture. Itâs not so much she is a complete native, sheâs almost a non-native toâ
Sheâs isolatedâbut I decided that for me it was very important for me to get in her mind, in her experience, in her country. Make people feel how she experienced that. I think that was important.