Alejandro González Iñárritu Q&A
The Mexican director discusses his new film 'Babel' with Dave Calhoun

Alejandro González Iñárritu is the director of 'Babel', which stars Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett and extends the 43-year-old Mexican filmmaker's earlier criss-crossing narratives - 'Amores Perros' and '21 Grams' - to a global scale, incorporating stints in Japan, Mexico, Morocco and the US as a cast of characters unknown to each other find their lives colliding. 'Babel' has divided critics since its premiere at Cannes last May, with its detractors quick to highlight its glossy treatment of tragedy and hollow pleas for profundity. On the day that Iñárritu spoke to Time Out, 'Babel' received seven Golden Globe nominations, prompting comparisons with 'Crash', last year's Oscar-winner that took a similar battering from reviewers on its release.

The awards season involves a lot of campaigning, interviews, appearances, massaging of voters. Are you happy to do all that?
Nobody's happy to do it, it's tough work. To speak about a film is always painful. When I find myself trying to verbalise the film, I feel I'm failing. I feel that I tend to make superficial comments, and there are things words can't describe very well.

Are awards worth working for?
At the end, no matter how much work you do, I don't think you get awards for the work you do promoting a film. I think all films promote themselves and try to reach more people. I don't think the promotion alone brings awards.

This is your third collaboration with the writer Guillermo Arriaga. What were your first ideas for the film?
I first thought of it when I was making '21 Grams' and originally I wanted to make a film in five continents and in five different languages. I mentioned this to Guillermo and he liked the idea and started to put together some ideas, some storylines.

When you had that first idea of five continents and five languages, was there an element of wanting to do that simply because you could? Because it's your third film, you now have more support, more money…
I never thought about money, I always thought that this thing should be cheap, which it is. Coming from the third world, we're very conscious about economy. For me, it was more a fact of coming first from 'Amores Perros', a film that dealt with parents and children on a local scale, which was my city in Mexico, and then making '21 Grams' in America, and then, after that, wanting to do a film on the same themes and with parallel stories on a global scale. It felt like natural growth to explore that same territory that we started with 'Amores Perros', you know?

Both you and Guillermo Arriaga are Mexicans who are familiar with the US. But 'Babel' includes stories of Morocco and Japan. How did you and Guillermo assume to know about these countries?
I like a challenge. I like difficulties and the possibility of failure. If I didn't feel that, I'd be bored to death. I always thought it would be challenging because a lot of the characters never see each other, are never linked physically, and so I'd need to find a way to link all these stories dramatically and emotionally and find a visual grammar, a language to make a unity of many different and diverse elements - four stories, five languages.

You've said before that you and Guillermo Arriaga won't be working together again. Do you feel that's because your use of this structure of filmmaking - of parallel, interlocking stories - has reached a natural end?
Yes, I think so. I hope that I won't be branded by these structures, which I feel are very different from one film to the other. 'Amores Perros' and '21 Grams' are very different structurally. I think that's only a choice you make, a dramatic tool you decide to use, but I won't have any problem using it again when it's needed. But I think, yes, for the purposes of this trilogy, it's come to a natural end.

You think of 'Amores Perros', '21 Grams' and now 'Babel' as a trilogy?
Yeah, completely. Because I think that the three films, no matter what, deal with stories of parents and children. I'm exploring the same themes in three films.

Isn't there a danger of dilution when you tell these different, parallel stories in one film? A danger that characterisation will suffer?
It's a matter of choosing what to show, of choosing which bits of these people's lives to focus on. Not all human lives are very interesting, but they all have moments that are really very interesting. You have to choose which story to tell and which part of their life to address and then hone in on that moment and then leave when it's not interesting any more. It's a difficult choice. When you go to a dinner and talk to a guy for two hours, you have a pretty good idea of who he is after just talking to him for that length of time. That's enough to know most of his life. And that's what can be accomplished in a film too.

Babel represents director Alejando Gonzalez Iñárritu's conclusion to a stylistic and thematic trilogy begun in Amores Perros and continued in 21 Grams. Of the three, Babel is arguably the most accessible. As with 21 Grams (and to a lesser degree Amores Perros), this movie is constructed as a puzzle, with different pieces transpiring during different times and in different places over a five-day span. However, this one is less complicated to put together. (Think of it as the difference between assembling a 250-piece jigsaw and a 50-piece one.) The temporal discontinuities are not extreme, and there is clear background evidence of how each sequence relates to those around it and fits into the global time-line. This allows story to take precedence over structure.

It's a compelling tale, one that delineates how small mistakes and lapses in judgment can have tragic consequences. It also illustrates how poorly we communicate in an ever shrinking world. In addition to those umbrella themes, the movie also has "smaller" messages for its individual segments. There are four of these. The first involves two children in a mountain village in Morocco. Their father has bought a gun to use to shoot predators hunting his sheep. One son, testing the range of the rife, fires a round at a tourist bus. The second segment features Americans Susan (Cate Blanchett) and Richard (Brad Pitt), who are on vacation in Morocco. She is shot and badly injured by the bullet fired by the boys, and her fight for life turns into an international incident with terrorist overtones. The third segment focuses on Susan and Richard's two children (Elle Fanning and Nathan Gamble), who are under the care of an illegal immigrant, Amelia (Adriana Barraza). When their parents can't make it home on time, Amelia and her nephew Santiago (Gael García Bernal) are forced to bring the children across the border into Mexico so she can attend her son's wedding. When the border patrol becomes suspicious of them on their return journey, there are consequences. Finally, in faraway Japan, deaf-mute teenager Chieko (Rinko Kikuchi) is trying to cope in a world that offers little in the way of affection. Her mother committed suicide and her father (Kôji Yakusho) is a cold, distant figure. In an attempt to capture a little emotional warmth, she engages in a series of increasingly risky sexual escapades. How this storyline connects with the others is left for the second half of the movie to reveal, although I can say it's nothing shocking or sensationalistic.

One of the great strengths of Babel is Iñárritu's ability to cope with issues of global importance while still presenting vivid characters whose individual problems are no less vital and compelling. There are no villains here. Crimes are committed, but none are intentional. Small errors snowball to have unintended and unimaginable consequences. One man's decision to buy a gun to protect his flock leads to two small white children being stranded alone in the Southern California desert. This is only one of many strands that is woven into Babel's web. It brings to mind the so-called "Butterfly Effect." (A nimble attempt to provide an encapsulated explanation of Chaos Theory, the "Butterfly Effect" states that the flapping of the wings of a butterfly in Africa can indirectly cause a tornado to appear half a world away.)

Perhaps the most poignant and personal story is that of Chieko. By occasionally showing her perspective (with an eerily silent soundtrack) and juxtaposing it with the strobe lights and thumping dance music of Tokyo's night scene, Iñárritu builds her segments into something deeply affecting. As good as all the performers are - and they include the likes of Brad Pitt, Cate Blachett, and Gael García Bernal - young Rinko Kikuchi steals the spotlight. Her work is heartbreaking and haunting. As much as we feel for the other characters in Babel and the tragedies that fate brings into their lives, Chieko is the one we want to cry for.

Babel is a masterwork from a director whose each effort re-enforces his international reputation. This movie is as mature and potent a piece of cinema as 21 Grams, and a worthy conclusion to Iñárritu and screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga's "trilogy." This is cathartic, thought-provoking, emotionally solid movie-making. It's the kind of cinema I hope to see whenever I sit down in a theater to view a drama. Whether viewed amidst a flood of pictures in the middle of a film festival or on its own in a local multiplex, Babel stands out from the crowd. Its complex (yet not mystifying) storytelling, forceful character development, and superb cinematography make this a candidate for one of 2006's best offerings.

The Tower of Babel, iconically painted by Pieter Brueghel the Elder in the 16th century, forgettably re-created by John Huston in his film The Bible, is - as recorded in the first nine verses of Genesis, Chapter XI - one of the founding myths of Judaeo-Christian civilisation. It's a brutal tale of God's anger over the hubris of a united humanity's attempt to build a tower whose top might reach heaven. To punish His own creations, He scattered them to the four corners of the earth and 'confounded their language, that they may not understand each other's speech'. During the first third of the 20th century the silent cinema went some way towards the forging of a universal, unifying art which was destroyed by the coming of sound. So the film Babel, which concerns itself with what divides and unites mankind, unfolds in four languages - English, Spanish, Arabic and Japanese. The Mexican director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu and his scriptwriter Guillermo Arriaga are noted for the multiple overlapping stories of their previous collaborations, Amores perros and 21 Grams (a technique Arriaga was also to employ in The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada). In Babel they link three continents and four families. Their theme is a variation on the so-called butterfly effect by which everything in the world is mysteriously, or scientifically, linked. Thus an insect fluttering its wings in the Amazon Basin can initiate a chain of events that ends in a hurricane in the Indian Ocean.

Here, a gun fired more or less at random with no purpose other than to test how far a bullet might go has consequences in Morocco, the United States, Mexico and Japan. The weapon is an American .270 Winchester hunting rifle that has gone from the States to Japan then come into the hands of an elderly Arab in a remote corner of southern Morocco. A neighbour buys the gun to kill jackals threatening his goats. While out tending the family herd, his young sons take pot shots, one of them at a distant tourist bus in the valley below them, not expecting to hit anything. But an American woman is seriously wounded and the repercussions are profound.

Last year, Andrew Niccol's film about the arms trade, Lord of War, began with a brilliant opening sequence that follows a bullet from a Russian factory as it passes through various hands until it blows a hole between the eyes of a child in Africa. Babel, however, is not, I think, trying to make yet another assault on gun culture and the armaments industry. The aim is to show what unites people through their natures and aspirations and what divides them through class, culture, politics, the global economy and the terrible gap in communication.

The American victim of the gunshot wound is Susan (Cate Blanchett), travelling in Morocco with her husband Richard (Brad Pitt). They're an affluent, good-looking, middle-class couple who left their two small children in San Diego to make this journey into the Sahara. The desert reflects their spiritual emptiness and they inevitably remind us of Port and Kit Moresby in Paul Bowles's The Sheltering Sky who are similarly exposed to life and death in North Africa. Their children are in the capable hands of a loyal, middle-aged Mexican maid, Amelia (Adriana Barraza), who, unable to find someone else to care for them, takes them with her to a family wedding south of the border. Meanwhile, seemingly unconnected to the two other strands, a widowed Japanese businessman is having trouble with his rebellious daughter Chieko (Rinko Kikuchi), an attractive deaf-mute schoolgirl troubled by her burgeoning womanhood. It turns out that the link resides in a generous (but tainted) gift to a guide at the end of a hunting expedition.
The film unfolds, non-chronologically, in some 24 chapters, and we are left, as with a number of recent movies, to compose the narrative in our heads. For instance, the second chapter has the Hispanic maid receive news on the phone of the events in Morocco, but this is before we have even seen Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett. It isn't until the penultimate chapter that we're present in Casablanca to see Pitt make the call home.

Taking in this cleverly contrived story, we steadily become aware of the shared neglect, innocence and playfulness of the two Moroccan boys, the girl in Tokyo and the pre-teenagers in San Diego. Moreover, while the movie seems to be sending out an ecumenically bland message about us all being part of mankind, and not sending to ask for whom the bell tolls, it is evident that some men's deaths are more significant than others, and indeed that America is the bell-ringer. The immediate assumption is that the bullet has been fired by a terrorist, and the European tourists panic and flee. A crisis is created, worldwide interest aroused. But whereas, partly by nature, partly by social deference, the authorities are courteous and helpful in their treatment of middle-class citizens, the peasants in Morocco are brutally ill-treated by their own police, and the Mexicans at the US border are viewed with contempt and suspicion.
The global village depicted in Babel is a harsh, unfair place. Tourism and mass media have done little to improve mutual respect and understanding. The film does not state this directly, but it dramatises it in a powerful and moving fashion. The task of re-creating that human unity God destroyed when the Tower of Babel was being built is probably too great, or has been too long neglected. Some will think this film glib and overly schematic. I found it an impressive, beautifully acted work with a tragic sense of life. The formality of its structure controls a seething anger.