Alejandro G. Iñárritu Talks ‘Bardo,’ Personal Contradictions & More [Interview]

That’s amazing. The dance hall scene at Salon California, with Daniel’s cathartic dancing, also comes to mind. What went into that scene?

I think the most difficult thing was how to craft the best people around me, like Darius Khondji, Eugenio Caballero, and all the team and all the crew that was at a AAA level. 

And the other thing is to understand what I wanted to make people feel, which is to create this atmosphere of joy and let the audience go and make them feel that they are in a real dance hall. Not objectively seeing the cast from the point of view of a filmmaker, but being the character and sharing with them that excitement to be surrounded by people, this music, and all of the spatial parts of salsa, kuminia, baile, all in this moment of joy and color. To approach that technically in order to create that atmosphere and to serve that emotion.

We found that the best approach was, and it was painful as hell, was with these wide lenses to show us basically, 180 degrees, and then to constantly move with the joyous music, and constantly move with the different emotions. 

It took us a couple of weeks to really nail it down, to get the applause, to get the right moment with all of the pre-produced and pre-recorded music, and for the actors and extras to hit their marks very precisely. There were 800 people in this California dancing club, wit no ac, no masks, covid protocols. People were coughing, smoking, farting, and it was hell. It took us a lot of effort, physically. But anyway, that doesn’t matter. I think the technical aspect and the effort was huge, but it paid off when we got the take that we needed. I hope that scene, in a way, makes people really forget. Because for me, cinema is just a moment to navigate through sound and images and make you feel you’re there. And I hope that people lose themselves in that scene. That was my intention.

How many takes were required to capture that entire sequence?

I think we got it on take 17. Take number nine was great, as I remember. And suddenly we noticed a couple of guys with masks on. And then there was another take where some people were watching the camera. Or maybe, the camera operator, Ari Robbins, he was doing a trinity, which is very difficult, to do a trinity shot with a 65mm camera and sweating like hell; sometimes he bumped into somebody. Or the marks were not precise. A lot of things. So anyways, it took 17 takes to get the right one.

But also weeks in advance of rehearsing to figure out how because I wanted to introduce the daughter and the friends and there were a lot of things going on in the scene, like the woman that appeared; he’s got an eye on her. So it was not only the dancing, but there’s a lot of little things going on between the family.

I love the unique, morbid humor in this film. In what ways did employing humor as a narrative device allow you to tell personal truths that might not have worked purely as dramatic beats?

I think the humor in this film was crucial for me. First of all, to laugh about myself. That was the key element. Whoever is not capable of laughing about himself is not worth taking seriously. And humor is a very serious matter for me in this film. There are so many things that are so sensitive and so deep, so delicate and fragile on a personal level, as the losses that my wife and I have been going through in our lives and the very delicate wounds of our Mexican story with the Spanish people, with the American-Mexican war, with the people that are disappearing, which at some point, if you approach all of that, it’s impossible to arrive at them, even in one single film. 

I just wanted to show an emotional approach to how those events have been going through me or through the collective memory of my country. And I wanted to laugh at the absurdity of the events and the impossibility to get to some certainty of what really happened. Because it’s an eternal discussion. It’s a wound that is still open, and the only way to heal the pain and wounds, sometimes, is by laughing about it. 

So much of that speaks to me. And on a thematic level, I keep returning back to the responsibility an artist, specifically an artist who’s a person of color, has to their people to represent them, yet the pressure of knowing that you can never, no matter your best intentions, fully live up to that responsibility. Could you talk more about that?

That’s a very good question. You know, it’s funny, I come from a very, I will say middle-lower class family, and I never studied film. I never thought in my mind I would be in Hollywood making films. I never thought that I would have success in anything. As Silverio’s father said in the bathroom, we never see it coming. And I said, no, I didn’t see it coming either. I’m a dark-skinned Mexican guy. In Mexico, there’s a pigmentocracy. The more white you are, the more chances you have to make it. So I’m in this very in-between kind of thing. 

And yes, I want to portray that the Spanish Conquistadors broke an empire and killed a lot of people, but we Mexicans, with Mexicans, can be tough on ourselves.

In the scene when they do not allow the maid to come into the resort, she’s being rejected by the classism and racism of a guy who has dark skin. Or the guy in the airport offices, and I have had this experience, who has some Mexican ancestors, and then suddenly they cut their roots to be integrated while disintegrating from their past; they can be more tough than anybody. That kind of thing. It’s something so complex in my country because we have been hiding that we are not racist, that we are classist, as if that’s an advantage. We are classist and we are racist because there’s only 10% of indigenous people that even speak their own languages, and they have not been able to integrate. It has been a very difficult time for them. 

I think this is a very complex topic to talk about for me too. Obviously, as somebody that has been working my way up, I know where I come from and I know how it feels as a Mexican, as an immigrant, as a dark skin guy. And yet, at the same time, I’m dealing with a very extraordinary privilege being a successful filmmaker. But in my Catholic family, to be successful is dangerous. And it can be a sin. You should be the last, not the first. So there’s a shame and a guilt of success and money in Catholicism. So, for me, there are a lot of contradictions that I have to navigate. And I think for every human, no matter if you’re a director or not, success can be very difficult. It can be more difficult to handle than failure in a way because it doesn’t teach you anything. It can mislead you. 

But anyways, lastly, I have to say that the other day I went to Chapman University, to give a talk. There was a young woman who was studying cinema, and she was from Mexico, and she asked what advice I can give her, because she was planning to do a film about a personal story, but she was afraid to tell the story from her point of view because she was a privileged Mexican, and she felt guilt about telling a story from her perspective.

It breaks my heart. What I said to the kids is don’t ask permission to make the film the way you want to do it. Say what you need to say the way you want to do it. Don’t ask permission. You don’t owe explanations to anybody because I think the world has been pinned down. African Americans have to tell these kinds of stories, shot this kind of way, the Mexicans have to do this…. No. We are much more complex than that. 

“Bardo” is now available on Netflix.