Top 260 Quotes & Sayings by Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu

Rhythm is God. I think, without rhythm, you can't create - there is no art.

'Russian Ark,' I adore - I almost cried at the end of that film, it's so beautiful.

When there's a good script, everybody circles.

From the time we open our eyes, we live in a Steadicam form, and the only editing is when we talk about our lives or remember things.

I think there's nothing wrong with being fixated on superheroes when you are 7 years old, but I think there's a disease in not growing up.

Cinema is universal, beyond flags and borders and passports.

Really, Mexico City has always been this big, complex monster of a city that has always had real problems and needs, and I've always found my way through it in different ways.

If art doesn't move people, then art has failed.

'Biutiful' is a tough film. It doesn't make concessions to the vulgarity of light entertainment. It's not the kind of film that you see every day in the Cineplex. But as an artist, it's the thing that I needed to do.

Everybody is looking for validation, no matter who you are, and I think that's a need of the human condition - to look for affection or recognition or validation.

You have kids studying master class visual arts who are pushed to make films that will be successful economically; that's what they focus on. So they work for corporate interest instead of artistic expression.

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

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.

I think I want to talk about life from the point of view of death.

To think that we can understand everything is such stupidity because our senses are so limited. We are so limited that to feel that we can understand the creation scientifically is a little bit naive. It's very childish.

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.

When you are shooting in a conventional way, you put nets around yourself. It's very hard to fall and hit the ground. You can always manipulate things to make it not embarrassing. If the scene is a little bit bad, you can polish it or even take it out. You can hide your mistakes.

Too much knowledge and analysis can be paralysis.

My cinema is an extension of myself. A sort of life-testimony of my vital experience, with my few virtues and my numerous limitations.

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.

I'm telling the same story in every film.

I'm scared of horses, and I don't know how to shoot them, but that's what excites me. After 40 years old, if you don't do some things that really terrify you, I don't think they're worth doing.

When you see things upside down, the ego can be extraordinarily funny; it's absurd. But it's tragic at the same time.

Good directors don't answer questions with their work. They generate debate and create discussion.

I didn't have a normal academic career. I never studied cinema. I learned from life.

Innocence can be more powerful than experience.

If you stretch tragedy, it will always become comedy.

When I talk about sad things, I talk about sad things.

In a world where irony reigns, where you have to separate, protect and laugh at anything that is honest or has an emotional charge, I bet for catharsis. I like to invest emotionally in things. And catharsis, when it touches the emotional vein, can open the doors of even those who protect themselves.

I think that in order to be a film director, one has to be a warrior who shouldn't be defeated by the daily onslaught of problems.

Writing is not an unknown territory for me.

For me, it is especially important to maintain my interior life. My spirituality, my connectedness. That is the way I think. That is the way I deal with life and tough moments. I keep in touch with something bigger than me. And I connect with people who have an interior life - a connection with something bigger than them.

While 'Babel' is a foreign-language film in some countries, in others, it is a local film.

'Birdman' came from a very beautiful side of me, from a part of honesty and surrender about things.

Fear of the unknown is a great creative partner.

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.

I think, unfortunately, everything is becoming about comfort, you know? A comfortable way to tell a story. The comfortable way, so that the audience will never be lost. A comfortable way to produce a film with green screens or without a lot of physical effort or losing control because of the weather or physical locations.

I like the possibility of failure. I don't want to be in a comfortable zone.

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

I define myself from a vision, from a point of view of life.

Two words guided the making of 'Babel' for me: 'dignity' and 'compassion.' These things are normally forgotten in the making of a lot of films. Normally there is not dignity because the poor and dispossessed in a place like Morocco are portrayed as mere victims, or the Japanese are portrayed as cartoon figures with no humanity.

I realized - and I am probably the last person in the world to realize this - that we live our lives with no editing.

Who cares about my opinions?

Life and death are illusions. We are in a constant state of transformation.

To make a film is easy; to make a good film is war. To make a very good film is a miracle.

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

Directing non-actors is difficult. Directing actors in a foreign language is even more difficult. Directing non-actors in a language that you yourself don't understand is the craziest thing you can possibly think of.

Sometimes reading scripts is terrible.

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

I love Sam Mendes, but I went to see 'Spectre' with my kid, and the opening scene of the Dia de Muertos party, with this kind of tropical music, in downtown Mexico City, with all these people dancing like it's the Rio de Janeiro carnival... I had to laugh.

Time starts out as a notion. But after you turn fifty, time is not a notion anymore but a fact that you start feeling clearly, and in a way, it pushes you to become present in the present.

I have always said that innocence is much more powerful than experience.

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

Now is a time where there are so many social networks, such need for validation... you don't have to be a star or a politician to want to have likes or dislikes. Now there is a disease of popularity in the whole society.

'Amores Perros' is three stories that interconnect in one moment, which is the car accident.

Cinema is a mirror by which we often see ourselves.

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

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.

I've learned to lose with a smile on my face. That's what the Oscar teaches you.

I think Jenny Beavan is a masterful costume designer and very deserving of the Oscar for 'Mad Max: Fury Road.'