Top 260 Quotes & Sayings by Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu - Page 3

It's very healthy to be aware of your ego.

My kid will come home from seeing the latest 'Transformers' movie, and I'll ask him, 'How was it?' 'Amazing!' 'What was it about?' 'I don't know, but it was amazing!'

When I was sixteen, I was an absolutely romantic guy. I fell in love every week. I mean, I was in love with everybody, but unfortunately, nobody was in love with me.

I like to make films, but the only reason I do is because I'm a very bad musician.

Actors are exposed in a way that nobody else can understand. They are subject to the likes and dislikes of people their entire life, no matter how successful they are. At the same time, in order to be liked, you have to not be yourself. So it's a very complicated human exercise - an alchemy that I have never understood.

I'm usually very critical of myself.

I think intelligence basically can be in a way defined by the possibility of having two opposite ideas living together and at the same time functioning. That's why I think a smart script has two things living in the same place, and they're absolutely contradictory.

I think films are bigger than structure.

The cavemen, when they saw the antelopes, they had to scratch them on to the caves because they needed to express the immediacy of what they were being affected by - and I love that. That is why I do what I do. I need to express myself.

I am not a depressive person at all.

I have never met a superhero, but why are we so obsessed with superheroes?

I think we do good things and bad things, sometimes simultaneously - or they may be the same thing.

My responsibility is to make a film and find my dramatic language; I don't have any political or social responsibility.

I really didn't want to become branded as 'that multistructural guy.'

I have fantastic ideas.

I'm overwhelmed by the pain in the world; I'm affected by the news very much, and adding that to my work was becoming a little bit too much.

Cinema is an infinite medium, so we should take advantage of it, I think.

I don't like the ironic tone that our pop culture, in the world, has taken. Everything is 'ironic.' Everything is 'cool.'

People talk about the pain of defeat, but I think defeat has a lot of value. I think the wound of victory can be even more damaging than defeat. Very few people really know how to win.

I learned with 'Birdman' that it's liberating when you just lose yourself and go after something that terrifies you. The experience was so good.

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.

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.

As the camera, I try to subordinate every word to be truthful and honest to each character's context.

The corporation and the hedge funds have a hold on Hollywood, and they all want to make money on anything that signifies cinema.

You have to make millions on Friday night, because there are another 600 films waiting behind you, with explosions and everything.

I can be unbearable sometimes asking for so many takes.

I always have considered Michael Keaton to be a phenomenal actor because he navigates drama and comedy.

Now that we're poisoned with the culture of superheroes, I think it's important to laugh about it.

At a very young age, I was influenced enormously by Julio Cortazar or Carlos Fuentes. In that literature, there's always an exploration of different perspectives, points of view.

For me, the most important thing that I have to accomplish is to be a good father. That's the most difficult challenge of my life. That's the most important thing for me, more than films.

If the audience, in minute 50, is thinking about the way a movie is shot, there's a problem. I want it to permeate emotionally.

I don't have a career. I have a life.

I never deny a true experience in one shot.

When you live in a city, as I do, where violence is really in the streets, and people die every day, there's nothing funny about it.

Antonio Sanchez is from Mexico City. I met him at a Pat Metheny concert. He did a solo, and I thought, 'This is an octopus man!'

On a transcendental level, a film is not going to be better or worse because there's a prize behind it. The work will be what it is, with or without a prize.

I'm an intense person.

When we are looking for validation, that will never satisfy us. When we are looking for affection, for love, a little bit of that will be enough to be complete.

I started off writing TV adverts. I saw those as rehearsals for a feature film.

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.

Time is what allows stories to spread into people's consciousness.

I'm less interested in reality. I'm more interested in perception, the truth of the universe that we see.

The creative process is mysterious; a conversation, a ride in the car, or a melody can trigger something.

It's not anthrax or terrorism or AIDS that is the worst ill in our world: The most horrible disease in the world is hate.

I learned there are ways to approach life. You can never change the events, but you can change the way you approach them.

That incredible bubble and high expectations built at festivals can work against a film.

I've listened to music all my life. I've always felt that music tells more stories sometimes than films, with more possibilities. Every time you listen to them, songs bring different images and moods - depending on where you are in your life, you can listen to a song, and it means something different.

I really try, at least consciously, not to be cynical or ironic.

I think musically.

I can't understand the conditions of a corporate product being designed and getting millions. I admire it, it's great, but I don't know how to do that. I have to have the wheel.

When you do a film in a foreign language, you know there's a cost in it, that you know, unfortunately, the audiences of foreign language films have not been cultivated. There's a market, but the market has been reduced, unfortunately, and you know that when you're making a foreign language film, you're making a choice.

'21 Grams' is only one story told by three different points of view, but they are really physically connected - literally, with the heart.

When I went to university, I finally got exposed to European films, and they had a strong impact on me. I felt those films had a lot of things to say that weren't getting expressed in the films I was used to seeing.

Ultimately, with every film I'd done before, there was a reference. They have their own uniqueness, but there was always a precedent.

I have learned that I am a one-woman man.

Millions of Mexicans leave their kids in order to take care of other kids. That's a very painful thing.

I think when you turn 50 you get a little melancholic in a way.

I'm always surprised when some director says, 'When I saw this film, that changed my life.' I don't have that.

Do you know the phrase, 'The word 'water' will not wet you?' It's one thing to write down an idea and another thing entirely to execute it.

In families you can find the source of every human drama. It is interesting because the cell of a society, the cell of a country, the cell of humanity - everything lies in the family.