Interview: Oscar-winning director Alejandro González Iñárritu

Alejandro González Iñárritu is on the subject of the modern blockbuster. He raises his hands in exasperation towards the ceiling of a dark, lavishly decorated hotel room in London’s Covent Garden.

“Why we can’t trust that people can have an incredible, spectacular, exciting rollercoaster, but with respect of their intelligence?” says the Mexican director, 52, from beneath a messy array of black curls. “Why do big films have to be about nothing? Or they have to extract any intelligence or humanity or truth from it, why? Why?”

As he moves on to an extended metaphor about “these pizzas and these hamburgers that are absolutely predictable”, I recall that this is the man who last year referred to superhero films as a form of “cultural genocide” and shortly afterwards released a film, Birdman, that skewered both the genre and the vanity of the American cinema establishment — a film that, in an ironic coup, went on to win him the Oscars for Best Director and Best Picture.

A year later, and Iñárritu himself is in the big film business. Sitting before me on a plump sofa in jeans and an untucked navy shirt, he is getting towards the end of a long day of press engagements. He describes the movie he is promoting, The Revenant, as “a big mural”. And it’s just that: a skin-searingly violent historical epic starring an on-form Leonardo DiCaprio and based on various historical accounts of Hugh Glass, a 19th-century fur-trapper who was brutally mauled by a bear and left for dead by his compatriots.

At 156 minutes and with a production budget that reportedly swelled to a mammoth $135m, it is a gloriously ambitious piece of event cinema. Indeed, Iñárritu remarks at one point, “This film deserves to be watched in a temple.”

What the film is not, though, is a Western. When I inadvertently use the word in noting the coincidental release of Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight this Christmas, Iñárritu corrects me in the warm but meticulous manner that will come to characterise our interview.

“I don’t consider [my] film a Western,” he says gently. “Western is in a way a genre, and the problem with genres is that it comes from the word ‘generic’, and I feel that this film is very far from generic.” When I protest that to many people the film — which is set on the American frontier and to a large extent on horseback — will look very much like a Western, he says, laughing: “Yeah, but it’s not . . . There’s no hats. What about that?”

Iñárritu has become known for this kind of fastidiousness. In July, the Hollywood Reporter ran an article in which a member of the Revenant crew described the shoot, which took place in Canada at temperatures as low as -40C and with 4am starts to capture limited natural light, as “a living hell”. I ask if there’s any truth to the rumours that the icicles in DiCaprio’s beard were real. Iñárritu laughs and takes a sip of Coke. “Sometimes, yes.”

But he is predictably unapologetic about his process; the conditions were “absolutely worth it and absolutely necessary” to convey the truth of the story, he says. At the time he turned, aptly, to Werner Herzog, the German director famous for his unflinching depiction of the macabre, for advice on dealing with difficult shooting conditions.

“Cold is a state of mind,” Herzog responded. “There’s no bad weather — there’s only bad clothes.” Iñárritu fixes me with a faintly Herzogian stare: “And honestly it’s true, it’s a state of mind.”

Perhaps the most notable thing about The Revenant is how unlike any of Iñárritu’s other films it is. There has been a radical shift from Birdman, in which Michael Keaton plays a washed-up actor wrestling with existential angst, to the rather more immediate mortal concerns of DiCaprio’s fur-trapper Glass, who is shredded by a bear to within an inch of his life and at one point is forced to sleep inside the abdomen of a dead horse.

“I like that there is no relation,” Iñárritu says when I point this out. “I like to try to not repeat myself, to not make the same thing.”

There can be no arguing with this. Having grown up in Mexico City and taken a rather disparate selection of early jobs — sailor, radio DJ — Iñárritu burst on to the global cinema scene in 2000 with his first feature, Amores Perros, a thrilling, bullet-strewn triptych that was widely celebrated for the verisimilitude of its account of the proximity of life and death in his home town. (Indeed, Iñárritu and his crew were assaulted at gunpoint at one point during the shoot.)

What followed was a spread of independent films that covered a tremendous acreage of thematic ground. From the kaleidoscopic Babel (2006), for which he became the first Mexican to win the Best Director prize at Cannes, to Biutiful (2010), an agonising study of a dying man, Iñárritu has built a reputation, alongside his friends and collaborators Guillermo del Toro and Alfonso Cuarón (the trio are widely referred to as “los tres amigos” in the Spanish-speaking press), as a pioneer of a new wave of Mexican cinema.

His relationship with the US, where he has lived for the past 14 years, has characterised much of his work. “Living in the US as a Mexican gave me a very good perspective,” says Iñárritu. “It’s a very conflicting relation.”

When he was growing up in Mexico, he explains, he was “absolutely bathed” in American culture.

“Since I was a kid I read Jack London and Conrad and Faulkner.” Their influence is palpable in The Revenant, which is played out against vast, immersive landscapes that have a distinctly Call of the Wild-ish quality. The film, he says, is “a commentary about how this time that has been portrayed as individualism, as the heroic American dream . . . was actually a story of huge greed, amazing exploitation of human beings” — referring to the uneducated trappers who were involved in the commercialisation of the New World.

“This is the seed, for me, of the capitalism that we live in now: completely inconsiderate of any con­sequences for nature.”

Iñárritu has been outspoken about his adoptive homeland in recent years. Upon receiving his second Oscar in February (from long-time collaborator Sean Penn, who joked as he opened the envelope: “Who gave this son of a bitch his green card?”), he said to widespread laughter: “Maybe next year the government will inflict some immigration rules on the Academy — two Mexicans in a row, that’s suspicious.”

I ask if he sees himself as a political artist. “No,” he says firmly. “As a citizen, as a human being — not as a film-maker.” Rather than “subordinate my personal political views to art,” he says, “I would prefer to write a letter to the newspaper and express clearly what I want, and not devote two years or three years to making a film to say what I can say in an article that will take maybe one day.”

In November, as Iñárritu was honoured at the lavish Lacma Art+Film gala in Los Angeles, he addressed the crowd in a speech that was both politically charged (he proposed that Mexican immigrants declared illegal by the US be thought of instead as “undocumented dreamers”) and a celebration of his art form. “We are the only creatures on planet earth who want to see ourselves in the mirror,” he said. “Cinema is that mirror.”

He reflects, as our interview draws to a close, on The Revenant, gesturing with the glass of Coke in his hand. “It’s kind of rescuing what cinema is about,” he says. “Show and don’t tell.”

‘The Revenant’ is released on January 8 in the US and on January 15 in the UK

Photographs: Reuters; Alamy