Blanchett, Pitt climbing Par's 'Babel'
Source: Hollywood Reporter
Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett are in negotiations to team up for "Babel," a drama that Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu is directing. Anonymous Content's Steve Golin and John Kilik are producing the project, which Paramount Pictures is the final stages of acquiring. The drama will reteam Inarritu with screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga. The two also collaborated on "21 Grams" and "Amores Perros."
fuck yeah, language.
Yes!!
A new film! I'm excited. Know nothing about it but yahoo!!
So Pitt and Blanchett exchanged an Aronofsky for a Gonzalez
From scriptsales.com
Title: Babel
Log Line: Four interweaving stories set in Morocco, Tunisia, Mexico and Japan, with the story beginning with a tragedy striking a married couple on vacation.
Writer: Guillermo Arriaga
Agent: Shana Eddy of UTA
Buyer: Paramount Pictures
Price: $20 million (rights package)
Genre: Drama
Logged: 3/3/05
More: Endeavor conducted an auction for this project, with the rights being sold for close to $20 million. Jon Kilik and Anonymous Content's Steve Golin will produce. Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu will direct. Brad Pitt, Cate Blanchett and Gael Garcia Bernal will star.
That tragedy better not be a car accident. I don't want to see a car anywhere near that scene.
Quote from: Weak2ndActThat tragedy better not be a car accident. I don't want to see a car anywhere near that scene.
Well, it's possible.
Arriaga has been talking quite a bit about wanting to do a "car accident trilogy" with Gonzalez.
We'll see, either way I don't think I'll be disappointed.
good shit :bravo:
but yeah, leave the cars out this time
Quote from: kotteSo Pitt and Blanchett exchanged an Aronofsky for a Gonzalez
i thougth pitt left darren for wolfgang for that shitty, cheesy troy movie.
i couldnt care less whose in this film.. i just excited b/c of AGI..and its cool to see bernal back..which brings me to another point. this film will undoubtly give bernal the starpower/crossover sucess he desreves b/c he could ride it off of pitts top billing. but the best part is that bernal is more of a talent and daring actor then pitt will ever be. this guy fucking awesome..
car crashes are awesome. deal with it. if ur ok with Von Trier doing the same thing 3 times then this shouldn't be an issue.
anyway, LANGUAGE! he's totally on the ball this guy. right now he IS the ball.
P, you've said "language" twice right now, and I totally don't see what that is about. Help a brotha out.
I hope it's a car crash. It's no secret that car crashes are probably one of the most disturbing things to ever witness or be involved in, so having three great movies surrounding these, I dunno it would be awesome. Sucks, I still haven't seen Crash by Cronenberg, but that's another forum.
Quote from: Gamblor Ain'tWorthADollarP, you've said "language" twice right now, and I totally don't see what that is about.
Quote from: MacGuffin 'Babel'
Quote from: Pubrickfuck yeah, language.
:oops:
Can we delete like the past couple of posts?
Ah, it's like babelfish. I get it.
Quote from: Gamblor Ain'tWorthADollar:oops:
Can we delete like the past couple of posts?
Ah, it's like babelfish. I get it.
Are you sure you're looking back far enough?
"It's this theory about the butterfly that leaves Tokyo and there's a storm in New York. It's the last of the triptych of crossing stories that starts with Amores Perros, the 21 Grams. This one [takes place] on a global scale, in Morocco, Mexico, the United States, and Japan, and will be like a cultural prism that shows how we are all connected."
- Alejandro González Iñárritu on Babel
http://www.emanuellevy.com/article.php?articleID=980
Preview 2006: Babel
"Babel," the new film of the gifted Mexican director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, who has helmed "Amores Perros" and "21 Grams," promises to be just as controversial and intense as his previous ones.
Written by frequent collaborator Guillermo Arriago (who wrote Tommy Lee Jones' current "Three Burials"), Babel stars Brad Pitt, Cate Blanchett, Gael Garcia Bernal (who was also in "Amores Perros"), Koji Yakusho, and Elle Fanning.
At once intimate and epic, "Babel," was shot in four countries with the above movie stars as well as non-professional actors, concludes Inarritu's trilogy that began with "Amores Perros" and "21 Grams." Boasting a more ambitious scope, the new film begins with two Moroccan boys, who set out to look after their family's herd of goats. Armed with a Winchester rifle, they decide to test it in the silent echoes of the desert, not realizing that the bullet fired would go farther than they had though with shocking consequences.
In an instant, the lives of four separate groups of strangers, on three different continents, collide. Caught up in the rising tide of an accident that escalates beyond anyone's control are a vacationing American couple (played by Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett, paired for the first time), a rebellious deaf Japanese teenager and her father, and a Mexican nanny who, without permission, takes two American children across the border.
None of these strangers will ever meet. In spite of the sudden, unlikely connection between them, they will all remain isolated sue to their own inability to communicate meaningfully with anyone around them.
Thematically, one can see a direct link to "21 Grams," as both films are constructed as puzzle and based on an accident that brings various protagonists together (in "21 Grams," it was Naomi Watts and Sean Penn). And there me be a reference to Hitchcock's "The Man Who Knew Too Much," which he directed twice (in 1934 and in 1956), in which a complacent married couple (Jimmy Stewart and Doris Day in the remake) are vacationing in Morocco and inadvertently get caught in an international espionage plot.
Produced by Jon Kilik and Steve Golin, "Babel" will be released by Paramount in fall 2006, after playing some of the major film festivals.
Wow, that sounds great. At least it doesn't have any car wrecks.
Quote from: squints on April 12, 2006, 11:39:43 AM
At least it doesn't have any car wrecks.
We'll see...
QuoteArmed with a Winchester rifle, they decide to test it in the silent echoes of the desert, not realizing that the bullet fired would go farther than they had though with shocking consequences.
Anyway...This is
the film of 2006...
Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett? Both former stars of the Fountain....hmm, we'll see who has the last laugh.
Quote from: kotte on April 12, 2006, 11:48:47 AMAnyway...This is the film of 2006...
2007, no?
anyway, i agree.
the latinos are owning the white boys if you ask me. iñárritu and meirelles are two of the best filmmakers working today.
EDIT: nevermind
Quote from: ©brad on April 12, 2006, 02:16:18 PM
2007, no?
Quote from: Ginger on April 12, 2006, 09:38:23 AM
Produced by Jon Kilik and Steve Golin, "Babel" will be released by Paramount in fall 2006
my bad.
Bullet Time
Source: Jeffery Wells; Hollywood Elsewhere
(https://xixax.com/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fhollywood-elsewhere.com%2Fimages%2Fcolumn%2F51706%2Fpittbabel2.jpg&hash=8a8bb61210bc64f0970590280443e3608bd18bea)
*READ AT OWN RISK*
Alejandro Gonzalez Innaritu's Babel, which will have its debut at the Cannes Film Festival on Tuesday, 5.23, regrettably hasn't been seen by yours truly. But I did read a late '04 version of Guillermo Ariagga's script four or five weeks ago, and the good part was that I didn't get the "all" of it until the morning after I finished it.
That's what finally sold me. Anything that takes a day to kick in, anything that gains upon reflection...
Spare and precise, the Babel script tells four stories that take place in three countries -- Tunisia, Mexico and Japan. Clearly an exotic element here, and yet the film uses a plot device (and in fact a thematic strategy) that fans of Inarritu's last two films will immediately find familiar.
The story's about several disparate characters (four of them played by Brad Pitt, Cate Blanchett, Gael Garcia Bernal and a young unknown Japanese actress, Rinko Yakusho) who are linked, in the same way that the characters in Inarritu's Amores Perros and 21 Grams are linked, by a single violent act.
"I can say the film is about incommunication, misunderstanding and loneliness," Inarritu said in an interview we did on 5.5, or about twelve days ago.
"But for me, on a personal level, being such a multi-dramatic film, the bottom line DNA of this film is about how fragile and vulnerable we are. How do you say, this is a chain, this is a little piece of the chain? A link? For me when a link is broken then the chain is broken. And that, for me, is what this film is about."
The Tunisian section has two stories -- that of a married American tourist couple (Pitt, Blanchett) and their encounter with a bullet, and a story about how that bullet is haphazardly fired from a long distance away by a pair of youths playing with a newly-purchased rifle, and about the consequences of this.
The Mexican section is about this couple's nanny (Adriana Barraza) and her taking Pitt and Blanchett's kids (Elle Fanning, Nathan Gamble) across the border into Mexico for a wedding, which leads to bad things all around, particularly for her nephew (Gael Garcia Bernal).
The Japanese portion is about the relationship between a wealthy businessman (Koji Yakusho) and his deaf daughter (Rinko Kikuchi), and the daughter's encounters with various men, among them a visiting police detective.
I wasn't allowed to see Babel as part of my interview deal, but as I waited to speak with Inarritu I saw a bit of footage on the large editing-room screen.
It showed a hyper, frenzied, salt-and-pepper-haired Pitt, playing, as Inarritu described, "a 49 year-old...a guy who's been through some tough times." The footage showed Pitt's character, who is called Richard, helping to carry his wounded bleeding wife (Blanchett) through the streets of a small Tunisian village.
I began our chat with my observation that the script feels good and strong at first, but smallish and concise and a bit less plot-driven than Amores perros and 21 Grams Then it sinks in a bit, and then it really kicks in the next morning.
"That's a good wine you're describing," said Innaritu. "I agree -- it's a very multi- layered film. I'm still looking to it. Every time, as I am seven months with this, every time I discover more layers, more things...it's true what you are saying."
Babel's similarity to Amores perros and 21 Grams -- all three being about a violent blow shattering many lives -- may suggest that Guillermo Ariagga, the screenwriter of all three as well as author of the Tommy Lee Jones western The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, had something to do with shaping Babel's basic plot. But Inarritu says it was pretty much his own.
"Babel was an idea I had when I first arrived in the United States," he recalls. "This film would have been impossible without me being a director in exile, I would say. Because what comes from this is that you have a consciousness...a very strange perspective of your country and of yourself.
"I'm speaking of a complex relationship between a citizen of a Third World country" -- Inarritu was born, raised and launched his career in Mexico -- "and this country, and the traveling that I have done in the last six years, the way you understand things. So I guess that was what [led] to the necessity of making this film.
"So I started working on this thing with Carlos Cuaron [the brother of Alfonso Cuaron and screenwriter of Y Tu Mama Tambien]. In the beginning. He would be the writer. But we began it as an argument and never took it beyond that, so we decided that he would do another project that we were developing.
"At this point I invited Guillermo to participate in this story, and we obviously...as part of that process, we decided to share a lot of things."
"I think Babel is different from Amores perros and 21 Grams because the range of this film is completely different, style-wise, than the other ones. Because every story has a particular narrative and personality, and I feel that this is a more cinematic piece.
"I tried to combine the realistic aesthetic that normally I have been working in, but qualitating from an imaginary world where the music and the sound is a guiding force. There are a lot of sound elements in Babel. I was really taking the audio seriously. Using it to try and be inside a character.
"I stripped down so many things in the script by myself, and I was constantly adjusting and adapting and rewriting a lot of things based upon the culture and the situation I was in. It was a very difficult and informative process.
"I feel it is a very different film from the other ones -- you will see this soon -- in tone and style. It's more cinematic. I can only put only one line in the script, but in the shooting I can make a ten-minute piece out of a whole interior consciousness [trip] by one of the characters.
"I had to make a lot of decisions. In a good way. I added some things, and I also took out some things. I was shaping a lot and learning a lot and learning the limitations of the actors. So in the end I took out like 30% of the script down, in the editing. So there have been a lot of changes."
We spoke of Rinko Kikuchi, a non-hearing-impaired Japanese actress that Inarritu cast as a sexually provocative teenager who has a hang-up about male attention, or a lack of.
"I first went to Japan in December 2004...just by myself, the trip being self-financed like always," Innaritu said. "I was looking for a Lolita kind of star, not quite attractive in an obvious way but one that you can really have some bad thoughts about her, but not quite in that way. It was difficult.
"I saw Rinko once, and then again nine months later when I returned, and I had never prom ised anything but she had studied sign language all by herself and signed as well the other girls. I can tell you she was better than the deaf girls. It was really impressive.
At what point did he sign Pitt, Blanchett and Bernal?
"I approached Brad and Cate in, I think, January or February of '05, and they said yes and we were shooting by May 2nd. It was a very fast process. Brad is playing an older character. I want to give him a kind of gravity so he looks older. No more boyish, and I think he looks great. I told him, I think you will be a very interesting old man.
"Gael, I always wanted We originally had just two stories...the Moroccan kids story [he used Morocco as a Tunisian substitute] and the Americans who receive the shot, which originally, by the way, was the man who received the shot...we changed it later to the woman...but this was a very, very early stage in the argument I had with Cuaron.
"But we needed two more stories, I said. We need to tell a story about Mexico, about a nanny. The story about Mexico and the border because I am very affected by that. The nanny who works with me at my home is called Julia, and she has told me the saddest stories you've ever heard. So for the border sequence, I always felt that would be best to have Gael. Partly because he is a master of accents and people in the north talk very differently. Always I have him in mind.
"We went into pre-production in Morocco in March '05, and we started shooting May 2nd. All three countries in sequence. The last day of filming was December 1, 2005.
"We shot in Morocco, and then pre-production in Mexico, and then we shot in Mexico, and then over to Japan for pre-production and then we shot there. It was the same as doing four separate films, which was intellectually and emotionally very difficult. To shoot something in Morocco and at the same time think about the likelihood that a scene would cut directly into a scene I know I will shoot in Japan seven or eight months later. It was an exercise.
"And it was such a struggle, about going or not going to Cannes," he added. "But we finally decided that Cannes is a good platform for this kind of film. It's a four-language film, a very personal film, a very complicated film, and this festival exists for that...for this kind of film.
"Now, I'm not sure exactly who is going to be in Cannes. Perhaps with Brad and his baby coming he will not be there...I'm not sure. But possibly Cate will come. And all the other actors. We are working on getting visas for the little [Moroccan] kids."
I mentioned the cliche about filmmakers facing the inevitable pit of depression after they have finished a long project. To avoid this some directors develop one, two or three films at the same time so they can jump right into the something fresh after one is finished.
"The only way I can conceive films like this is being quiet and being alone," Inarritu replied. "If I go into the machinery, into the factory thing, it's good but I don't know that I have the skills to have three girlfriends. I'm a one-woman man.
"From Amores perros to 21 Grams I needed two years. It is always that. That is the time I need to assimilate, to be working the characters, to know who they are. It's a very conceptual and quiet internal process, and I need that time to develop it."
I mentioned Inarritu's excellent BMW commercial, "Powder Keg," which was made in '01 and co-starred Clive Owen, and then asked if he had been approached to do one of those idiosyncratic American Express commercials that M. Night Shyamalan and Wes Anderson have directed.
"They offered me to do one, and I reject," Inarritu replied. "I reject because, first of all, for me, to expose myself with a crowd like that...it's like a capitalist statement. I worry about that statement. It's not safe in Mexico to be the American Express guy. That's not a smart thing for me."
Inarritu took part in that recent, very large Latino demonstration in Los Angeles (which also happened in other cities) against a proposed change in U.S. immigration and labor laws that would adversely affect the economy and culture of Latin communities all over.
"I didn't send my kids to the school that day -- I took them with me [to the demonstration]," Inarritu said. "The guys in the editing room were shouting bad things at me. We were facing a deadline, they said. I said, 'Guys, a man is defined not just by work but by what he believes.' They were furious at me.
"The kids and I took a taxi and arrived on Broadway downtown, and we spent four hours there and the kids loved it. It was peaceful, not angriness. You need us, we need you. It was a beautiful experience. An amazing experience."
It seemed to me like the biggest and best organized demonstration by Latinos in this country ever, I said. "Mexico doesn't have that kind of organization," he replied. "If we had that power in Mexico we would throw out the president. This is a human rights thing."
We discussed his director friend Guillermo del Toro, who has advised Inarritu about pruning his films in the editing room, and who has his own film, Pan's Labrynth (Picturehouse), showing at Cannes this year. Inarritu calls it "very sad."
"I helped him finish it," he explained. "He helped me to take out three minutes from my film, and I helped him take out nine minutes from his."
He then switched back to Babel by asking, "Did you like the script?" Very much, I repeated. I guess I hadn't really said that in my initial comments.
"The other ones were more plot driven," Inarritu said. "This one is more character driven. One of the things I liked the most about it is the Japanese section, because there's nothing happening. There is no plot in it. It is the undercurrent thing that, little by little, begins to take you somewhere."
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Inarritu, Babel editor Stephen Mirrione
Film clip here. (http://pdl.stream.aol.com/aol/us/moviefone/movies/2006/babel_025148/babel_clip_01_dl.mov)
nice clip. Thank you.
Am I the only one that really loves Guil's dialogue?
Sort of Pinter like, maybe.
I don't know... just controlled as hell.
Q&A: Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu
By Anne Thompson, Hollywood Reporter
Rushing to complete postproduction on his third feature, "Babel," in time for its In Competition debut in Cannes, Mexican filmmaker Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu had just returned from the massive May 5 immigrants protest march in Los Angeles, where he spoke to The Hollywood Reporter deputy film editor Anne Thompson about his sprawling $25 million film. Shot in three countries and in four languages, "Babel" references the Biblical notion of many people speaking but not able to communicate. But film, which uses images to reach people all over the globe, says Inarritu, "is as close to Esperanto as it gets."
The Hollywood Reporter: Had you been in Cannes before?
Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu: Cannes has been very significant for me. With my first film "Amores perros" six years ago, at that time there was a guy who selected films in Latin America, but none ever went into the competition. So my film went into Critics Week and won best film, and got a lot of attention. Life is wisdom. Playing the underdog made possible what happened in Cannes for me, when my career changed completely.
THR: Things have improved for Latin American cinema since then.
Inarritu: I am very happy. That has changed so much since 2000. Not only me, but Alfonso Cuaron, Carlos Reygadas, Guillermo del Toro, have all changed the perception of Latin American film. Now there are two Mexican films in Competition. What's happening, funnily enough, is not the consequence of something political-cultural happening in my country. These are individual miracles happening at the same time, three individuals changing things.
THR: How did you manage to make such a challenging film with a studio distributor and still hang on to your freedom?
Inarritu: It's four films set in three different countries with three to four big names and mostly nonactors. It's very cheap; it's basically a self-financed independent film. We put everything together; I developed it myself. Producers Steve Golin and Jon Kilik helped. I had already cast the main cast and scouted locations when I presented "Babel" to the different studios. Brad Grey, the new chairman at Paramount, wanted to change the perception of the old studio. Paramount put up 50% for rights to distribute in American territories. I have control over every line, I have final cut. It's been the same since "Amores perros." I consider myself a lucky guy.
THR: How was working with movie star Brad Pitt, who was partnered with Grey at Plan B?
Inarritu: Of course he and Brad had a good relationship, but he was in before we signed up with Brad Grey. The whole experience was difficult -- intense is the word I would use. Directing actors in another language is not easy at all. I thought for the American couple traveling through Morocco who are in an intense situation, sad, and personally emotional, Brad represented the American I needed for this story. It wasn't the obvious choice: This is (not) a Brad Pitt role. Normally in my choices, I go against what your standard instinct would tell you. Art is transformation. It was challenging for Brad to leave 'Brad Pitt' behind and become a fragile human being. That gets the adrenaline higher. He represents a wide range of American citizens; he's an icon to play with, figure out and manage.
THR: You were also working with many nonactors?
Inarritu: To not only work with Brad and Cate (Blanchett) but humble village people and a little kid was crazy, crazy to try and penetrate their culture and tell their stories from their points of view. The four different languages are Arabic, English, Spanish, Japanese. I try to make it feel easy for the audience so it's not a language barrier, it's human beings talking. It's speaking English while trying to survive Babelism.
THR: How did you cast the unknowns in Morocco?
Inarritu: We announced it from a mosque. We videotaped hundreds from different little villages who had never seen a camera in their lives. We had to teach them to perform. Dialogue coach and great actress Hiam Abbas translated for all the Moroccan nonactors. I relied on her, she was my right arm, telling them what to do. They used mimicry. It was an interesting process, without languages. We understood each other.
THR: Where did the Mexican story come from?
Inarritu: It's a nanny taking care of two American kids (of the couple in Morocco) who has to cross the border. It's a sad story inspired by a nanny working with me who told me so many sad stories. She's played by Adriana Barraza, who played the mother of Gael (Garcia Bernal) in "Amores perros." Gael plays her nephew here.
THR: What is "Babel" really about?
Inarritu: It's about people trying to communicate across barriers and borders of language in different situations in third-world countries. For me, the story is about how vulnerable and fragile human beings are. I would not have conceived this personal idea without being a director in exile living five years in L.A. outside my country. How difficult it is to communicate. Ideas and prejudices more than borders divide us. I started the script with Carlos Cuaron, brother of Alfonso, then invited Guillermo (Arriaga, author of "21 Grams") to finish the script with me. I traveled to Japan, it was a circus of one year out of the country with my wife and two kids, now 11 and 8. It was a human transformative experience.
THR: This movie seems deeply felt by you.
Inarritu: Every film for me is a testimony of my point of view of life, who I am, my weaknesses and virtues. This one is very personal. I was throwing ideas into the script. I was traveling around for one year. This was special to me.
THR: What is the Japanese story?
Inarritu: It's kind of silent. The camera is on the deaf mute teenage girl, played by newcomer Rinko Kikuchi. Her father is the unbelievable actor Koji Yokusho. It's one of the most hypnotic stories. The three stories are related, but they are physically related only briefly -- with just a touch. They take place over two days. The running time is two hours, 15 minutes.
THR: Will your old agent, John Lesher, release the movie through his specialty division?
Inarritu: Both (divisions of Paramount) will release it. I died happy with John Lesher doing this. I hope all of the cast will come to Cannes. If Brad's kid is born a little before, he'll do his best. Many of the cast have never seen each other, this will be their first time. That will be very beautiful.
THR: What will you be doing next?
Inarritu: I have so many ideas. I need at least a couple of months to rest. We're releasing the film in October. I'll take the summer off and spend some time with the kids and catch up with the world.
Quote from: MacGuffin on May 22, 2006, 09:29:19 PM
Iñárritu: [Brad Pitt] represents a wide range of American citizens; he's an icon to play with, figure out and manage.
don't let pete hear you say that.
Babel
By Ray Bennett, Hollywood Reporter
*READ REVIEW AT OWN RISK*
Tense, relentless and difficult to watch at times, Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu's "Babel" is an emotionally shattering drama in which a simple act of kindness leads to events that pierce our veneer of civilization and bring on the white noise of terror.
Inarritu and screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga involve six families, most of them not known to one another, in four countries on three continents in their story of random fate and the perils of being unable to communicate.
Brad Pitt, Cate Blanchett and Gael Garcia Bernal give committed ensemble performances alongside seasoned character performers and non-actors as the story ranges from Morocco to San Diego to Tokyo.
The film, which also features exceptional work by director of photography Rodrigo Prieto, production designer Brigitte Broch, editors Stephen Mirrione and Douglas Crise, and composer Gustavo Santaolalla, is headed for major prizes and large, appreciative audiences.
As with his previous films, Inarritu tells his story using scenes out of order so that the pieces fall together in a jagged form that heightens the tension. It starts in the Moroccan desert, where a man buys a Winchester rifle from a neighbor to help keep the jackals away from his herd of goats. A Japanese hunter had gifted the neighbor with the rifle in gratitude for his work as a guide.
The rifle is entrusted to the goat herder's two young sons who end up firing it from a mountainside at a coach filled with Western tourists just to see how far the bullet would go.
The bullet, however, strikes an American named Susan (Blanchett) who is traveling with her husband Richard (Pitt) in attempt to patch up their marriage following the death of a child.
Four hours from the nearest hospital, the coach takes a detour to a remote village where a local man offers shelter while the other tourists argue over whether to stay or leave.
Desperate, Richard phones the U.S. embassy pleading for help and also calls home in San Diego where their long-time maid Amelia (Adriana Barraza) is caring for their other two children. With Susan bleeding and near death in the desert, he begs Amelia to remain with the kids as he tries to get help.
Amelia's son, however, is getting married across the border and, having exhausted attempts to find another sitter, she decides to take the kids with her to the wedding in a car driven by her friendly but hot-headed nephew Santiago (Bernal).
As Richard fights to keep Susan alive with the help of a wise and calm old Moroccan woman and a veterinarian, the shooting escalates into an international incident with security forces believing terrorists to be responsible and hunting for the perpetrators.
Meanwhile, in Tokyo, a young deaf-mute woman named Chieko (Rinko Kikuchi) is grappling with the loss of her mother by suicide, fighting with her equally bereft father (Koji Yakusho), and trying to deal with the frustrations of adolescence.
The filmmakers succeed brilliantly in weaving these stories together, taking time to explore depth of character and relationships. The suspense builds throughout as everyone involved becomes lost in a place they don't understand with people they don't know if they can trust.
Several astonishing Tokyo sequences replicate what it might be like to be deaf-mute, and equal imagination is applied to scenes at night in the wasteland of the Mexico/California border and the barren mountains of Morocco.
This is not a fear-mongering movie, but it is unpredictable and shocking, with compassion hanging on for dear life.
BABEL
Paramount Pictures and Paramount Classics present an Anonymous Content production, an Una produccion de Zeta Film, a Central Films production.
Credits: Director: Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu; Screenwriter: Guillermo Arriaga from an idea by Arriaga and Inarritu; Producers: Inarritu, Jon Kilik, Steve Golin; Director of photography: Rodrigo Prieto; Production designer: Brigitte Broch; Editors: Stephen Mirrione, Douglas Crise; Composer: Gustavo Santaolalla. Cast: Richard: Brad Pitt; Susan: Cate Blanchett; Santiago: Gael Garcia Bernal; Yasujiro: Koji Yakusho; Amelia: Adriana Barraza; Chieko: Rinko Kikuchi; Ahmed: Said Tarchani; Yussef: Boubker Ait El Caid; Debbie: Elle Fanning; Mike: Nathan Gamble; Anwar: Mohamed Akhzam; Tom: Peter Wight; Hassan: Abdelkader Bara; Abdullah: Mustapha Rachidi; Alarid: Driss Roukhe
No MPAA rating, running time 142 min
(https://xixax.com/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fimages.apple.com%2Fmoviesxml%2Fs%2Fparamount_classics%2Fposters%2Fbabel_l200607271722.jpg&hash=4a2641eae2fb50406dd7cc41beff19b0ef674b24)
Trailer here. (http://www.apple.com/trailers/paramount_classics/babel/trailer1/)
looks like it's already been remixed to look like an action/thriller.
Screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga on the weight of words
By Michael Fox, SF360
As debuts go, Guillermo Arriaga's explosive screenplay for "Amores Perros" is hard to beat. "21 Grams," his follow-up with director Alejandro González Iñárritu, provided more than enough emotional red meat for Benicio Del Toro and Naomi Watts to carve into Oscar nominations. For his next trick, Arriaga nabbed the prize for best screenplay at Cannes 2005 for "The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada," a modern Western about friendship, responsibility and the unintended effects of violence. "Babel," which stars Brad Pitt and garnered the best director award for Iñárritu this year at Cannes, opens in the fall.
But long before he achieved an international rep as a screenwriter, Arriaga was a novelist, TV producer, and documentary maker. His 1999 novel "The Night Buffalo," about a cocky Mexico City youth's turmoil following a friend's suicide, has just been published in English in the U.S. (Arriaga produced the film adaptation, which stars Diego Luna and is in postproduction.) The tall, bearded writer made a local stop last month during his abbreviated book tour, and we spoke a few hours before he headed out to the Balboa to introduce a screening of "The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada."
SF360: Is there a disadvantage in having 'The Night Buffalo' come out here after you've made a name as a screenwriter?
Arriaga: Many people have said, 'It's clear, your cinematic influence.' (Laughs.) But I [finished] this a year before I began writing screenplays.
SF360: What's the difference between writing novels and screenplays?
Arriaga: The only difference is that in the script you have to deal with more collaboration process. But I use the same language and structure and dialogue. These people that say I have cinematic influence in my novel, they are wrong. I have been putting literary influence in my screenplays.
SF360: I understand you're a very hands-on producer on 'The Night Buffalo,' visiting the editing room every day. How does the director feel about that?
Arriaga: He feels OK. We have this [idea] like the director is the only one who has a work. I'm against that. When they say it's an auteur film, I say auteurs film. I have always been against the "film by" credit on a movie. It's a collaborative process and it deserves several authors.
SF360: Does Iñárritu adhere to that philosophy?
Arriaga: I don't think so. (Laughs.) I don't think so but I think it will be healthy to have a debate about it. Cinema is very young, and it's finding its own language, it's finding its own way to credit the authorship. For some time it was the producer who was the author of the film. In some countries, it was the writer. In some, the actor. I think the greatest crisis in cinema today is the crisis of stories, and one of the reasons is the figure of the writer hasn't been fully respected. The word in Spanish implies the guy who .... "What's your idea? OK, and now what?" I am a writer. I don't write other people's ideas. I only develop my own stories.
SF360: So you are the sole source of your ideas.
Arriaga: Yeah. I work with a director and a producer, I don't work for a director or producer, which is a different way of approaching the writing process.
SF360: How much of the crosscutting between the stories in 'Amores Perros' and '21 Grams' was your devising?
Arriaga: You can read the screenplay. I spent a lot of time doing that kind of structure. When some of the scenes don't work, you have to reshuffle. But I can tell you that 95 percent of the structure of '21 Grams' is in there. And almost 99 per cent of the structure of 'Amores Perros.'
SF360: Yet there's room for a director to bring his energy, shot selection and sense of composition.
Arriaga: I absolutely agree with you. But that doesn't mean that that presence has to cancel the authorship of the writer.
SF360: No, but there are directors who'll take a script and trim the dialogue and tell the story more visually.
Arriaga: It also happens in the theater and in music, and nobody ever questions Wagner and no one questions Shakespeare. You never say the Ninth Symphony by Luis Perez. You never say Hamlet by Marty Lupus. (Laughs.) Let's consider 'Paris, Texas.' Who has the coherence of the themes, Sam Shepard or Wim Wenders? Whose world is in there? Or Charlie Kaufman. Who's the one who has these ideas about the brain, Michel Gondry or Spike Jones or Charlie Kaufman? I do not want to take a single piece of the authority of the director, but it has to be shared.
SF360: Do you accept that your defining theme might be described as the tension between violence and morality?
Arriaga: Moral for me only means you have to assume the consequences of your acts. I think there are two kinds of writers, one who bases the work on [that] of other people and one who bases it on some life experience. I have seen the deep damage that violence can cause. Violence for me, it's not funny. Violence for me, it has consequences. So in this world where violence is banalized, life is superficial, I want to recover the importance of every single human life.
SF360: I would submit that Quentin Tarantino, to cite one well-known example, trivializes violence and death.
Arriaga: I'm happy you brought [up] Tarantino. They say that I [am] influenced [by] Tarantino, so I had to go and rent Tarantino movies to see who was my influence. I think Tarantino belongs to the other kind of writers. It's clear that he hasn't suffered real violence in his life. I don't have the sense of smell. I was cut by a knife before I was 14. So I know that violence is real. My cinema has nothing to do with Tarantino. You want to see one American influencing me? Go to William Faulkner.
SF360: Your films attract upscale arthouse audiences, but don't they have the potential to make more of a difference with young people enmeshed in lives of violence?
Arriaga: I don't think that's the purpose. I'm just describing characters that are very close to who I am, with similar backgrounds and similar ways of seeing life. As Flaubert would say, 'Madame Bovary, c'est moi.' I am my characters. It's always my life experience that is behind my characters. Before [I was] 18, I was involved in, like, 500 fights. So you see, I can never make 'Kill Bill.'
SF360: Do you get calls from Hollywood? I would imagine you're pretty selective in who you work with.
Arriaga: I have been honored by great offers by people I respect a lot, but I only write originals. I'm not good writing other people's ideas. I made the mistake of doing a rewrite ('Dallas Buyers Club') because I wanted to work with Marc Forster ('Monster's Ball') and Brad Pitt. In the end, I ended [up] working with Brad Pitt without the need of doing a rewrite. He's an actor who's willing to take risks even though he's a movie star. And now he has taken it in 'Babel.' He doesn't look beautiful, he looks old.
SF360: Finally, in your view, what makes more of a difference, documentary or narrative?
Arriaga: For me, fiction is the crown of everything, because it's a representation of the world from a very particular point of view. And that representation creates a new reality. Although documentaries give you the real sense of what's happening and open a lot of doors that you cannot imagine, fiction is always beyond. I think that human beings would be incomplete without fiction. As Stendhal said, 'The novel is a mirror on the road,' so you can see things that you cannot see another way.
Quote from: picolas on July 27, 2006, 09:14:55 PM
looks like it's already been remixed to look like an action/thriller.
Who cares? So it'll trick people like my mom into going to see something good for a change.
it looks too good. this time iñarritu and arriaga won't disappoint (me).
i know. even though arriaga's still a jerk, it's a formula that works for iñarritu. he could polish any old turd from arriaga and make kusturica think it's pie. (https://xixax.com/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fi5.photobucket.com%2Falbums%2Fy154%2Fpubrick%2Femoticons%2Ffood.gif&hash=d87348595d035d26c5478ca9fb2836fa3650e201)
that was tommy lee jones, P.
Quote from: Pubrick on July 30, 2006, 05:26:41 PM
i know. even though arriaga's still a jerk, it's a formula that works for iñarritu. he could polish any old turd from arriaga and make kusturica think it's pie. (https://xixax.com/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fi5.photobucket.com%2Falbums%2Fy154%2Fpubrick%2Femoticons%2Ffood.gif&hash=d87348595d035d26c5478ca9fb2836fa3650e201)
I didn't understand any of this. But is the title "Babel" actual a very layered pun, being the Biblical reference and a reference to Douglas Adams' Babelfish.....or is Adams' Babel fish a reference to the Bible? In any case, I just figured out something new for myself.
Quote from: Gamblour le flambeur on July 31, 2006, 11:40:14 AM
is the title "Babel" actual a very layered pun, being the Biblical reference and a reference to Douglas Adams' Babelfish.....or is Adams' Babel fish a reference to the Bible? In any case, I just figured out something new for myself.
"Babel fish" is a biblical reference.
Quote from: Pubrick on March 03, 2005, 01:37:17 AM
fuck yeah, language.
I think babel is a reference to the language translation service babel fish, which the novel got its reference from.
Quote from: pete on August 01, 2006, 03:16:24 AM
I think babel is a reference to the language translation service babel fish, which the novel got its reference from.
and the translation service is a reference to the post that you just now posted right there, just now.
from Premiere...
"The title's of course referring to the Tower of Babel," says Pitt, "where God gave everyone different tongues-the frustration of communication, and the failure where people couldn't talk to each other."
Travel and tribulations
Alejandro González Iñárritu rounds off his "trilogy" with "Babel."
Source: Los Angeles Times
He calls it "the trilogy in my trilogy," but Alejandro González Iñárritu isn't just playing a clever numbers game.
Do the math: The Mexican director's new film, "Babel," like his breakout hit "Amores Perros" (2000), is a unified story told in three interlocking parts. But its logistical ambitions surpass those of "Amores Perros" and his other feature film, "21 Grams" (2003), neither exactly a slacker effort.
Set in four countries (Morocco, Japan, Mexico and the United States), "Babel," opening Oct. 27, has four sets of interlocking protagonists, struggling to communicate in half a dozen languages (Spanish, English, Japanese, Arabic, Berber and sign language). The multinational cast mixes marquee Hollywood stars (Brad Pitt, Cate Blanchett, Gael García Bernal) with lesser-known talents, such as Japanese actress Rinko Kikuchi, augmented with a large number of nonprofessional performers.
Pitt and Blanchett play American tourists whose lives are turned upside down when two Moroccan boys accidentally shoot at their tour bus in a remote desert region of the African country.
Meanwhile, the couple's two young children embark on their own high-risk adventure with their Mexican nanny. Through a series of coincidences, these interwoven tales eventually loop back to the saga of a rebellious, deaf-mute Japanese girl whose father may be implicated in a mysterious death.
Leo Tolstoy, in "Anna Karenina," observed that while happy families are all alike, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own unique way. "Babel" attempts both to flip, and universalize, Tolstoy's famous adage.
"What makes people happy in Morocco or Japan or the United States, it can be very different," says the director at his Culver City offices. "But what makes us miserable and what makes us sad is exactly the same for everybody. What exactly is the tragedy of not being able to love, of not being able to receive and absorb love. And the vulnerability that we have for the ones that we love. Those things are universal no matter who you are. That is when we share that empathy. That's what I discovered in this film."
The movie's title obviously alludes to the Old Testament story in which God "confused the tongues" of men because they had defied him by trying to construct the massive Tower of Babel to glorify themselves. God's punishment was to divide humanity by making people speak different languages.
"Babel" updates the biblical allegory by addressing some of today's burning global issues: immigration, the cultural clash between East and West, and the spiritual confusion that many privileged First World-ers feel.
"I want to talk about, I would say, these big-scale kind of things but from the intimate universe of a couple, of Brad Pitt, of the [Japanese] father and daughter," Iñárritu says. "I don't want to make a film about politicians talking in their offices. I don't care about that."
The main theme of "Babel," Iñárritu says, is the same as for the other two films in his "trilogy." "In the end, you can talk philosophically and socially and politically," he says. "But the bottom line for me is: 'Babel' is just a simple film about four intimate stories about parents and sons — that's it."
Pitt humbled by non-actors in "Babel"
He's one of Hollywood's biggest stars, but Brad Pitt says he enjoyed taking a smaller role as part of an ensemble in the new film "Babel," and was humbled by the work of several nonprofessional actors in the film.
Directed by "21 Grams" director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, "Babel" made its North American debut at the Toronto International Film Festival this weekend.
An intense tale of four interlocking stories spread across three continents, the film was a favorite at the Cannes film festival earlier this year and is generating Oscar buzz.
"Being a part of an ensemble is always more fun, you don't have to carry the film," Pitt told reporters in Toronto on Sunday, one day after throwing fans into a frenzy at the red-carpet screening of the film.
"For me, I consider myself more a citizen of the world, and I have great pride as I sit up here with all the people from different cultures, and know that we all came together," he said.
Pitt stars alongside Cate Blanchett as a couple on vacation in Morocco when tragedy strikes. Their story is linked to that of two shepherd boys living in a remote village, and also to two narratives taking place at the U.S.-Mexican border near San Diego, and in Japan.
Pitt's and Blanchett's scenes were filmed on location in Morocco, and Inarritu used several non-actor locals to fill out the cast, which he said was the most difficult challenge he had faced as a director.
He singled out one scene in which Blanchett's character needs medical attention, and the only help available is the village veterinarian.
"We were in this room with the veterinarian who stitched up Cate, and he was the real veterinarian of that town. His hands didn't smell so good, because he came from some goat surgery," he said.
For Pitt, who during the news conference brushed aside a suggestion he had become an icon, the experience was humbling.
"How easily they picked it up and understood what they were trying to get across. ... I was just pretty surprised. It took me down a notch as well," he said.
HIGH POWER, LOW PROFILE
Pitt has kept a relatively low profile since the birth of his daughter, Shiloh, with Angelina Jolie in May, and he did not appear in Cannes.
His has been the most sought-after face at a Toronto festival already boasting considerable star power with the likes of Russell Crowe, Jude Law, Sean Penn, Penelope Cruz and Jennifer Lopez.
At the news conference on Sunday, the moderator twice chided photographers to "calm down" so Pitt's answers could be heard over the sound of clicking cameras. That prompted Pitt to wave his hands and mug for the photographers.
"That's the picture that's going to end up when I have breakdown or something ... if I get arrested for a DUI (drunken driving charge) later on, make racial slurs or something," he joked.
Inarritu said he considered the film at its core to be about parents and children, a theme that resonated with Pitt.
"It becomes the one thing that keeps you up at night, how can you protect your children? It's less about yourself, and it's more about the kids," he said.
Pitt added fatherhood would definitely influence roles he accepts in the future.
"I'll try to be a little bit more mature about my decisions, but this one I'll be proud for them to see, once they're old enough to really understand it."
"Babel" is scheduled for limited release in October.
Bay Area Xixax members:
This is playing at the Mill Valley Film Festival on October 8th at 4 PM.
SPOTLIGHT AND RECEPTION $50 BABE08P
SPOTLIGHT ONLY $25 BABE08R
"Please join us for the Spotlight Award program, featuring the screening of Babel and an interview with Alejandro González Iñárritu. Following the Spotlight program, we move on to the new Smith & Hawken store at Strawberry Village Shopping Center for a party in honor of the talented director. The celebration features delicious food from Perry's Gourmet Catering and fine Northern California wines."
http://mvff.com/node/1892?PHPSESSID=0409c5219c9fe55311eda066a6baee97
Advance tickets aren't available anymore (fuck me for only discovering this screening today) but the film is in "RUSH STATUS."
"...Rush tickets are typically available for screenings that have gone to Rush Status.
A line for each Rush Status screening will form outside the theatre prior to the screening. Approximately ten minutes prior to the screening, available Rush tickets will be sold on a first-come, first-served basis to those in line.
There are NO DISCOUNTS on Rush tickets and sales are CASH ONLY."
So there's still a (small) chance of getting in.
Creatively brilliant, but tensions simmer
Alejandro González Iñárritu and writer Guillermo Arriaga are apparently at odds.
Source: Los Angeles Times
Will an Oscar run end the long artistic alliance between Mexican director Alejandro González Iñárritu and his countryman, screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga? Their brilliant collaborations have thus far given us the intricate and intense dramas "Amores Perros," "21 Grams" and "Babel," which hits theaters Oct. 27. Along the way, they have become one of the most distinctive creative partnerships in dramatic filmmaking.
But long-simmering tensions about who is claiming responsibility for the success of the pair's films have recently bubbled over. Though no one is speaking publicly, several of the people invested in the two artists and their project are privately aghast that Iñárritu, apparently miffed that Arriaga claimed much of the credit for the critical success of "21 Grams," banned the writer from attending Cannes, where "Babel" had its world premiere. Iñárritu, in full "auteur" glory, went on to claim the best director prize. Multiple calls to Arriaga's UTA agent went unreturned, Iñárritu's manager would merely confirm the ban and acknowledge the feud, and a message left for Iñárritu sits idle.
Now "Babel," which stars Brad Pitt, Cate Blanchett and Gael García Bernal, is on the verge of exploding into Oscar season ("Perros" was nominated for best foreign-language film; "21 Grams" pulled acting noms for Benicio Del Toro and Naomi Watts), and no one knows whether the creators will buddy up to do the film's publicity.
Fans of the duo's work tend to think of them as a cohesive unit, one perfectly blended, deeply powerful cinematic voice. Iñárritu, who helps develop the original ideas, clearly finds Arriaga's writing fertile ground for his many directing talents, and could even be said to rely on it since he's never made a major feature with any other writer. The director himself has said Arriaga spent two years working on "Babel's" incredibly complex structure.
This seems like the kind of snowballing crankiness that will suddenly evaporate the moment one of them has another good idea over cold beers (then again, more Oscar recognition could blow the rift even further out of proportion). But if they do decide to dissolve the partnership, Arriaga could always push his future work into the hands of filmmakers such as Tommy Lee Jones, who movingly directed "The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada." Which, incidentally, won Arriaga the best screenplay award at Cannes last year.
Babel: Writer vs. Director
Source: Hollywood Reporter
When Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu visited my UCLA Sneak Previews class last week to talk about Babel, I asked about his falling out with writer Guillermo Arriaga. The director asked that he and Arriaga be remembered for the fruits of their collaboration, the trilogy they had worked on for nine years, beginning with Amores Perros, through 21 Grams and finally, Babel. Now their relationship "has run its course," he said, and they are ready to move on to other things. Arriaga wrote Tommy Lee Jones' The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada and will be directing his own movies now.
I was curious about the non-linear structure of the stories in the movie, how they seem to fluidly move back and forth in time, building to emotional crescendos. How much of that was detailed in the script? About 70 %, he said. "The script was a great and solid base from which to start." He rewrote about 30 % 40 %, and took out 18 to 20 scenes.
How much of the movie was found in the editing room? He found things to shoot on the fly on location, for example. He had the sense that the Moroccan story with the two boys who shoot an American tourist (Cate Blanchett) came to an end too early in the film; he wanted more. So he cut in some shots that he had taken on a gusty day of the boys facing into the wind, along with some other atmospheric shots that he thought might be useful at some point. He had no idea how he would use them.
Working with the actors was crucial, of course. He doesn't like them to overthink things. When they get stuck, he makes them use numbers instead of words, to get to the essence of the emotions they are trying to convey. He wants to dig down to bare authenticity, to break them down. He raved about Mexican actress Adriana Barrazza, whom he had worked with on Amores Perros, who had experienced some heart trouble in the past but still soldiered on without taking a break,carrying a child in the desert heat, so that he would get the footage he needed in one day.
He finally broke down and hired professional actress Rinko Kikushi after he had insisted on finding a real deaf actress who was as good as she was—and couldn't. When Kikushi came back a second time she was signing fluently and he cast her on the spot. (I didn't know that deaf people sign differently in every language—and thus can't communicate with deaf people outside their own country.) Her character's need to use her body to communicate was not about sex, he said, but about seeking affection the only way she knew how. "The urban desert can be the toughest to survive," he said. "You can feel lonely in Tokyo even when you're surrounded by people."
Quote from: MacGuffin on October 24, 2006, 02:42:56 PM
(I didn't know that deaf people sign differently in every language—and thus can't communicate with deaf people outside their own country.)
is that an aside by the reporter or from iñarritu? i'm guessing the reporter. they should learn to keep stupid comments like that out of their articles.
arriaga is a terrible writer, it's fairly obvious who is the better of the duo. there are always these awful moments in their movies (and the collaboration with tommy lee jones) that goes for the worst kind of contrived melodrama, thinking it as some kind of brilliant serendipity. they have ruined the previous three movies arriaga worked on. dump that cheesy sack of balls. without good sensitive directors, arriaga's scenerios don't seem anymore different from dozens of Tarantino imitators out there--it's just that he happened to write for melodrama instead of gangster pics.
Quote"You can feel lonely in Tokyo even when you're surrounded by people."
yeah, not like a terribly overrated tour-de-shit hasn't been made about that subject already.
For "Babel" director, pictures tell the story
If a picture truly is worth a thousand words, then movie audiences should easily be able to grasp the challenging story in "Babel" even though it is told in Arabic, English, Spanish, Japanese and even sign language.
"Babel," starring Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett, debuts in U.S. theaters on Friday with a global tale of how languages and cultural traditions divide people more than distance or personal ideologies. It expands nationwide in coming weeks.
"The most difficult challenge in this film ... was to get rid of text and find how to translate these words -- and in this case three continents, five languages and four stories, all these diverse elements -- into one, single visual language," said Mexican director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu.
Apparently, he was up to the challenge. Inarritu won the best director's trophy at the Cannes film festival in May, and "Babel" is earning wide praise from critics and industry watchers who put it high on this year's list of must-see Oscar hopefuls.
Success also has brought news reports of a feud between Inarritu and "Babel" screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga, with whom he worked on earlier highly acclaimed films "Amores Perros" and "21 Grams."
Inarritu confirmed that they have stopped working together, but he called Arriaga an "essential and incredible talent, partner and collaborator in the three films."
"We feel sad that this kind of gossip, or focus, has been more in the ending of the relationship -- it had run its course, naturally -- instead of focusing on the product of that work," Inarritu said.
THE LANGUAGE OF 'BABEL'
"Babel" interweaves four stories. Moroccan boys take their father's rifle to practice shoot. Two U.S. tourists (Blanchett and Pitt) are victims of an errant bullet from the rifle. In San Diego, problems arise when a Mexican nanny takes the Americans' kids across the border, and in Tokyo, a deaf teenager copes in dangerous ways with the death of her mom.
The film utilizes four small, personal stories about husbands, wives, fathers, mothers and children to comment on a big, global problem of how a lack of understanding and respect for different people and cultures can spark violence.
"Babel" challenges audiences intellectually, yet Inarritu has simplified the delivery of the movie's themes by using personal stories to which audiences can relate.
"I didn't want this film to be a judge or a preacher. I wanted it to be subtle and (have) compassion even for the policemen and institutions," Inarritu said.
The film's title is derived from the biblical tale of the Tower of Babel, which humans built to reach heaven. But God saw it as a symbol of defiance. He gave people different languages, so they could not speak to each other and finish the tower. Then, God scattered humans to different parts of the world.
Inarritu means the title to be a call to unity, and say to people of different cultures and languages around the world that they should embrace -- not fear -- differences.
He said the movie's themes and topics have been swirling in his head since 2003, and "Babel" was a way to purge himself.
Asked if he felt he had now said all he wanted, Inarritu's answer is, perhaps characteristically, rather simple.
"Yep," he said.
Quote from: pete on October 24, 2006, 11:59:45 PM
arriaga is a terrible writer, it's fairly obvious who is the better of the duo.
Sadly, both of them think they are the second coming in their respective field, Arriaga almost thinks as if he is the mexican Shakepeare and Iñarritu...whoever he thinks is worthy of comparing to himself, and it's sad because being mexican I should be happy these two are having so much succes only that some interviews I 've read they sound so full of themselves and I don't like ppl like that.
While I don't agree with Pete that Arriaga is a terrible writer nor I think he is great but he is good, and as for Iñarritu I do think he has talent, Amores Perros was an awesome flim but 21 Grams wasn't, and I'd like to see him do something non fragmented and if possible to shut him up about how he does EVERYTHING in his films and how precious his final cut is otherwise he won't move a finger. :yabbse-rolleyes:
My support right now is for Cuarón and Del Toro, I'm eagerly waiting for Children of Men and hope is really great, I want to see Babel too of course but AGI's attitude puts me off.
Quote from: pete on October 24, 2006, 11:59:45 PM
Quote"You can feel lonely in Tokyo even when you're surrounded by people."
yeah, not like a terribly overrated tour-de-shit hasn't been made about that subject already.
Get over it, already.
Interview: Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu
With the release of Babel, Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu completes an important triptych of films. His first effort, 2000's Amores Perros, established him as a daring and ambitious filmmaker; his second, the Oscar-nominated 21 Grams, proved that he was more than a one-hit wonder. And his latest effort demonstrates that the Mexican native can hold his own as one of the great voices of modern cinema.
IGN recently spoke to Inarritu at the Los Angeles press day for Babel. In addition to discussing the completion of his unofficial "trilogy," the director talked at length about collaborating with both movie stars and nonprofessional actors, and addressed the social and political undercurrent of his often-harrowing tales.
IGN Movies: The press notes describe Babel as part of a trilogy when looked at with Amores Perros and 21 Grams. Did you see it that way when you conceived it?
Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu: No, I thought about the trilogy [before] I was conceiving Babel. I was in pre-production for 21 Grams and around those days -- which was 2003 -- I thought about this idea, this concept of one of them happening in one country and then having an effect, a tsunami miles away. I thought it was a good possibility to close that trilogy, which started with Amores Perros in a local way, in a foreign way as 21 Grams and then on a global scale. I thought it was a good way to find a triptych.
IGN: Is it important that the different characters are not aware of their counterparts in other countries?
Inarritu: People always say, "This guy is playing with the same structure." And I think that Amores Perros is such a different structure. Amores Perros is three stories that interconnect in one moment, which is the car accident. 21 Grams is only one story told by three different points of view, but they are really physically connected -- literally, with the heart. I think that Babel, differently, are four stories that are never connected physically. They never see the face of each other; the actors met once at Cannes. But they are emotionally connected, so my job was to find the right visual language to make four stories that apparently should not have physical connections form a whole. That was the experiment, which was very different from the other two. But formally it's four stories that have to do with one another. The reason that I call it a trilogy is because they are about parents and children; thematically, it's more important for me why they are a trilogy than formally.
IGN: So after this film will you abandon the idea of interconnected stories?
Inarritu: I don't know, to tell you the truth. The interconnecting thing is more about the curiosity that I have. It's something I think that's not about style itself; I think every story has a way to be told, and these three stories were better told this way. So my responsibility is to find the best way to tell them. But I don't think so. Maybe the next one is a monologue, straightforward and that's it. Something simple.
IGN: This is obviously your most ambitious movie thus far. How important was it to have Brad Pitt in the cast to make it happen?
Inarritu: Well, it's a very low-budget film, to tell you the truth. It wasn't a problem of getting the money; the money was there before Brad Pitt. I thought it would be a challenge to have somebody who is as recognizable as him. Iit was not an obvious choice but the challenge of transformation -- which is the art -- I think he was attracted to that to. And to have an American icon like him that has such magnetism and attraction, you can feel empathy immediately with this guy. He has that power to get people in touch, so I thought it was a good choice to have beyond any economical thing. I felt it was a good way to start the film.
IGN: Was it your decision to make Brad look older?
Inarritu: I wanted him to be older. I think it was a necessary thing just to get the man who has been going through very difficult emotional times. That helped him a lot. But I think the most important thing in an actor is not a physical transformation or a make-up thing; it's internal. I think he did a good job feeling not the Troy guy; you can feel that he's weak, and that's about the acting more than the exterior thing.
IGN: What was the collaborative process like with Brad and Cate Blanchett?
Inarritu: Well, I think it's a combination. I tried to be as helpful as possible. I tried to really delineate and inform them -- communicate and be very clear what I think the scene is about. What is the dramatic objective of that character? What kind of action can guide them to make them achieve that? But, obviously, I'm always open to ideas and possibilities; sometimes I'm very meticulous, but sometimes I'm not. It depends on what I think is clear because I'm seeing the whole thing. I was the only one in every country who knew from where I came or where I'm going, so they have to trust in me that sense. But with actors like Cate, you trust in her instincts. So it's a collaboration, but it depends on which scene. Sometimes they need you; sometimes they don't need you. Sometimes you are just admiring her craft.
IGN: It sounds like you have a good relationship with Pitt. Where did that develop from?
Inarritu: I worked with him on a Japanese jeans commercial five years ago and we had a good time. So after five years, I just approached him and talked to him about the concept and what I wanted to do. I think what Brad has is an over-the-edge kind of feeling; he likes to challenge, he likes to risk, and I think that speaks a lot about who he is.
IGN: How was it working with non-actors?
Inarritu: That was a nightmare, a very irresponsible decision that I made 17 days before shooting and I didn't have one actor. I turned to the towns, I found them in the streets and it was very, very difficult. To direct non-actors is difficult, but in a language that you don't understand directing non-actors is like suicidal. Combining with actors, it's really bad. It's difficult. But it was really rewarding when suddenly I got something, and we would find emotion. They were really fantastic. I mean, I want to say that I was so lucky to find these people. They surprised me; my philosophy now is that you can make anybody in the world act. If that person has a nature close to what you need for the character -- because they need to have something that sparks the nature or the spirit of the character -- then you can just pull that fire and it works. But you have to look for them; that's the difficult part.
IGN: You're part of a canon of directors like Fernando Meirelles and Alfonso Cuaron who are telling stories on a more global scale. Do you feel a sense of responsibility when you are coming up with ideas to continue on this path rather than acquiescing to something more conventional?
Inarritu: No, I don't have any responsibility. My responsibility is to make a film and find my dramatic language; I don't have any political or social responsibility. I do what really I like to talk about; all of the things I talk about in Babel are things I am passionate about and am bothered by them or want to express them or just that my heart and my mind are filled with. So all of those things are really very close to me, and I try to make them an extension of myself. It's a testimony of my vital experience with who I am, but I don't feel the need to be finding something to fill expectations or whatever.
IGN: That said, there are a lot of social underpinnings to the emotional story told in Babel. Was that just a subtext for the stories that you wanted to tell, or did they come first and you found a fictional narrative to frame those issues?
Inarritu: There are political and social comments in it that I wanted to be clear, but not obvious and not judging. I don't want to make films about politics or politicians; I dislike them a lot, especially now. Why bother working to express who these people are when they are on TV on all of the time. They are basically clowns that are just doing things for self-image; it's not about helping people in societies any more, so why bother to make a film about that? I was very interested in politics of the human things, very intimate things. Obviously there's a criticism of the institutions and there's a very obvious pointing out of the paranoid state that now this regime of George Bush is having -- about terrorism, about immigration, and I think they are relating one thing that doesn't have to do with the other. Like doing everything that they can to make sure the racism and xenophobia and fascist world will return to this century, and that's really scary, I think.
IGN: Were the visuals predetermined or did you just develop a color palette and a look for the film at the individual locations?
Inarritu: I found first the locations, the towns, and then we brought in the production designer and Rodrigo [Prieto, the cinematographer], and we would find [a look]. Each story is shot indifferent formats: Morocco is shot in 16mm, Mexico is 35mm, Japan is shot in an anamorphic lens. So each of them is different, but combined in a way that make a character and uniqueness in each one. The palettes mark every character, but the difficult thing was not to separate them; it was to give them a character but at the same time there's a congress of all of them. Obviously the camera movements should be congruent with what the characters need and the story... what it's about. And so it's a lot of decisions -- minimal, not in your face but there is an undercurrent visual romantic thing that's going on.
IGN: You must have a wonderful relationship with your editor.
Inarritu: (laughs) Yeah, Stephen Mirrione is one of the best collaborators at that stage that make my life easier. He really helped me find an order in my chaotic system. He really is more of a sculptor than and editor. He really is a very smart guy.
IGN: What was your most fun moment?
Inarritu: What is that? (laughs) I had fun in Japan; I think I had a lot of fun. Shooting the scenes in the discotheque or walking with the kids through the discotheque. Well, it was fun because it was dangerous because police were chasing us all of the time trying to get us in jail. So we were hiding and that was fun. There is no permission there. There is no film commission, so they don't give a damn; it's not about money, it's a society that doesn't allow you to shoot because you will destroy the order of a society that is built on corporations. There is no individuality there, so anything that you do will destroy the ant mechanism. So we had P.A.s who were hired just in case the police arrived they would be in jail, not us.
IGN: Chieko's story requires her to be both physically and emotionally bare. How do you make an actress comfortable enough to be able to be that open?
Inarritu: I think she was very [connected] to the character. Once somebody's right for the character, which is 80 percent of my job -- to find it in the world, which is not easy -- but once you find them then your life is easier. It's her nature; she was so into the character that it wasn't even a problem. At first I thought she was very shy, very silent, almost like a sign-language girl. And she's not; she was just playing, and she was all in her own character all of the time. It's a lot of discipline, I think.
IGN: There's a sense of expectation or anticipation in almost every scene of the movie. Would you attribute that to the writing or the directing or editing?
Inarritu: Well, there are a lot of things that I decided on set. All of that scene with the drugs, it wasn't written like that. It was a friend's house, and I thought it was a real opportunity to get in her shoes and really make the audience experience what it is to be on drugs in Japan and be a deaf Japanese which is a very strange kind of possibility. I wanted to shoot everything from her perspective and through the audio, just that scene in particular the audio becomes a very powerful tool to fight against the tyranny of images. So the audio is guiding you through a place to experience a discotheque in silence, just to have that perspective, is a very powerful thing, I think. I just created it; I improvise a lot of things and I was just with the camera finding how she would be looking to the world in that moment. I improvise that kind of thing at times.
IGN: Your films seldom spell out the action or lead the audience by the hand -- exemplified by the shifting time structure. You leave it to us to put everything together instead of explaining where and when you are going.
Inarritu: I think the nature of filmmaking, the experience of going to the theater and watching a movie is a very emotional experience -- a fragmented art. Things that don't have anything to do one with the other, the juxtaposition of them is what makes sense, and we fill the gap between one scene and another one. That's the way it works -- film -- and that's the magic of it. Our brains, at the same time, we are living in the past all of the time thinking what we did yesterday. Or we are anticipating... our brains are anticipating machines that are all of the time thinking ahead about what time I have to leave, when I have this meeting. It's very hard to live in the present, so I don't think we have trouble jumping [in time]. I trust in the people when I am doing that. Normally we do it, so why shouldn't we do it [here]? Cinema is an infinite medium so we should take advantage of it, I think.
i liked it. while i havent seen it in a few years, amores perros is definitely still my favorite of the 3. and though i havent seen it since the theatres i think i liked this about as much as 21 grams. i recall coming out of that thinking i liked it but it wasnt something i wanted to watch again and i have the same feeling here. but thinking about it 3 years later i think its probably time to watch that again so maybe the same thing will happen here. anyway, each story could've been its own movie and the tokyo one feels the most disconnected from the other stories but is one of the more interesting. surprisingly the pitt/blanchett storyline is the one for the bulk of the film i wanted to go back to the least. and i'm pretty surprised pitt agreed to take the film because he isnt given a whole lot to do here, so i guess it was just to work with the director. SPOILERS there was also a moment midway through the film where you can envision a very very bad ending for each of the stories and thankfully it doesnt happen. there are a few sad touches/sacrifices, but most of the stories do not resolve themselves as grimly as i had imagined. by the end though i was really engaged in the pitt/blanchett storyline and just kept thinking "please dont die, please dont die". END SPOILERS so it was good, i'm glad the chronology was for the most part in tact as that was my biggest qualm about 21 grams, it made good sense here and i look forward to seeing what he does next outside of this 'trilogy'.
what a glorious disaster. this proves a concept that i hate, and that is if a movie has a bad script, there's little to no hope. i would've absolutely hated this film had it not been for the performances or inarritu's undeniable talent. they bring to babel the few inspired, humane moments there are, desperately breathing life into arriaga's fashionably bleak outlook--without inarritu's sensibilities, i don't think it would be as wonderfully-but-unevenly elegiac as it is. but that makes watching the film one really long act of giving the benefit of the doubt. arriaga seems like he's trying to rewrite the old testament, new and improved with arbitrarily fractured narrative structure and ridiculous coincidences that somehow suggest human connection, where redemption is nothing but a device and spirituality is a hook in a (bad) pop song. he and haggis have succeeded royally in failed brechtian didacticism and i hope to god that neither of them ever write another movie again, as unlikely and impossible as that is. instead they get awards. oh well.
Inarritu wraps his trilogy with 'Babel'
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Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu speaks reverently about an Argentine theatrical group whose suspended acrobats pluck audience members off the ground and into the air.
"Some people were so mad and so insulted that someone had crossed that line," the director recalls of the group, De La Guarda. "If you don't want to participate because you're too cool or don't want to deal with emotion, then you are becoming an old man and should surrender."
Similarly, Inarritu's gritty, visceral filmmaking has powerfully affected moviegoers since he burst onto the international cinema scene with his 2000 debut, "Amores Perros," leaving them wide-eyed and punished as they creep out of theaters.
"Art should create catharsis. If art doesn't move people, then art has failed," says the long-haired, intense Inarritu. "I want people to feel what I'm trying to say."
Inarritu's third and latest film, "Babel," concludes his trilogy, which also included 2003's "21 Grams." Though the films aren't directly related, each juggles fractured, tragic stories of intersecting lives brought together in the violence of a car crash, a heart transplant or a gun.
The film represents a pinnacle for Inarritu, 43, who has been hailed by New Yorker film critic David Denby as "one of the world's most gifted filmmakers." He is also part of a growing Mexican film invasion notable for both its talent and camaraderie though those bonds have recently begun to fray.
"Babel" is a four-pronged narrative that includes an American married couple (Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett) vacationing in Morocco when a stray bullet strikes; a Mexican nanny and her nephew (Adriana Barraza and Gael Garcia Bernal) who encounter difficulty crossing the U.S. border; a Moroccan goat-herding family forever altered by the purchase of a rifle; and a deaf and mute Japanese girl struggling with her disconnection to the world.
The separation of people by language, politics and misunderstanding is the larger theme of "Babel." The movie takes its name from the Tower of Babel, which the Bible describes as having been built by a united humanity to reach heaven. The tower angered God, who scattered mankind across the planet, doomed to forever speak different languages.
"My film is about those border lines that are within ourselves, which are the most dangerous," Inarritu explains.
Born the youngest of seven in the Mexico City middle class neighborhood of Narvarte, Inarritu who is called "El Negro" by his friends on account of his dark skin has made a lifelong pursuit of surpassing constraints.
At age 20, he became a disc jockey at a top Mexico City radio station, playing mainstream music like Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin. He became enormously popular in part because of the on-air characters he portrayed.
The popularity of his characters led him to a career making television commercials for Mexican TV. Though very successful, Inarritu says he was "getting my soul lost" in advertising.
He and screenwriter/novelist Guillermo Arriaga began planning a feature film of splintered narratives which would eventually be trimmed down for "Amores Perros," but remain the general concept for the entire trilogy.
"Amores Perros" catapulted much of the cast and crew to stardom. It was Bernal's first major film; he has since gone on to star in "The Motorcycle Diaries," "Y Tu Mama Tambien" and "Bad Education."
Arriaga wrote both "21 Grams" and "Babel," as well as Tommy Lee Jones' "The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada." Cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto has shot each of Inarritu's films (all mostly with realistic hand-held camera work) as well as Ang Lee's "Brokeback Mountain," Spike Lee's "25th Hour" and Curtis Hanson's "8 Mile."
"Amores Perros," Prieto says, bound them together.
"What came of that movie is a bonus, but it was a very exciting time when we were making it," Prieto said by phone from Hong Kong, where he is shooting Ang Lee's "Lust, Caution." "It felt like we were doing something exhilarating."
The friendship between Inarritu and writer Arriaga, however, is over. Inarritu doesn't dispute recent reports that portray a feud between the collaborators over authorship of their films which reportedly culminated in Inarritu preventing Arriaga from attending the Cannes Film Festival earlier this year.
"I think we both are very sad and disappointed that a couple of newspapers tried to show the end of the relationship and not the nine-year relationship," says Inarritu, adding that they can now explore themselves artistically in new directions.
But the Mexican influx to Hollywood isn't limited to Inarritu collaborators. Directors Alfonso Cuaron ("Y Tu Mama Tambien," "Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban") and Guillermo Del Toro ("Hellboy," "Mimic") have also led the movement.
The three filmmakers have forged a well-known friendship and often screen early edits of their films for each other for advice. Cuaron and Del Toro also have films coming out this fall: "Children of Men" and "Pan's Labyrinth," respectively.
"There's nothing better than to share a common moment," says Del Toro, who first met Inarritu after Cuaron passed on an early edit of "Amores Perros." He called up Inarritu and told him flatly that his film was a masterpiece, but needed to be cut 20 minutes forging a friendship of candor and support.
"The three of us share a level of passion and a hatred for institutions," says Del Toro, laughing. "Though we defer on which institutions those are!"
Inarritu now lives in Los Angeles with his wife and two children.
"You become not from here, not from there. You become your own country in a way," he says of his new home. "I define myself from a vision, from a point of view of life."
The director is relieved to have completed "Babel," which he compares to having birthed a four-headed monster. The initial rough cut of the film had to be whittled down from 4 1/2 hours. The production took place across Mexico, California, Tokyo and Morocco and included many nonprofessional actors who spoke a number of languages.
The irony that those barriers of nationality and language could be crossed for "Babel" isn't lost on Inarritu. For him, the film's final shot where two characters silently comfort each other by that same power of physical touch is the symbol and hope of "Babel."
Quote from: MacGuffin on November 01, 2006, 02:44:44 PM
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If you hold a spoon up in front of this photograph for long enough, it'll start to bend.
Babel Soundtrack To Resonate With World Music
Composer Gustavo Santaolalla scores Alejandro González Iñárritu's new film.
The soundtrack to Alejandro González Iñárritu's new film Babel will be released by Concord Records on November 21st, 2006.
The music from the film was composed by Argentinean musician Gustavo Santaolalla, who has worked with Iñárritu on his two previous films 21 Grams and Amores Perros.
To give the music for Babel an authentic Middle Eastern feel, Santaolalla taught himself to play the oud, an Arab lute with a distinct, percussive sound. His work for the soundtrack album includes solo oud meditations, folkloric recordings of the Gnawa brotherhoods of Morocco and orchestrated pieces that combine electronic percussion with the sounds of classical Arab music.
In addition to Santaolalla's music, the soundtrack also features Japanese musician, producer and DJ Shinichi Osawa and musician, producer Cornelius.
Furthermore Iñárritu worked closely with Santaolalla, Anibal Kerpel (Composer and Music Editor) and Lynn Fainchtein (Music Supervisor) to capture the traditional sounds of both Marrakech and Tijuana via the music Gnawa and other traditional Arab musicians in Morocco and various Norteño sounds from Mexico.
does it feature sting (post 1998) and peter gabriel (post birth) as well? WORLD music.
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Book Description
On the set with Iñárritu: The making of the final film in the Mexican director's acclaimed trilogy
Mexican film director Alejandro González Iñárritu, along with top photographers Mary Ellen Mark, Patrick Bard, Graciela Iturbide, and Miguel Rio Branco, bring together their highly perceptive visions on cultural diversity in a book that combines seductive images and firsthand remarks on the unique experience of shooting Babel. Winner of the Best Director prize at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival, the film is the third in the director's trilogy started by Amores Perros and 21 Grams.
Shot in Morocco, Tijuana, and Tokyo, and involving a multilingual cast lead by Brad Pitt, Cate Blanchett, Gael García Bernal, and Koji Yakusho, as well non-professional actors from the three countries portrayed, Babel continues the director's quest to explore the effects of loss and grief, and seeks to relate the modern implications of ancient myth on the origins of human inability to successfully communicate.
From the Publisher
This book is a visual recollection of the parallel stories and real-life characters that revolved around the making of Babel, and the unexpected ways in which fiction and reality collide. Photographs both from the set and the surrounding disparate landscapes are paired with the director's personal commentary on the larger-than-life film shoot. Introduced with essays by novelist and poet Eliseo Alberto and Gonzalez Iñárritu, as well as an interview with the director by Rodrigo García, the result is an engaging book that both complements Babel's powerful statement on the barrier of language, and reveals the fascinating reality of the people and places that inspired the film.
http://www.amazon.com/Babel-Alejandro-Gonzalez-Inarritu-Photo/dp/3822818143/sr=1-1/qid=1163464218/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/102-7339416-9181733?ie=UTF8&s=books
This books pretty cool. I was checking it out at the Pompidou gift shop and got lost for about a half hour in some of the images, and Innaratu's commentary is involving enough.
I just saw it. it was good, and no serendipity! but the ending felt a little bit weak, just because I dunno, the point seemed to have gotten lost amidst the resolutions.
I'm going to begin writing this before I read any posts about it. SPOILERS
I think Innaritu has slowly expanded his cultural awareness across his career. With the purely Mexican Amores Perros, to the sorta bicultural 21 Grams, to this global film, he broadens his understanding of culture and how they build fences between each other. He's able to find the fences we build and show how they can be avoided through compassion. I feel he's a very compassionate person, as witnessed on the behind-the-scene stuff on the dvds, and it really comes through in his filmmaking.
It's interesting how he shows each culture: the Mexican marriage is very much about family and pure enjoyment, and even if you're not a part of that family or culture, you can enjoy it as well -- it's about unity and togetherness; the tour bus is very much not just white, but Eurocentric culture -- the culture of survival and independence and fending for one's self -- shown not just by the skin tone, but by the French, Australian, and American accents; the Moroccan culture and it's synthesis of these two ideas, as shown by their generosity to those in need, and their utter brutality towards their own people; and finally, the Japanese culture, which I'm the least informed about. A friend told me that their is a spreading of HIV and AIDS in that region, and that perhaps that influenced the portrayal of a girl with unbound sexual hunger.
What made this film work for me was the Mexican caretaker's story and the Japanese girl. I felt so much sadness for these two people, and what happened to the Amelia really fucking sucked. I started to hate the movie, because all the tragedy that happened to her was unfair, just because of one mistake. But then I guess it is also an indictment of the border patrol. Likewise the tragedy of the Moroccan family is so horrible, the film starts to dish out a bit too much.
The ending of the Japanese girl's story, and that last shot and the final musical score, was very beautiful.
I think what they've done with the idea of language barriers extending to cultural barriers and then extending to the barriers we choose to set up to prevent interference with other cultures is very intriguing, and this film is probably they're most insightful.
the movie was pretty decent. my initial response was that i really liked it, but its only because innaritu decided to end on the japanese story, which was the heart of the movie. the ending hit me pretty hard.
i really didn't like the brad pitt story at all, that had the most problems. from the minute we sense the "tension" while they eat, you know there will be the obligatory reconcilation scene, but the writing just made it incredibly simple and dull.
in the very least, the movie succeeded in giving the Japanese girl's story a context.
Rodrigo Prieto, 'Babel'
Source: Variety
Awards: Phoenix, Florida, Chicago, Dallas-Ft. Worth crix kudos for "Brokeback Mountain"; Golden Frog at Camerimage for "Amores perros"; Silver Frog for "Alexander."
Tools: Prieto used four of Kodak's 16mm film stocks in Morocco to help give each story a different look. "(EXR 100D) 7248 was our favorite -- its grain texture was visible, and to me it seemed the most like 5289 -- but, as with 5289, I discovered it had just been discontinued," he told American Cinematographer magazine. "We looked all over the place and were able to secure just enough of it for the Americans' story.
"I didn't want the Moroccan kids' story to be as grainy, so I used (EXR 50D) 7245, which has a finer grain, for those day exteriors, (Vision2 250D) 7205 for day interiors and (Vision2 500T) 7218 for a couple of night interiors and a day-for-night shot."
Visual references: "(Director) Alejandro (Gonzalez Inarritu) and Rodrigo accepted that Morocco would be void of a primary red, so it would basically be a very dark, rich red and the oranges of that country in contrast to Mexico, where we decided to use a primary red color, like the red of the flag, to represent the straightforward Mexican passion. For Tokyo, we chose to use a lot of purples, pinks and fuchsias to make it look like a diluted blood of futuristic essence," production designer Brigitte Broch explains.
Aesthetic: "We visually represented the character's individual emotional journeys through the use of different film stocks and formats," Prieto says. "By emphasizing the subtle differences between the image quality of each story -- like the texture of the film grain, the color saturation and the sharpness of the backgrounds -- we were able to enhance the experience of feeling like you are in different places geographically and emotionally," Prieto says. "We then digitally combined the different lens formats used into one negative, in the same way that all these cultures and languages come together in one film."
What's next: Reteaming with "Brokeback" director Ang Lee on "Lust, Caution," a WWII-era espionage thriller set in Shanghai.
Exclusive: Babel's Rinko Kikuchi
Source: ComingSoon
One of the four separate segments in Alejandro González Iñárritu's global drama Babel involves a punky deaf-mute girl from Tokyo named Cheiko, who is feeling lonely and unloved after the suicide of her mother. For most moviegoers, it's the first time they were able to see 26-year-old Japanese actress Rinko Kikuchi in action, but anyone who attended the New York Asian Film Festival in the past few years may have caught Ms. Kikuchi's small roles in a few of the festival's most memorable films like Katsuhito Ishii's Taste of Tea. (It will open in New York City next month!)
Critics have been raving about how Rinko is able to carry her quarter of Iñárritu's latest film, and now, she's been nominated for both a Golden Globe and a Critics' Choice award for her performance. The way things have been going, she's also likely to be dressing up to walk the red carpet come Oscar night, and after a few attempts, ComingSoon.net finally had a chance to talk with this talented young actress about the role.
ComingSoon.net: I understand you just had a birthday, so "Happy Birthday!"
Rinko Kikuchi: Oh, thank you!
CS: I've actually seen some of your Japanese movies, but how did Alejandro find you for this role?
Kikuchi: He got me through auditions, but which films did you see that I was in?
CS: I've seen "Funky Forest", "Taste of Tea" and "Survive Style 5," all small parts I guess.
Kikuchi: What did you make of ["Funky Forest"]?
CS: It was very weird, but I liked "Survive Style 5" a lot, that was good. They've played a lot of them at the New York Asian Film Festival. Had Alejandro seen any of these movies or did he find you through your agent?
Kikuchi: Actually, my friend informed me that there was auditioning going on, so I asked my agent to contact them and find out the details, that's how I got involved.
CS: What did you know about the part or the character beforehand?
Kikuchi: I received a videotape from Alejandro where it was one of the first scenes in the film where the girl and the father are talking in the car. I received a video of that scene, and I assumed I was to do that scene in the audition. Before I went in to audition, I did some research on my own, and I actually went to the deaf-mute school and tried to spend some time with those girls.
CS: And you learned sign language for the part? How long did that take?
Kikuchi: Actually, I was learning it throughout the auditions as well, so I guess it took a little less than a year maybe.
CS: What did you make of the idea of Alejandro, this Mexican director, coming to Japan and trying to shoot part of his movie there with Japanese actors in Japanese?
Kikuchi: The first thing I thought of when I heard of him coming to Japan and shoot the film was obviously this issue of language. I think for obvious reasons, it's one of the most important elements in communicating with the director, and for the film, as well. I understood the sign language more as a body language, and it was really about using your hands in gestures and expressing the emotions. In that sense, it was easy for me to digest, and Alejandro would basically check every single detail about what's being said, what kind of language the translated script was written in, and what specific language the communication was that was taking place on set. He basically laid out the whole map where he was aware of how the communication was taking place. It was a very, very interesting experience in that sense.
CS: Did he work mostly with a Japanese crew or did he have a lot of his own people there, as well?
Kikuchi: Well, Alejandro brought from his usual crew, but most of them were Japanese crew.
CS: Were you aware of the other segments in the movie while you were doing your part or did he just give you your part of the script?
Kikuchi: I had no idea what the other segments were about or what they were.
CS: After you got the part, how did you feel about having to carry this portion of the movie, since you hadn't done a role of such weight and significance? Were you nervous about that?
Kikuchi: During the one-year audition process, before I knew that I was going to get the part, there were actually moments where I already felt that the character Chieko was emerging inside me. By the time I received the news, I actually felt this whole experience was already worth experiencing and trying. When I did receive the role, I was very, very happy, but I was at the same time, like you said, very conscious and constantly thinking about how to give life into this role. I also understood that it was a big responsibility, but in some ways, the whole audition experience was so intense that I knew that I could do the role and that it would come out okay.
CS: You have a pretty intense nude scene towards the end with an older male actor. Were you nervous about having to do that and did Alejandro leave that until the very end of the shoot?
Kikuchi: Yes, I do think that whole scene was scheduled towards the later part of the production, but that scene we'd done over and over in the audition process, so Alejandro and I were very much aware that that scene was going to be a very important scene in the entire segment of the Japan section. At the same time, as far as being nude, I think being nude is like a sacred state of human nature, and I consider it very, very beautiful to be nude. I actually thought it was going to be a beautiful scene, so there was no reluctance or anything like that on my end.
CS: What did Alejandro do or say to make you, or even the older actor, more comfortable when doing that scene?
Kikuchi: To begin with, the actual crew was minimum while we were working on that scene, and Alejandro would constantly communicate just the two of us, he would just pull me aside on the set, and he basically made sure that every element was working for me. For example the actor who played the policeman, he was very nice in general as a person, so he tried everything he can to make me feel comfortable, and I think Alejandro knew that. Alejandro tried to do everything he can to make that scene work both on and off set.
CS: Do you think that your segment is representative of what kids or teen girls are like in Japan today?
Kikuchi: Well, I think that young people like that exist everywhere in the entire world, but Tokyo is kind of a place that's overflowing with information and things are constantly changing. I would say that there are many different kinds of young people in Tokyo living there. I do think the world depicted in "Babel" does represent a part of the world exists in Tokyo, but not necessarily everything. You do see all these young people hanging out in that (it's called) J-Pop café in the film. There's no question that the film depicts certain aspects of the youth culture in Japan, but ultimately, I think what was important was the director's vision of how he sees the world in Japan, as well. We tried to understand that as well as depicting the real situations that exist in Tokyo.
CS: The movie has gotten a lot of attention for your performance. Are you excited about doing all of the red carpets for the award shows or is it all a bit overwhelming?
Kikuchi: Yes, I was very surprised and it is overwhelming. I'm constantly thinking that I have to do this or that or all these other things, but I'm also trying to have fun as much as I can, although everything is kind of crazy now. That's what I'm trying to focus on, just trying to have some fun through this.
CS: Have you had a chance to meet your awards rival Adrianna yet, even though you were in separate segments of the movie?
Kikuchi: Yes, I've already met her and we're always doing press together in L.A.
CS: And there's no competition between the two of you even though you're both nominated for many of the same awards?
Kikuchi: No, no, of course not. We really respect each other and love each other, so there's nothing like that.
CS: Have you been able to learn any English while doing all of the press for the movie?
Kikuchi: (without her translator) I'm learning English right now!
Pretty much with mod on his points explained in his spoilers. As things got hairy for the characters, I got caught up more in their stories that when the scenes shifted, they were like great cliffhangers. I think the moments that worked for me the most were when there was no dialogue, no sound, just the score and the images - the wedding, the helicopter pick-up, etc.
Babel 2-Disc SE Due
Brad Pitt's dramatic turn caught on two-discs in February.
On February 20, 2007, Paramount Home Entertainment will release Babel (2-Disc Special Edition) on DVD. The flick depicts four individuals, in four different countries, affected by the actions of one couple. It will be available for the MSRP of $37.99 and will feature tons of bonus materials and extra features like...
The Making of Babel: West
The Making of Babel: East
The Making of Babel: Far East
Theatrical Trailer
(https://xixax.com/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fdvdmedia.ign.com%2Fdvd%2Fimage%2Farticle%2F756%2F756015%2Fbabel-2-disc-special-collectors-edition-20070117112008336-000.jpg&hash=d7a376ee5999da83facdd70ade3bd7bdd2c50782)
This film floored me with Drama. It's his best hands down and now I have to change my best of 2006 to include this fantastic flick
I dont get the negativism towards this movie. THE JAPANESE STORY HAD EVERYTHING TO DO WITH THE OTHERS. It's a film about lack of communication, not about the current state of our world, that is used as part of the story, not as a main theme. Since then, thematically, these stories are all deeple interconected, much more than just in the literal storytelling way.
People complaining about watching a bunch of characters make stupid decisions are saying more about themselves than the movie. Iñarritu would never judge the characters that way. And it takes just a little of solidarity to understand every character in this film, without saying they're idiots. The scene in the border is impeccable. It is so realistic. Every mexican Im sure knows what Im talking about here. Everytime we cross the border, even though we've done nothing wrong, we're afraid of being arbitrarely denied the entrance to the US because of this or that. The costumes people are always rude and treat mexicans as suspects of something bad.
The metaphoric nature of the movie is being ignored in favor of criticism of the literal storytelling, whichs is obviously secondary. Rinko Kikuchi's performance is amazing in that regard, a young girl unable to communicate or express frustration excepto via sex. And Barraza was spot on too. Those scenes of the mexican wedding are just like being there.
What I liked the most is the compassionate look the filmmakers have towards the characters. You really can't blame anyone, unless you're so self rightous to understand the character's positions and feelings. How can one judge Pittps answer to the nanny, and at the same tie judge her for her mistake? A woman taking care of other people's kids while her own son is getting married. No one is pointed out. not even the border patrol guys, who can really be some serious assholes when they want to...
I read somewhere that Sam Jackson, while as a jury on Cannes, refered to Babel as Crash Benetton. Really, isn't that a completely idiotic way to look at it? Is this movie about racism for real or is it about something deeper? Whatever, my guess is a lot of people have something personal against guillermo arriaga and iñarritu the way sometimes people hate so much oliver stone or spike lee movies.
Quote from: Alexandro on January 26, 2007, 01:40:08 PM
THE JAPANESE STORY HAD EVERYTHING TO DO WITH THE OTHERS.
i think most people just mean superficially the storyline wasn't as linked to the others. not thematically.
Quote from: modage on January 26, 2007, 02:57:10 PM
Quote from: Alexandro on January 26, 2007, 01:40:08 PM
THE JAPANESE STORY HAD EVERYTHING TO DO WITH THE OTHERS.
i think most people just mean superficially the storyline wasn't as linked to the others. not thematically.
i think so too, that's why it pisses me off. cause that's all that it is, a superficial link. the important linking is thematically. this is not supposed to be short cuts, this is not about figuring about the relationship between this and that character.
Quote from: Alexandro on January 26, 2007, 03:27:24 PM
Quote from: modage on January 26, 2007, 02:57:10 PM
Quote from: Alexandro on January 26, 2007, 01:40:08 PM
THE JAPANESE STORY HAD EVERYTHING TO DO WITH THE OTHERS.
i think most people just mean superficially the storyline wasn't as linked to the others. not thematically.
i think so too, that's why it pisses me off. cause that's all that it is, a superficial link. the important linking is thematically. this is not supposed to be short cuts, this is not about figuring about the relationship between this and that character.
weeell.. then what was the point of superficially linking them through the girl's father and the morrocan family - hmmmm?
Quote from: pozer on January 26, 2007, 03:51:15 PM
Quote from: Alexandro on January 26, 2007, 03:27:24 PM
Quote from: modage on January 26, 2007, 02:57:10 PM
Quote from: Alexandro on January 26, 2007, 01:40:08 PM
THE JAPANESE STORY HAD EVERYTHING TO DO WITH THE OTHERS.
i think most people just mean superficially the storyline wasn't as linked to the others. not thematically.
i think so too, that's why it pisses me off. cause that's all that it is, a superficial link. the important linking is thematically. this is not supposed to be short cuts, this is not about figuring about the relationship between this and that character.
weeell.. then what was the point of superficially linking them through the girl's father and the morrocan family - hmmmm?
i didnt' say that the fact that they are literally linked is superficial, I say that the how is what is superficial. They could have made the link in any way that got into their heads as longs as they had the thematic unity the movie aspires to. If I'm gonna get into the position of saying "why they connected the story here instead of here" I will get nowhere. Possibilities to connections are endless, that's why it would be a fucking boring movie if the juice of it were on the dramatic interconnections between each story. The links are all superficial and then each story develops on it's own, none of the stories depend on the other to find a resolution, the links are only used as a start.
i am a fan of innaritu/babel. however, i do find (especially after re-watching his films) that the superficial links get in the way of the thematic ones.
Who really made Babel?
Jo Tuckman on the Mexican standoff surrounding Inárritu's Oscar contender.
Source: The Guardian
With an unprecedented 16 Oscar nominations, the titans of contemporary Mexican cinema are riding high. But should they win anything, don't expect any big buddy bear hugs from director Alejandro González Inárritu and scriptwriter Guillermo Arriaga. After collaborating on Amores Perros, 21 Grams, and now Babel - nominated both for best direction and best original screenplay - the two men are barely on speaking terms.
Arriaga has been most vocal about the break-up, complaining that he should be getting more recognition for the three films, which the director seems happy to talk about as his own creations. "It is not true to say that this is Alejandro González Inárritu's trilogy," Arriaga says. He insists they all stemmed from ideas he had "a long time before we even met".
González Inárritu has only reluctantly talked directly about the split of the partnership that, arguably, kickstarted the entire Mexican renaissance. He repeatedly offers only neutral comments, about how he is moving on to a new creative stage. But the director has also claimed the inspiration for Babel as his own, has told some interviewers that he approached other writers first, and even said he gave the text a major overhaul. He also reportedly banned Arriaga from the film's premiere at the Cannes film festival in 2006.
It was never an easy relationship - a long way from the mutually supportive friendships enjoyed by the other two Mexican directors making a global impact: Alfonso Cuarón with Children of Men and Guillermo del Toro with Pan's Labyrinth.
Arriaga and González Inárritu had to overcome deep initial antagonism to start working together on Amores Perros - the film about Mexico City's dark underbelly that catapulted their talent, their ambitions and their considerable egos onto the world stage. From there, they went on to tackle an American story of grief and guilt in 21 Grams, which is when the conflict over recognition reportedly began. And then, in Babel, they took on the theme of global miscommunication, played out in Mexico, the US, Morocco and Japan.
But whatever the truth about the end of one of the most successful writer-director teams of recent times, Arriaga was clearly less involved in making Babel than he had been in the previous films. This has some critics busy identifying hints as to González Inárritu's future direction. He has never made a full-length feature without Arriaga, coming late to the industry after a successful career as a radio DJ and a maker of TV commercials. Fernanda Solórzano, critic for the Mexican culture magazine Letras Libres, sees evidence of Inárritu beginning to shake off the shackles of Arriaga's obsession with interweaving, fragmented plot structures and solemn moral messages. As a result, Babel is filled with loose ends and a touch of moral ambiguity, she says, but also with a freer exploration of character.
Arriaga, who says he is happy with how Babel turned out, has already shown his individual colours in the Tommy Lee Jones-directed The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada - which won him best screenplay in Cannes in 2005 - and the film of his novel The Night Buffalo, which premiered in this year's Sundance festival. Both, he says, are the first parts of new and different trilogies - on the desert, and on clandestine love.
Arriaga says he believes that audiences would do well to pick their films from the writing credit. He points to Paris, Texas as more the work of Sam Shepard than Wim Wenders, and applauds Charlie Kaufman's progress into the spotlight. Arriaga won't go quite that far for himself - not yet, anyway. "I say what Chekhov said: 'I write what I can, not what I want to.'" But seeing Babel win best film in Los Angeles, he says, would be like being a divorced parent watching their child win an Olympic medal. "We could share the pride in what we both made."
(https://xixax.com/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Ftheenvelope.latimes.com%2Fmedia%2Fphoto%2F2007-02%2F27937183.jpg&hash=5777f36acceafc7926a8f579ee487337cca066b4)
Talking 'Babel'
Director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu on his multicultural gem, working with actors and making beautiful music.
Source: Los Angeles Times
Winner of the Golden Globe for best dramatic picture, "Babel" is nominated for seven Academy Awards including best picture, screenplay and director for Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu.
Gonzalez Inarritu, 43, is the first Mexican-born filmmaker to be nominated for a best director Oscar. He was also nominated for a Golden Globe and Directors Guild of America Award.
Shot in Africa, America and Japan in five different languages, the gritty drama revolves around the repercussions from the shooting of an American woman (Cate Blanchett) while vacationing with her husband (Brad Pitt) in Morocco.
The film marks the third collaboration between director and screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga -- the two have since had a falling out -- which began seven years ago with the Oscar-nominated Mexican drama "Amores Perros."
They followed that up three years later with their first English-language production, "21 Grams," for which Naomi Watts and Benicio Del Toro received Oscar nominations
Gonzalez Inarritu began his professional career as a disc jockey at the top-rated Mexican station in 1984. By the end of the decade, he was composing music for features and short films.
In the 1990s, he was put in charge of production of a TV company and by 27 was one of its youngest directors. He segued into forming his company for producing advertising, short films and TV. Gonzales Inarritu made his first short feature, "Detras del Dinero" in 1995.
Since you have a background in composing, is directing a film akin to conducting a piece of music?
Completely. The first thing I did in film was the music for short films. I always conceive my films as symphonies. I always perceive myself as orchestrating chaos. My job is to get the best performance from the violin player and the best moments of the piano solo. . . . At the end you are orchestrating to get all of the people involved.
My job is just to choose the right musicians for the right parts and then try to get from them the best. All of us should be coordinated with the story and the themes I want to explore.
"Babel" is a very complex, thematically rich drama.
It's very challenging for audiences in a way that provokes not only on an emotional level, but at the same time on an intellectual level.
At the same time, the film deals with a lot of ideas, subject matters that are affecting all societies simultaneously around the world. The film visually and emotionally touches the nerves and touches the hearts and minds of people. It makes them think -- which is a good thing to happen.
What was it like to direct such a sprawling, globe-trotting feature?
This one challenged me more than ['Amores Perros,' '21 Grams'] because it is not only dealing with intimate stories and the isolation and the lost of these characters, but at the same time it has social commentary that deals with the fate of the world now.
The characters are not physically connected. They never see the faces of each other, but they are thematically and emotionally attached to each other. It was challenging, but when it works with audiences it is very rewarding.
When did you come up with concept come up with "Babel"?
When I was in pre-production on "21 Grams" I conceived this idea of this film on a global scale. I talked and shared this with Guillermo and he liked very much the idea. We thought it was [a way] to explore how an act can create ripples not only with another city or country but around the world.
Just as with your previous films, "Babel" uses a non-linear way to tell the four interwoven stories.
I think that in the end when you are dealing with different stories that are simultaneously happening on the screen, I always think the story finds the best way to be told. And I think by obvious reasons there are no other ways to tell it.
Rinko Kikuchi is nominated for supporting actress for the film. How did you find her?
One year before I start shooting, I traveled to all of these countries [where I would be shooting] .I found found her in one of the first sessions and she blew my mind. She was far the best one because she had an interior life that none of the others had.
One of the most moving scenes is when Brad Pitt breaks down while talking to his son on the phone.
I think that was one of the best moments in the film. I think he and the character merged. There are no cuts in the scene. I just put the camera on him and it just happened. We were shooting at the Casablanca hospital. It was like 6 a.m., and he just broke down. I got goose bumps.
Quote from: MacGuffin on January 17, 2007, 06:37:57 PM
Babel 2-Disc SE Due
Brad Pitt's dramatic turn caught on two-discs in February.
On February 20, 2007, Paramount Home Entertainment will release Babel (2-Disc Special Edition) on DVD. The flick depicts four individuals, in four different countries, affected by the actions of one couple. It will be available for the MSRP of $37.99 and will feature tons of bonus materials and extra features like...
The Making of Babel: West
The Making of Babel: East
The Making of Babel: Far East
Theatrical Trailer
Yeah, this is wrong. Only the single disc - with the trailer as the sole extra - was released today. Mutherf'ers!
Quote from: MacGuffin on February 20, 2007, 07:18:08 PM
Quote from: MacGuffin on January 17, 2007, 06:37:57 PM
Babel 2-Disc SE Due
Brad Pitt's dramatic turn caught on two-discs in February.
On February 20, 2007, Paramount Home Entertainment will release Babel (2-Disc Special Edition) on DVD. The flick depicts four individuals, in four different countries, affected by the actions of one couple. It will be available for the MSRP of $37.99 and will feature tons of bonus materials and extra features like...
The Making of Babel: West
The Making of Babel: East
The Making of Babel: Far East
Theatrical Trailer
Yeah, this is wrong. Only the single disc - with the trailer as the sole extra - was released today. Mutherf'ers!
They cancelled the two disc, does anyone know why?
they cancelled it so that people will be forced to buy the barebones version so they can release the 2 disc version 6 months or a year from now. they're probably hoping they can slap a BEST PICTURE COLLECTION type header on there too.
i hate they.
I enjoyed this. I haven't had a chance to see Amores Perros. I've seen 21 Grams which I didn't like too much and read some of the negative comments here. So my expectations were fairly low going in. That said, I enjoyed the story and the ideas in the story and I don't think it's fair to compare this to Crash.
Mexican film duo goes public in row over credit
Source: Guardian Unlimited
A long-running private squabble over who deserves most credit for the film Babel has escalated into a public row between one of the most important cinematic duos of recent years.
Director Alejandro González Iñárritu, and writer Guillermo Arriaga spearheaded the Mexican assault on international cinema seven years ago with their first film, Amores Perros. They went on to secure access to A-list Hollywood stars with 21 Grams, before going global thematically, geographically and linguistically with Babel.
The collaboration was breaking down when González Iñárritu banned Arriaga from Babel's sets around the world. Later the director told the writer to stay away from the film's premier in Cannes. But it wasn't until the pressure cranked up ahead of the Oscars - where Babel picked up seven nominations, including best director, best screenplay and best film - that the pair began airing their grievances in print.
It had died by the time the director told the writer to stay away from the film's premier in Cannes. But it was not until the pressure cranked up on the road to the Oscars - where Babel picked up seven nominations, including best director, best screenplay and best film - that they threw discretion to the wind and began airing their mutual grievances in print.
The spat became particularly acrimonious this week with an open letter from González Iñárritu to Arriaga dated five days before last Sunday's ceremony and published this week in the Mexican magazine Chilango, accusing Arriaga of harbouring an "unjustified obsession with claiming the sole authorship of a film".
The letter follows a series of interviews in which Arriaga complained that González Iñárritu had always hogged the glory for the cinematic trilogy he claims is rooted in ideas he had "long before I met Alejandro". "You were not - and you have never allowed yourself to feel - part of this team," González Iñárritu's letter says. "Your declarations are a sad and very reductive end to this wonderful collective process that we have lived and are now celebrating."
The letter is signed by 12 other collaborators on Babel, as well as the director. These include Mexico's most successful film actor Gael García Bernal, as well as Adriana Barraza (nominated for an Oscar for her performance), Gustavo Santaolalla (winner for the soundtrack), and renowned cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto.
A less glamorous figure who still lives in Mexico, while his former colleague moved to Los Angeles long ago, Arriaga has not yet received such open shows of support, although he claims private phone calls offering solidarity. In a radio interview the writer said his earlier complaints about González Iñárritu were merely meant to defend the rights and dignity of all screen writers and that the letter "manipulated my position".
Suggesting, once again, that the real egomaniac in the affair is not him, he added: "Alejandro never says 'our trilogy', he says 'my trilogy'."
The end of their professional association has left many wondering what they will produce on their own. Arriaga has already been successful with the film The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, which won him best the screenplay award at Cannes in 2005. His latest, The Night Buffalo, starring Diego Luna, premiered to a mixed reception at the Sundance festival earlier this year.
González Iñárritu has never made a feature without an Arriaga script. For the moment all the director is publicly saying about the future is that he needs a rest.
I finally got to see this. I had the DVD for over a month until tonight I decided it was time to see if this was Crash or not. It didnt win the awards, so it had to be better than Crash... and it is.
However, I did not love it. I think the stories on their own were good, but the connection between them was not as strong as in Amores Perros and 21 Grams. I did not care about the global story as much as I did with the other two movies.
The Mexican story was by far the best one, but I do feel it ended very quickly. Not sure how to explain.
I liked the music a lot too.
I had the feeling many times how this is viewed by someone from outside the US, and many things were stereotypes of how people from outside (especially Latin America) see the Americans. Like the tourists of the bus, or the police officers in border patrol, or the way it was covered in the news all over the world and nobody had a fucking clue of who fired the shot and were speculating like it always happens.
Overall, it was better than what I expected so I'm glad I finally saw this. Nowhere close to Pan's Labyrinth and I have not seen it yet but I think Children of Men is also a better film.
Hollywood's 'Babel' too steamy for China's censors
The acclaimed Hollywood film "Babel" has made its debut in China, but five minutes shorter than its original length after censors cut nude scenes.
Censors removed scenes involving a troubled Japanese teenager who bares all as she attempts to seduce an older man, the Beijing Morning Post reported.
The actress portraying the teen, Rinko Kikuchi, earned an Oscar nomination for best supporting actress for her work in the film.
Staff at the China Film Association, which handles film censorship, declined to comment when contacted by AFP.
The film, which stars Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett and received seven Oscar nominations, is a complex tale about cultural clashes in today's globalised world shot in several countries and five languages.
The newspaper did not say whether other scenes potentially offensive to censors in authoritarian China -- such as depictions of police brutality in Morocco -- had survived the scissors.
China allows only 20 foreign films to be screened domestically each year.
It has no movie-rating system but authorities often order producers to cut scenes that are deemed too violent, sexually explicit or politically sensitive.
The official version of "Babel" began screening in China on Monday. But illegal pirated DVD versions of the original cut are already freely available.
Quote from: kal on March 05, 2007, 12:33:07 AM
I had the feeling many times how this is viewed by someone from outside the US, and many things were stereotypes of how people from outside (especially Latin America) see the Americans. Like the tourists of the bus, or the police officers in border patrol, or the way it was covered in the news all over the world and nobody had a fucking clue of who fired the shot and were speculating like it always happens.
The border patrol scene is my favorite, the best in the movie i think, and I don't think there's anything steretyped about it. I've crossed the border many times, and the guy that plays the officer in babel is spot on. they alwways treat you with suspicion and make you feel uncomfortable, even though you have nothing to hide or should not have any problems to cross.
the tourists in the bus seemed just like normal people scared and impatient...
i think one of the best qualities of babel, maybe one of the most disturbing things about it, is how people's reactions to what's being shown are reflecting the same issue of misscomunication the picture is trying to portrait. everyone seems to be seeing different things. some people in mexico have called it "anti mexican", because it "depicts our country in a bad light"...others claim that it has "a soft hand with americans cause iñarritu needs his american job"...others seem to compare this to crash out of nowhere...really, nothing to do...reallly...
'Babel' audiences grow ill
Strobe-light scene causes problems
Source: Variety
"Babel" drew an unusual reaction from the aud at Nagoya's Midland Square Cinema during its Saturday bow in Japan -- five became physically ill and complained to theater staff. According to Midland management, the culprit was a blinking strobe light in the pic's club sequence, featuring Rinko Kikuchi as a hearing-impaired high-school student.
Two patrons became ill during Saturday's morning show and three more during the first afternoon screening. All were women, and none went to the hospital. For the evening screening, the theater posted a sign warning auds not to look too long at the screen during the show, but to instead "occasionally avert your gaze as appropriate." Theater staff also explained the problem to auds before the beginning of the show.
Distrib Gaga Communications, however, denied that the pic was to blame, saying no other theaters had complained about a similar problem. In a statement, the distrib also said that individual theaters should devise their own methods for dealing with any problems.
Media flap is not Gaga's first with the Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu film. Prior to release it was criticized by the hearing impaired for not subtitling the Japanese-language scenes, making it hard for them to follow the story. Ruruka Minami, a sign-language translator involved in the casting of the pic, led a petition drive to persuade Gaga to release completely subtitled prints. Gaga later announced that it would subtitle the Japanese scenes in all prints in time for its release.
On 9/25 from Paramount will be a 2-disc Babel: Special Collector's Edition.
Quote from: MacGuffin on June 26, 2007, 01:42:12 PM
On 9/25 from Paramount will be a 2-disc Babel: Special Collector's Edition.
cool, i might finally see it.
DVD review:
http://dvd.ign.com/articles/818/818703p1.html
Extras and Packaging
This two-disc release of Babel is a perfect example of less being more. In this case, almost perfectly more. Where the previous DVD featured almost nothing in the way of worthwhile extras, this new version features only one - a single, solitary extra which stands among some of the very best bonus content currently available on DVD today.
The second disc contains the feature-length documentary Common Ground: Under Construction Notes - director Alejandro Inarritu's personal video-diary shot during the production of the film. Oddly, it feels wrong to refer to this as a "making-of" documentary, or a behind-the-scenes offering - despite the fact that these two hours go behind-the-scenes to document the making of the movie. Those terms have historically referred to polite, fifteen-minute, studio-produced pieces which provide the illusion of access by showing a director sitting behind a camera looking fiercely at a monitor - or a handful of interviews with recognizable stars talking well of their fellow cast and crew.
Common Ground, rather, brings to mind more notable (and noble) cinematic documentaries like Lost in La Mancha - which told the tragic tale of Terry Gilliam's collapsed and misbegotten production of the Don Quixote story. This is a truthful, honest tale of the construction of Babel - the struggles, the frustrations, the joys, the logistics, the goals, the aims, the dreams, successes and failures involved with the making of a film scattered across three key locations and languages.
It is both moving and astounding the degree to which the difficulties and miscommunications shared by the characters in the film are so brilliantly mirrored in the production of the very same piece of fiction. Common Ground is a film which clearly illustrates that just as husbands and wives can often miscommunicate in the same language - or just as two people can find themselves unable to speak for lack of a common discourse - filmmakers and actors and non-actors of all races and backgrounds can undergo the same essential troubles.
There is no "PR value" to this film. Inarritu comes across as an artistic visionary in a single moment bravely juxtaposed against another where he appears as little more than a self-obsessed, insecure child. It is an unflinchingly honest snapshot of a man in his best and worst moments and an accurate portrayal of the emotional range of the filmmaking process.
Equally captivating are the vast cultural differences in making this film throughout Morocco, Mexico and Japan. From working with the locals to liaising with governments to making back-door deals with Yakuza or watching children of completely disparate cultures find the simplest of ways to communicate, Common Grounds is among the most moving and meaningful pieces of filmmaking about filmmaking. It elevates this DVD to "must own" status.