The Mexican director talks about the recut of “Bardo” into a “tightened” film and explains why, according to him, certain modern films “lack soul”.
Alejandro González Iñárritu is a man of conviction. On the occasion of the promotional tour of his new film, Bardo, false chronicle of some truths that he produced for Netflix, he did not hesitate to deliver his feelings on the current production and deplored that modern cinema privileges style to substance.
Speaking in London in early October for a wide-ranging debate about his career, the two-time Best Director Oscar winner said: “I don’t care about the quality of things. When I see young filmmakers, I’m very attached to the way they express themselves. Today there are many beautiful things, but there is a lack of soul“, reports Variety.
According to the filmmaker, audience expectations have also changed. He claims that his film is unlikely to “requiring“, 21 Grams made in 2003, can be made today.
I don’t know if we could have done it today, because the public would be very irritated by this film. People need to be hand-fed so much more
Bardo, a false chronicle of a handful of truths is the director’s first film since his triumph with The Revenant, with Leonardo DiCaprio in 2015. This feature film, his seventh, also marks a return to his native country, Mexico.
An existential film, Bardo sifts through family relationships, cultural identity and an artist’s career. Evoking Fellini’s film Eight and a Half, Iñárritu uses and abuses surrealistic excursions to blur narrative conventions, and uses the absurd as a tool, a way of relieving his subject in the face of a busy central theme.
Greeted by mixed reviews when it premiered in Venice (then Telluride), the director has since returned to the editing room and cut Bardo down to 22 minutes. In a previous interview with IndieWire, Iñárritu explained that watching the film with an audience gave him a new perspective – some scenes were cropped, some inserted, and some rearranged. He believes the result is a movie”tightened“.
“I put everything I have in Bardo“, he confided in London. “I have nothing more to give right now. I gave everything: in terms of heart, in terms of soul, in terms of attention… I didn’t want to do Bardo, I needed to do it.“
He also explained that he had “tired“of his signature multi-narrative approach during the Biutiful era in 2010 and that he needed to shift gears.”I was a little tired of the multi-structure. I wanted to see what it felt like to make a movie about one person. I didn’t know if I would be able to do it. It was scary to sustain a single narrative line.“
Bardo, False Chronicle of Some Truths is currently on Netflix.