The Berkeley Beacon

Issue date: 10/26/06 Section: Arts and Entertainment

Media Credit: allmoviephoto.com Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, director of Babel, explains to Brad Pitt that he will be sharing the film with three other narratives.

Alejandro Gonzalez Iñarritu reaches his hand out toward the table to pick up his matchbook and light a cigarette. He's not sure he can do that in this hotel room, but he does anyway.

He's about to say something bordering on brilliant and knows it.

"Sometimes a script is like a theory. It's like when you go to hunt an animal and you have the shot. Then, the animal moves," he says in his rolling Mexican drawl. Now he's going to draw back in this layered parable, just as he does with all the movies he directs; Babel, his current film and the reason he's sitting down for this interview, is no exception.

"The most intense moments come from nowhere. The challenge is to put it together," he says. "The tough moments-you can feel those on the set. What is the trick is that you can get those across, but you have to know when it's too much," he says.

He sits back in his chair and says the least abstract but truest thing he'll say all day: "You can't fall in love with your own emotions."

In Babel, Iñarittu tries to emotionally attach youth, greed, media stereotyping, communicative boundaries, innate love, innate hate, big government, small government and power.

You can fall in love with your own emotions.

"When I started making this movie, I started thinking about doing things about differences in communication," he says. "But I ended up making this film about how close we are, how similar we are, what unites us."

He does this by following and interlocking four different stories, along the lines of his two previous lower-budget films, 21 Grams and Amores Perros. The four stories, shot in Tunisia, Morocco, Japan, Mexico and the United States, are spliced throughout the movie in the most dramatic ways possible.

Richard (Brad Pitt) and his wounded companion Susan (Cate Blanchett) are stuck in Tunisia after Susan is shot by a pair of restless teenagers while on vacation; Santiago (Gael Garcia Bernal) is border-hopping between California and Mexico with Pitt and Blanchett's on-screen kids and their nanny. All the while, the teenagers are now suspected as terrorists and Chieko (Rinko Kikuchi) is struggling with the comparatively minor struggle of being deaf in Tokyo.

Continued...

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