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00:00 [MUSIC PLAYING]
00:03 What film or series lit your fuse
00:13 and made you have to tell stories on screen?
00:17 I think it was Fanny and Alexander, The Bergman.
00:23 I know it was TV originally, but the way we saw it in Mexico
00:27 was as a movie, which is, I think, the same way
00:30 that it played in the US back in the day.
00:33 This was like 1984.
00:37 And my mother had died recently.
00:41 And my mother loved horror, but she wouldn't
00:44 let me and my sister watch horror.
00:46 My father came to me and my sister and said,
00:48 you know, you know the bad news, guys.
00:50 You know what happened.
00:51 The good news is we have a new administration in the company.
00:57 So anything that you didn't like in the past management,
01:00 we can change.
01:02 And I said immediately, I want to watch horror movies
01:05 and grow my hair.
01:07 Those were my two.
01:07 So he said, what do you want to watch?
01:09 And I said, I want to watch The Shining and Alien.
01:13 And he said, OK, fine.
01:15 This is what we're going to do.
01:16 You get to watch those movies if I tell you everything
01:19 that happens in them, and you still want to watch them.
01:23 And you watch a movie that I pick.
01:26 And I was like, fine.
01:27 So his movie was funny and Alexander.
01:29 And my movies were The Shining and Alien.
01:32 And he reenacted Alien and The Shining for us
01:38 so well that when I saw it, I felt
01:40 that I had already seen it.
01:42 And he was very smart, because then the shocks are not shocks.
01:44 You know what's coming, you know?
01:47 And I love those movies so deeply.
01:50 But then I had to see the movie that my dad had picked for me.
01:53 And it was super long, and it was Swedish.
01:57 But I sat down.
01:58 This movie is not appropriate for an eight-year-old
02:00 anyways either, you know?
02:02 But it shook me to my core to see these two children who
02:08 lose their father.
02:11 And their lives change.
02:13 And they realize that you're never done with the dead.
02:17 You know, they keep walking with you wherever you go.
02:20 And both the family mechanics and the strange Scandinavian
02:26 magical realism of an antiquarian with a room where
02:30 there is an angel trapped.
02:32 And these ghosts walking with the characters
02:34 forever stayed with me.
02:36 And I felt that I could at least try to tell stories like that.
02:42 And here we are.
02:43 Wow, well, so now as you were finding your way
02:48 as a filmmaker, was there a movie or a series that
02:52 came along and you watched it?
02:54 And it was so good, it made you question
02:57 if you could ever rise to that level
03:00 or if you belonged in playing in this sandbox?
03:03 Well, I mean, this is going back to when I was making up
03:06 my mind about all of this.
03:08 Wings of Desire of Wim Wenders was a massive thing back then.
03:12 And I just could not believe that what I was watching
03:15 was a movie.
03:17 You know, it felt--
03:19 it apparently didn't have a storyline.
03:23 It did.
03:23 In the end, there is a love story.
03:25 But so much of the movie is just the human experience.
03:29 And I removed witness watching the human experience
03:32 and the poetry of it all.
03:35 It just blew me away.
03:36 I couldn't understand how a person could
03:41 summon that amount of beautiful images and beautiful music
03:46 and beautiful poetry and performances
03:49 and make a movie where nothing happens,
03:51 but absolutely everything happens.
03:54 To this day, I don't know if I can make that movie, you know?
03:56 But you move on and you carry them.
04:01 And then eventually, they come out in little ways.
04:04 Well, now, maybe it was success of your work or approval
04:14 from someone whose opinion really mattered to you.
04:18 But what first gave you the confidence
04:20 that, in fact, you should be doing this,
04:22 that you could move people in the ways
04:24 that you've just mentioned?
04:26 Well, after my mother died, I didn't
04:29 feel part of the world of the other kids
04:33 around me in school.
04:34 And so I would submerge myself.
04:36 I would love to submerge myself in movies.
04:38 But we were so broke that we couldn't own a VCR.
04:42 It took us a really long time to get together the money.
04:45 So in the meantime, what I could do was read.
04:49 So I started reading like crazy.
04:50 And I would hide my books, which were, you know,
04:55 everything from Sherlock Holmes to Edgar Allan Poe
04:58 to Lovecraft, in my school books,
05:02 and start reading them in class secretly.
05:05 But I would get caught.
05:07 And the teachers would take the books.
05:08 And they would never give them back.
05:09 And again, we were broke.
05:10 So that was tragic.
05:12 So the solution I found was to pretend
05:16 that I was taking notes in class.
05:18 I was a terrible student, not good grades,
05:20 as you can imagine, after all of that.
05:22 And instead of taking notes, I started writing my own stories
05:26 to not be in the real world.
05:29 So writing came as a way of survival when I was very young.
05:33 I didn't feel that I needed to learn to write.
05:35 I knew that I was a storyteller.
05:37 However, I developed an enormous passion for archaeology
05:42 because I had seen Raiders of the Lost Ark,
05:45 another formative movie.
05:46 And it just-- I could not understand the beauty
05:50 of living that life.
05:52 So I went into archaeology.
05:53 And I very quickly understood that I was not
05:56 going to become Indiana Jones.
05:58 And that's not what archaeology is.
06:01 So if that was not it, and I could not be Indiana Jones,
06:05 maybe I could make Indiana Jones.
06:08 I was already writing.
06:10 I loved movies.
06:12 But I didn't know if I could acquire mastery
06:17 of the grammatics of it.
06:19 I immediately came home and told my father,
06:22 I'm not going to be an archaeologist.
06:24 And he was like, oh my god, we've
06:25 lived 12 years for you preparing for archaeology.
06:28 And now you come up with this.
06:29 What do you want to do?
06:30 And I said, I want to be a filmmaker.
06:32 And at that time, eight movies a year were made in Mexico.
06:36 So it didn't look good.
06:38 So we took the yellow pages, opened them,
06:40 found the telephone number of one of the only two film
06:44 schools in Mexico.
06:46 This one is part of the National University.
06:48 It's a film school where Cuaron and Chivo attended.
06:53 And we just asked, what do you need to do
06:55 to come into that school?
06:56 They were very selective.
06:57 It was very small and free because it
07:00 was a national university.
07:02 Thank god.
07:03 I applied.
07:04 And it was a very tough process of selection.
07:07 But I got in.
07:08 I was one of 15 students that year.
07:10 And the rest is history.
07:13 Wow.
07:13 And so did somebody--
07:16 maybe it was a teacher for me becoming a writer.
07:21 Someone called me out in class and said,
07:24 this is as close to professional writing
07:26 as I've seen in one of my classes.
07:30 Was there somebody in particular who reinforced
07:33 that you were really good?
07:36 Well, my father.
07:37 He was kind of biased.
07:39 But also, he had really good taste.
07:42 And he was tough.
07:44 And when I started writing, he would give me endless notes.
07:47 And I would throw it at him.
07:48 And I still react like that to notes, I have to say.
07:52 But I would eventually think about it, go back, try again,
07:55 try again, try again.
07:56 And he was a tough teacher.
07:58 And eventually, it started to become better.
08:00 And then in high school, I had been kicked out
08:04 of eight schools.
08:06 I ended up being in 10 schools during my childhood.
08:10 It was difficult, to put it mildly.
08:13 At this time, I was in a Catholic school.
08:15 Because even though I was an atheist, a young atheist,
08:20 the only school that would take me
08:21 was a Catholic school in hopes of converting me and saving me,
08:25 which didn't work.
08:26 But they have a contest.
08:28 All the Catholic schools of someone
08:31 writing a short story about a saint, which
08:34 is not my subject matter.
08:36 But you can take any subject matter is my philosophy.
08:40 So I took a story of a young high school student that
08:45 dies and has a revelation.
08:48 And I won the award for best writer.
08:51 And I started taking it seriously.
08:53 And then after that, I just started
08:56 writing a lot of short stories.
08:57 And a lot of them got awards.
09:00 And some of them got published in Mexico.
09:02 And I started to feel that I could actually do this.
09:05 In the way that the young are amazing,
09:08 because they don't know the challenges.
09:11 So you're fearless.
09:12 And you don't know the rules.
09:14 So you just break them.
09:15 You just go for it.
09:16 And without noticing, you develop a style.
09:19 I think starting later in life is so much harder,
09:23 because everything is real and terrifying.
09:26 And you realize the challenges.
09:28 When you're a kid, the world is yours.
09:29 So I went for it.
09:31 Well, so now what would you say was the biggest obstacle
09:35 that you had to overcome to allow
09:37 you to turn the projects that influenced you
09:41 into your own language as a writer and director?
09:44 I think this is something that happens to a lot of people.
09:48 You have a first feature.
09:50 And you want to put everything in it.
09:54 You want to make it like so many movies.
09:58 And you want so many cool things to happen in it.
10:02 And so I had four main characters.
10:05 And it was a love story.
10:06 But it was a comedy.
10:07 But it was also a surreal moment.
10:10 And it had magic.
10:11 And it had music.
10:12 And it had-- so the movie is fun.
10:14 But it's too many things.
10:17 I think that the love that I felt for movies and literature
10:20 was a problem in the beginning.
10:22 And slowly, as you mature as an artist, you can shake those
10:30 and be clearer and cleaner in the story you're telling
10:34 and only letting the influence that at the time
10:37 needs to come to peak.
10:41 That's the goal.
10:42 I'm still incredibly Baroque and incredibly ambitious.
10:46 And my justification for all of that is I'm Mexican.
10:48 So the way we cook and our architecture
10:51 is about having.
10:53 And I'm still trying to acquire some zen.
10:56 So that's my exercise as a filmmaker,
10:59 to do at some point something that is a very, very, very
11:04 minimal storyline.
11:05 It's just not who I am.
11:07 Now, my last question.
11:08 I can still remember when I saw the first "True Detective."
11:15 I mean, I could tell television was changed.
11:19 And you could peel these characters like an onion,
11:23 and people would follow.
11:25 And it changed things for actors.
11:27 It made for richer performances.
11:29 It is quite a high bar they created there.
11:32 Tell me-- and now you've got Jodie Foster.
11:35 You've got this incredible venue,
11:39 which is really interesting to look at
11:41 and logistically complicated.
11:44 Tell me what most burned in you to do this.
11:49 Well, something happened with that first "True Detective,"
11:51 right?
11:52 That in the middle of all the noise and all the options
11:55 and all the TV and all the movies,
11:59 this thing created an impact.
12:02 And people stopped and watched.
12:04 And not only that, for me, the true testament
12:07 to something that is unique is the fact
12:12 that it stayed with people.
12:13 It's been 10 years since that came out.
12:17 And people remember it.
12:18 And people crave it.
12:21 So me, myself, as an audience, I was like, I wanted to come
12:27 back.
12:27 I want that emotion and that feeling of that first season.
12:32 I want to experience it again.
12:35 So when HBO came to me, and Nick was no longer involved,
12:40 and they asked, what would you do with "True Detective,"
12:43 oh my god, I stopped in my tracks.
12:46 And I had ideas.
12:49 Because we all do this.
12:51 We watch something, and we go like, oh, they should do this.
12:54 And if they had asked me, I would--
12:56 but now they asked me.
12:58 So I sat down, and I was like, what
13:01 was it that hit me so hard about that?
13:05 Me and everyone about that first series.
13:07 And it was a world.
13:12 There's Southern Gothic, where two very different men
13:16 with two very different views of the world
13:20 are trying to talk amongst themselves
13:24 of the very two different worlds where they live.
13:27 They inhabit different worlds.
13:29 But behind them, there's this bayou full of secrets
13:35 and dark and sinister old gods.
13:38 And I thought, I want to see that again.
13:40 So what happens-- what could feel
13:44 as full of secrets and creatures and stories and whispers
13:50 like the bayou, so unique and still a piece of Americana,
13:55 but still like a discovery, still like a character?
13:58 Alaska came to me.
14:00 And the darkness and the ice, because nothing better
14:03 than darkness and ice to hold secrets, you know?
14:08 And then I thought, what would happen
14:10 if it's two women?
14:12 And they are also carrying long pasts with twists and turns.
14:18 And they're carrying their own ghosts.
14:20 And they both walk in a world where
14:24 things may be exactly what they seem,
14:27 or they may be something behind, you know?
14:32 And keeping that--
14:34 those elements of what really worked of that for me,
14:38 of that for season, but then being free to change
14:42 everything else was an experiment.
14:45 Obviously, it's nerve-wracking, you know?
14:47 You're messing with something that is beloved.
14:52 But I think we all miss it.
14:54 Why not try to see it again?
14:56 Best thing about working with Jodi?
15:00 It's impossible to say one thing.
15:02 That woman is a dream.
15:03 And I don't want to work with anybody else ever again.
15:05 She's the best actor of her generation.
15:07 And I will, with a couple of mezcals in me,
15:10 say she's the best actor alive.
15:12 The things that I saw her doing on set, in camera,
15:18 and after months and months of editing her,
15:21 you still discover other things that she's doing.
15:24 She works at so many levels.
15:26 And the effortlessness, you know,
15:28 especially the effortlessness.
15:30 She just glides into it.
15:32 It's such a gracious talent.
15:37 But on top of that, she is an incredible collaborator.
15:41 She's a filmmaker herself.
15:42 She has worked with the best directors in the world.
15:46 And she's incredibly generous and easy.
15:49 So she will come to set from the script.
15:51 She would say, maybe this could happen.
15:54 And that, instead of being, you know--
15:56 sometimes you work with actors that
16:00 are dealing with ego things.
16:01 And they want to see themselves in a really cool way.
16:04 That's not where she comes from.
16:06 Her entire thing is, how can the show be better?
16:09 How can the movie be better?
16:11 So she would come with ideas that would immediately
16:13 ignite me.
16:14 And I would take them and rewrite around them.
16:17 And we would work together in that.
16:19 And then on set, it was the same.
16:22 Scenes that we had rehearsed, scenes that we had discussed,
16:25 we would stand there, look at each other, and go like, nah.
16:29 And we would create it again.
16:31 And we would love that process.
16:34 So it was one of the best collaborations, if not the best,
16:40 I've ever had in my career.
16:42 (electronic music)