Alejandro González Iñárritu at his art exhibition Amores Perros: “This is an anti-AI exhibition” | Alejandro Gonzalez Iñárritu

ALejandro González Iñárritu, a Mexican director, is widely known for his innovative style of storytelling. His 2000 debut, Amores Perros, was labeled a “hypertext film” because of how its three main leads escalate from a central car accident, but are otherwise separated. In an interview discussing his new show at Lacma, Sueño Perro – which sees Iñárritu return to hundreds of hours of footage that never made it into his first film – he shared that it was his father who inspired his unique shooting style.

“My father was naturally a great storyteller,” Iñárritu told me via video from Los Angeles. “He would always start what was near the end of the story, so he would throw you a hook, but then he would come back to the middle. He was a great storyteller, always finding ways to get new hooks here and there, to keep you listening to a long story.”

In Sueño Perro’s film installation, which sees Iñárritu review a meter of archived celluloid taken during the making of Amores Perros, he pushes his explorations of narrative even further, giving the audience what he instead refers to as “light sculptures” and “dreams” that emerged from bits and pieces of the raw material of his debut. Creating Sueño Perro was a major process that took years of dedicated work.

“I thought, ‘Well, maybe I can salvage things that never worked, and maybe they meant something,’” Iñárritu said. “That was a seven-year process, to figure out whether or not there was something there. The movie. It was.” [Amores Perros] It’s 2 hours and 34 minutes long, which is about 18,000 feet of film. So 1 meter-feet is an enormous amount of film. I wanted to film everything, and I was probably running the camera all the time.

Iñárritu, whose subsequent films Birdman and The Revenant brought him two Best Director Oscars, was inspired to return to Amores Perros in part because of the film’s 20th anniversary, which saw Criterion release a remastered version. Watching the edited version, he saw that his film retained its power after all these years. “The bite from these dogs was still pretty bad,” he said. “It was great to see that the film is still holding up so well.”

He also takes credit for the auspicious discovery that archived recordings had been located for years at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). “That really amazed me, because you never do that,” Iñárritu said. “The miracle was that the producers — Monica Lozano, Tita Lombardo, and Martha Sosa — decided to send everything that was left of the newsroom to UNAM.”

Those seven years he spent examining the recorded footage of Amauris Perros and turning it into an installation piece gave Iñárritu a different kind of creative freedom, one completely separate from his work on film. While even innovative films are subject to the demands dictated by the need to tell a compelling story, using an installation piece he can separate the pieces from the narrative and transform them into pure fragments of image and sound.

“When you free yourself from the narratives that we’re so addicted to — the plot twists and all that — when you free the images from that, the images have to say something,” he said. “Not by offering any story, but by being what you found. The way you remember a movie is never complete, you’re always remembering flashes and images and moments. That’s the way our memory works. So, this is kind of a representation of how our memory works when we remember a movie — they’re bits of light and memory that aren’t connected, but somehow they mean something, and hopefully they make you feel something.”

Sueño Perro’s film is about abandoning cinematic plot and searching for a different kind of truth that can be captured on film. Iñárritu explained that he is indebted to the authors of the Latin American boom – led by Carlos Fuentes, Gabriel García Márquez, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Julio Cortázar – who dared to tell stories in completely new ways, constructing narratives that question the nature of our realities. Inspired by these writers, as well as Akiro Kurasawa’s film Rashomon – in which each different character tells their own version of a central murder – Iñárritu found his own understanding of how film can create its own version of our reality.

“Rashomon really made a huge impact on me, knowing that one event is observed in three different ways, telling completely different stories. One of the things we’ve lost is that we’ve confused truth with reality. Reality doesn’t care about our truth or our beliefs. Truth seems very personal, but truth isn’t truth. Reality is much more complex, so those films, from Rashomon to Amoris Perros, have to notice one thing and understand that reality doesn’t really exist, so we only have one slice of that event, and the world we live in has become Very complicated because we assume that reality is what we believe it to be, but that’s not true.

In his search for ways moving images can put us in touch with a reality beyond our personal realities, Iñárritu returns to the cinematic basics that have been a mainstay of the medium for more than 100 years, before the shift to digital cinema. Sueño Perro has deliberately made it a tangible experience that includes real film and real projectors. The audience enters a narrow space filled with smoke and light, as well as the distinct sounds of Mexico City. He believes that for those who never lived in an era when it was normal to see film projected on a screen at 24 frames per second, seeing movie projectors will be a revelation.

“I think one of the very powerful things from my point of view from this experience is that you get into a dark place, and you’re faced with these huge projectors that are dinosaurs, which are magic lanterns, that project shafts of light. Their materiality is a statement against artificial intelligence. Suddenly, people feel alive in that room. The installation is very sensual, and that’s what I was interested in, that young people will understand how this flash and this flame and this sound are very delicate and sensual — that’s part of cinema.” “It’s not just a tablet or a cell phone that you watch yourself at night in your room — it’s very specific to our existence.”

Iñárritu hopes that this Sueño Perro experience will serve as a wake-up call at a time when films are increasingly being watched at home on small screens, and when artificial intelligence is increasingly being integrated into the filmmaking process. Being a director who truly loves the old-fashioned physicality of film, Iñárritu expressed his annoyance at what AI might do to the film industry.

“Now, with AI, we’ve reached a point, where I think our senses will be so lacking in information that it will affect our ability to really learn from what we see and hear in a comprehensive and useful way. I think the crisis of AI will be the fact that we will start to doubt everything we see on the screen. It will be so terrifying that it will force us to go back to basics, to just believe what we really experienced with our bodies, that it was really something real… Maybe I’m trying to be positive here, but it’s so terrifying that I would love to find something that could Which brings us to the good thing about this…this is an anti-AI exhibition.

Iñárritu worked on Sueño Perro throughout the creative process for his upcoming film Digger, which was titled Tom Cruise. He found that spending time sifting through all the excess footage of Amauris Perros was a relaxing and helpful counterpoint to the pressures of producing a major film in Hollywood.

“There’s a lot of pressure to find the story, and I think that’s what was liberating for me to do the compositions, it was almost like a game,” he said. “It was very liberating to not have that financial pressure, and to do it in parallel. It was a great way to escape a little bit from [Digger]. I was just going back and time traveling to 25 years ago and having a little fun.

As for Digger, Iñárritu couldn’t help but be a star child who was blown away by working with Cruise. He expects the film to be intense, but in a very different way than Amores Perros was. “It’s Tom Cruise!” He shouted. “It’s a different kind of intensity, it’s a lot of fun. It’s been an exhilarating experience, a really great experience.”