Alejandro González Iñárritu, the Director Always Accused of Wanting Too Much

Alejandro González Iñárritu

Photo: Bart Michiels / CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	August 15, 1963 Mexico City, Mexico
Occupation	Film director
Known for	The Revenant, Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance), Amores Perros
Awards	5 Academy Award · Cannes Film Festival · BAFTA · Directors Guild of America

Every Alejandro González Iñárritu film arrives with the same charge sheet attached: too much grief, and too much of the director himself in every frame. He heard it after a car crash in Mexico City split three lives apart, and after a single rifle shot in the Moroccan desert carried across three continents. He heard it when Leonardo DiCaprio dragged himself out of a shallow grave in the snow. His answer has never changed. He asks for more. Digger, a satire in which Tom Cruise plays an oil tycoon racing to save the world from the disaster he caused, is the largest version of that wager so far, and the one with the least room for error.

The route to cinema ran through the sea. Expelled from secondary school as a teenager, he twice signed on to cargo ships bound for Europe and Africa, and later spent a year drifting on a thousand dollars his father had given him. Somewhere on that journey he saw Yılmaz Güney’s Yol, the Turkish drama about prisoners on a week’s leave, and understood that a film could carry the damage of an entire country.

Mexico City, where he was born on 15 August 1963, the youngest of seven children of Luz María Iñárritu and Héctor González Gama, had already shown him how fast a life can turn: his father, a banker who owned a ranch, went bankrupt when the boy was five. He studied communications at the Universidad Iberoamericana and in 1984 became a host on WFM, the capital’s leading rock station, where he sequenced playlists like stories with a beginning and an end. He wrote music for six Mexican features, then co-founded the production company Z Films with Raúl Olvera and learned to fit a feeling into half a minute by directing commercials.

With the novelist and screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga he made Amores perros in 2000, three Mexico City stories bound together by one collision. It won the Grand Prize of the Critics’ Week at Cannes and the BAFTA for best film not in the English language, and was nominated for the Oscar. In 21 Grams a hit-and-run and a heart transplant tie Sean Penn, Naomi Watts and Benicio del Toro to one another, and Watts and Del Toro were nominated for Academy Awards. Babel followed in 2006, spreading the consequences of one gunshot from Morocco to the US–Mexico border and Tokyo with Brad Pitt, Cate Blanchett and Rinko Kikuchi. It made him the first Mexican-born director to win Best Director at Cannes and drew seven Oscar nominations, including Best Picture.

The partnership did not survive Babel. After a public disagreement over who could call those films his own, Iñárritu kept Arriaga off the set. Arriaga told the Los Angeles Times in 2009 that it had to come to an end, adding that he still respected the director. Iñárritu went to Barcelona for Biutiful, in which Javier Bardem plays a dying father who scrapes a living off undocumented workers. Bardem shared the best actor prize at Cannes and was nominated for the Oscar.

Then came a comedy. Birdman cast Keaton, once Batman, as a faded superhero actor staging Raymond Carver on Broadway, with Edward Norton and Emma Stone beside him and Emmanuel Lubezki’s camera disguising the whole film as one unbroken take. In 2015 it won Best Picture, Best Director and Best Original Screenplay, the first Best Picture for a Mexican filmmaker. A year later The Revenant, which put DiCaprio through a nine-month shoot as the frontiersman Hugh Glass, won the actor his first Oscar and made Iñárritu only the third director to take the award in consecutive years, after John Ford and Joseph L. Mankiewicz.

He then left the screen altogether. Carne y Arena, a virtual-reality installation that puts visitors barefoot on sand among migrants detained at the US border, became the first such work presented at Cannes, in 2017, and earned a Special Achievement Academy Award, the first handed out in more than two decades. Two years later he became the first Latin American to preside over the Cannes jury.

Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths is where the charge sheet was read aloud. Daniel Giménez Cacho plays a Mexican journalist based in Los Angeles who comes home to be honoured and finds his country, his marriage and a son who died days after birth waiting for him. Iñárritu and his wife, the editor and designer María Eladia Hagerman, lost their son Luciano that way in 1996. The film premiered at Venice in 2022, went to Netflix and split critics; The Guardian’s Wendy Ide called it audacious but “bloated with self-regard”. Iñárritu answered that there was “a kind of racist undercurrent where because I’m Mexican, I’m pretentious.” Both readings hold. Bardo is about a successful Mexican artist suspected of vanity by the country he left and by the one that rewarded him. The reviews that dismissed it acted out its plot, though the film also handed them the ammunition.

The recent work has looked in both directions. For the 25th anniversary of his debut he recovered more than a million feet of unused Amores perros footage from the archives of the National Autonomous University of Mexico and ran it through banks of 35mm projectors in Sueño Perro, an installation shown in Mexico City and Milan and then at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art until July 2026. In May 2026 he became the first filmmaker admitted to El Colegio Nacional, the academy that has gathered Mexico’s leading scientists and artists since 1943.

Digger is the stake on the table. Shot at Pinewood Studios with Lubezki, it casts Cruise as Digger Rockwell, a magnate trying to prove he is humanity’s saviour before his own catastrophe destroys everything, with Sandra Hüller, John Goodman, Riz Ahmed and Jesse Plemons around him. After a London premiere on 22 September 2026, it opened in Mexico on 1 October and in the United States and the United Kingdom on 2 October, on a budget that trade reports put between $140 million and $180 million. The reviews divided along the old line. Robbie Collin called it “Dr. Strangelove for the climate crisis” in The Telegraph; Robert Daniels of RogerEbert.com found it “excruciatingly painful”. Iñárritu says the film is about the stories we tell ourselves to justify our actions.

The box office will decide within weeks whether Warner Bros. gets its money back. It will not decide the argument about him. After a quarter of a century of answering “too much” with “more”, Iñárritu has made a comedy about a man who cannot stop, and his next film will show whether he heard the joke as a confession.