BASIC: An interview with 21 Grams screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga.
By Warren
Curry
11/19/03
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BASIC: An interview with 21 Grams screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga. By Warren
Curry |
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I had the pleasure of speaking one-on-one
with Guillermo Arriaga, who, in addition to his work as a screenwriter,
is an acclaimed author of novels and short stories, via phone
while he was in New York recently. Focus Features will release
21 Grams in New York and Los Angeles on November 21, before
it expands to more cities soon after.
(Read the review of 21 Grams.)
Why the title 21 Grams?
21 Grams refers to the weight a person loses at the exact moment of death. I can't say this is a corroborated specific fact. Some doctors have weighed dying people, and at the exact moment of death they lose 21 grams. I wanted to use this as a metaphor about the way a person who dies weighs over the ones that survive them. Sometimes you carry this weight all of your life.
Talk a bit about the genesis of the script?
I have been living all of my life in Mexico City, except for a couple of years I worked as the director of the department of communications at a university in Leon (Mexico), and the university was in the outskirts of the city. One day, I went out of work very late, and it was my birthday party. I knew that my wife was waiting for me with my friends and I was late. I was on my way home, and because it was the outskirts I had to take a highway. There was a patrol car and there was an accident, so I stopped because it was a road a lot of students used to drive home. I stopped and there was a man lying there dead -- someone ran over him. A police officer pulled out (the man's) wallet to see his ID. Beside his ID was a photograph of him with a smiling woman with a little girl in her lap. This man was dead, and I thought his family is waiting for him and now he's dead. Maybe his family is now laughing and having dinner, this woman is playing with the little baby, and this guy is never going to arrive home. I joined this idea of the dead man with my birthday party, and that was the genesis of the idea.
The motivation has to do with my son, Santiago, who Benicio Del Toro's character is named after. Santiago in English is Jack. When he was 4 or 5 years old he asked me, "If I die will you ever smile again?" His cousin, when he was two years old, drowned in a pool -- my wife's sister's kid. After 3 or 4 years, my son saw her smiling again. He could not understand how after such a terrible loss she can smile again. That's why he asked this question. This is my answer to that question.
You've been quoted as saying that your work is about the dead influencing the living. Why is that?
Almost all of my work has that theme. It has to do with almost all of my novels and my short stories. My grandmother died when I was 15 years old -- you can never understand death. Something that this death brought to me was understanding that our identity is created by who we're surrounded by. For example, in 21 Grams, this woman's identity -- her family's her identity. The moment she loses her family, her identity is broken. Many times, when people die, your identity turns to another direction, has another meaning. You can't forget these dead people -- they belong to you as much as the living ones. These people are sometimes much more powerful in their absence than in your presence.
Both of your films examine morality, and you seem to be specifically interested in the elusiveness of the concept. Especially in 21 Grams, where the characters are neither good nor bad, and the film doesn't present traditional protagonists and antagonists.
Something I learned very early in my work as a novelist is that you can never judge your characters. You need to always love and understand them in order to make them believable. I think that what is the essence of humanity is contradiction. The more contradictory a character is the more humane he is. In life, there is never black and white. In Amores Perros, for example, I wrote horrible, awful characters with awful motivations, but people understand them. To understand a hit man -- a hit man is always a terrible person, but I wanted the audience to understand the other side of the hit man. In 21 Grams, Jack runs over a family, but it is an accident. What is sad is that he left them dying in the street -- he had the decision to stay there. The post-accident decision was his, but he decided to run away. That choice has a consequence, and the consequence is huge guilt. You can do nothing about accidents, they happen, but how you behave after the accident is how the real character of a person is revealed. I wanted to have these kinds of contradictions, and I love contradictions in my characters, so people will not say this is the good guy and this is the bad guy. They will say these are people.
What is it about the multi-story, non-linear structure that you find so appealing?
This was a choice I took for this story in particular. I always want to find the way a story has to be told. I wasn't intending to write this structure, until I read an old, unfinished novel I wrote when I was 24 or 25 years old. It went back and forth all the time. And I have a short story that has been recently published that also goes back and forth all the time. I think this is the way we tell stories on a daily basis -- we never go linear. We always go back and forth from one point to the other. For example, if I want to tell you how I met my wife, I will never begin at the very beginning…I think this is the natural way to tell stories. My worry was to have emotional continuum. There are huge gaps of narrative information, but I want to have an emotional continuum. I was trying to balance every scene very carefully, and make them contradictory.
And then I was obsessed with light. Few people notice this, but in the screenplay I tried to have the first 30 pages have a lot of light, day scenes. When the accident is revealed, I want to have dark scenes -- then there are afternoon, dusk, or dawn scenes, where everything is between light and dark, so you can feel how the characters are feeling at that moment. I was also trying to achieve that, so that's why I chose this structure -- to emotionally involve the audience, to mold it narratively, to look for a dialogue with the audience. I always care that the audience has a dialogue with the film.
Being that you're a novelist and a short story writer, do you ever feel restricted by the screenplay form?
No. What is important is that you have
to conciliate and never concede. If you concede you are betraying
yourself, the characters, and the screenplay. I can understand
point of views, of course, the director's point of view, and I
can understand the production limitations, but I can't concede.
I must be very honest with my story and I have to be very truthful
with my characters. Because I'm a novelist, I always write my
screenplays with the same care and the same deepness I will do
with a novel. I take care of the style and the action. I re-write
and re-write dialogue again and again, so it will feel fluid.
I take care of language as much as I do in a novel. I want the
screenplays to read as if they were novels, with the same beauty
of language and the same beauty of dialogue.
Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu is a very visceral filmmaker, and
he brings an aggressive visual style to your screenplays. Do you
envision your scripts the way he directs them?
Absolutely. First of all, I think that Alejandro is one of the greatest directors of our time. I can tell you this after working two times with him that he's a genius. He's brilliant. We have this dialogue all of the time. The other day someone asked Alejandro why this collaboration works so well, and he said it was because we fight all the time. And yes, we fight all the time. Not only on the screenplay, we fight all around, but it's not an ego thing. It's working for the film. When he approaches it this way, I already know he's going to approach it like that, because I have this dialogue with him. I understand perfectly how he's going to shoot. I understand perfectly the kind of details in the screenplay that will help him in the moment he shoots.
Amores Perros can definitely be seen as a bleak film, and in my opinion 21 Grams taps into even deeper levels of darkness. Is this a reflection of your view of the human condition -- that all human beings are, as you put it, in a constant state of contradiction?
I think in both films it's clear that we're always in a state of contradiction. Characters that have no contradictions are not appealing to me; people that have no contradictions are not appealing to me. I hate these, as we say in Mexico, "one block" people -- people who are very coherent with everything, and you can always expect the same from them. I think that they are dark films, but I think that they are very hopeful films also. It's easy to talk about hope when we have these feel-good movies, but what about hope when you are deep in hell? That's very interesting, and I think that in these times we are having very dark moments. September 11 was a very dark moment. The Oklahoma City bombing was a very dark moment for the United States, and the Columbine killings. Where can you find hope? In the end, I think that both films are quite optimistic. What I want to say with 21 Grams is that life has enormous power -- it can teach us that life is worth it and that life has more power than death. Even though they are dark films, they are hopeful films. They are love stories, both of them.
Fate also plays a big role in 21 Grams. How much of what happens to the characters is a result of their actions, and how much is out of their control?
There is a Spanish philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset, and he says that a person is defined by his circumstances and by his own decisions. I am obsessed with this -- how much is our circumstances and how much is our own decisions? What I try to portray in all of my characters are ones that decide. If even the circumstances take them to deep hell and dark places, they can decide to continue with their lives.
Fate is important, but much more important is the capacity of human beings to make decisions. I'm an atheist -- a lot of people think this is my Catholic film. I'm not Catholic, I have no Catholic background at all. I have not a single bit of Catholic education -- no religious education. I think life is our only chance; our only chance to tell people we love that we love them. This is the only chance we have to demonstrate how much we love them, and this is the only chance we have to take advantage of. I am always obsessed with people who know that this is the only chance, and they use their decisions to correct the directions in their life. Even if circumstances push it to another place, you have the decision to turn your life again.
Is there a reason you didn't set the film in a specific city? I know you shot in Memphis, but you never name the city in the film?
I want to tell the story very basic with very basic feelings. Our idea is that it's so basic that it doesn't need a specific place to happen -- it can happen anywhere. It can be a nightmare for everyone everywhere in the world. I don't think for this particular movie that the setting was important. What's important is to make a person feel that it can happen to you. Even where you're living -- in New York, L.A., Memphis, Seattle, Boise, Idaho, it can happen to you.
So the idea of it being universal?
Not so universal -- very basic. I don't
want to be pretentious and say it's universal. These are basic
feelings and basic situations. To lose somebody is one of the
situations, and that your responsible for the death of someone
is another basic situation that can happen anywhere. The feelings
that this brings is love, hate, revenge, guilt, forgiveness --
I think they are very basic.
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