2015-01-12



From a Deadline interview with Birdman director Alejandro González Iñárritu and his co-writers Alexander Dinelaris Jr, Nicolas Giacobone and Armando Bo:

Iñárritu: [Laughs] I turned 50 last year and I have learned a lot going through my personal process. I learned there are ways to approach life. You can never change the events, but you can change the way you approach them. The only thing that is important to me is to be honest to my circumstance and context. What this film talks about, I have been through. I have seen and experienced all of it; it’s what I have been living through the last years of my life. Instead of approaching it tragically, I wanted to try another mode. Not to reconcile past events, but actually to survive them. Doing this, I personally experienced a kind of reconciliation with life itself and faced things I don’t like about myself, things which used to make me bitter...... 
Deadlin: Birdman has a subtitle. What is the unexpected virtue of innocence? 
Giacobone: It’s a good question. For me, I would say it’s that ego usually wins in that situation where you think you know what you’re doing. You create this mountain that you are climbing and you feel you are in control until you get to this point of desperation where you just realize that you have no control at all. Everything is bigger than you and you turn into this weak, ignorant thing. That moment of ignorance is beautiful....... 
Iñárritu: That subtitle came later. What happens to this character is, he is an actor and to be most successful, he has to be not himself. That is the most incredible set of contradictions, the idea that you have to be not yourself in order to be good. In the moment that Riggin Thompson tries pretentiously and ignorantly to prove he is something that he is not, when he surrenders to that, when the critic says I will kill you, when his daughter rejects him and he realizes he has lost everything, in that moment right before that climactic act onstage, he is not acting. He is real and that is why the critic responded to his performance. He broke the rules of the game. And by surrendering to his reality, he gets to the unexpected virtue of ignorance. There was beauty in it.






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