Alejandro G Iñárritu is one of only three filmmakers in Hollywood history to have won back-to-back directing Oscars – and now the Mexican auteur is back with his first film since the one-two punch of Birdman and The Revenant.
Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths arrives on Netflix this weekend and sees Iñárritu return to his native Mexico for his most personal film to date. It tells the story of an esteemed journalist and documentary filmmaker who goes through something of an existential crisis when he arrives back in his homeland to collect an award, touching on everything from national identity to the nature of memory.
The film opened to mixed reviews at Venice Film Festival earlier in 2022, but in the time since, Iñárritu made the decision to recut the film – chopping 22 minutes off the runtime. In an exclusive interview with RadioTimes.com, he explained his reasons for doing so.
“I finished the film three days before I went to Venice, so it was the first time that I saw it in front of an audience,” he revealed. “So the first time that I saw it, it was a great instructive kind of thing to say, ‘Okay, I can do work to tighten things.’
“But more than anything, not about the time – because I knew that the internal rhythm of some things, of some sequences, could benefit by synthesising some things without losing anything. So that’s what I did. And it was very rewarding.”
He continued: “I’m a butcher when I’m editing, I’m very tough. [William] Faulkner said ‘kill your darlings,’ so things that really I love, but are not serving the whole journey, I can take them out very easily.
“So editing a film is an endless process. You can go over and over and you can be filtering things, and the same film is intact, but I think it’s more sharp. So yeah, I’m very happy about that.”
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The film is a relatively unorthodox one, full of all sorts of surrealist segues and unusual imagery. And according to cast members Ximena Lamadrid and Iker Sanchez Solano – who play the grown-up children of the film’s protagonist – it could well become a cult classic in years to come.
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen a film that gives me that vibe and that entire atmosphere,” said Lamadrid. “We didn’t read the script, so we weren’t really aware of the dream essence of it until we saw it. And so being part of a film like that is definitely so special – I think it will change film, it will become this cult classic with these legendary shots and visuals but also the emotion and the themes.”
Of working with Iñárritu, Solano added: “He was always communicating with everything in the film, but he didn’t want to spoil everything. He kept a lot of secrets, like really important parts of the movie [he kept] secret because he wanted us to have this personal perception of the film, he didn’t want us to have the perception he had of the film.”
Meanwhile, Daniel Giménez Cacho, who plays the lead character Silverio, revealed that the fact he has a lot in common with Iñárritu made it much easier for him to get into character.
“I think I’m actually in this movie because Alejandro talked to me and chose me because I’m in the same or very similar moment of my life,” he said. “We have the same age, we have a wife for 30 years, we have two children. We are maybe looking that ahead of us there is less time than what we have behind, so we see that death is something that’s coming closer.
“We reconsider many things because of that, it’s like a changing in our life now – so there are a lot of coincidences between him and me, and I concentrated on that.”
Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths arrives on Netflix on Friday 16th December 2022. Sign up for Netflix from £6.99 a month. Netflix is also available on Sky Glass and Virgin Media Stream.
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