Career
While teaching at the Universidad Iberoamericana, Arriaga met future film director Alejandro González Iñárritu and decided to make a feature length, multiplot film set in Mexico City. The result was Amores Perros (2000), one of the most heavily praised films in the recent history of Mexican cinema. The film, with its gritty look at the underbelly of Mexican life received an Oscar nomination for "Best Foreign Film" as well as a BAFTA Film Award for "Best Film not in the English Language," the "Critics Week Grand Prize" and "Young Critics Award" at the 2000 Cannes Film Festival as well as many other awards from festivals and societies around the world.
The success of Amores Perros earned Arriaga and Iñárritu an invitation to the U.S. to work on the Universal/Focus feature film 21 Grams, starring Benicio del Toro, Naomi Watts and Sean Penn. Watts and del Toro received Academy Award nominations for their performances.
Iñárritu and Arriaga collaborated on a third movie, Babel, to form a trilogy with his first two pictures focusing on the theme of death. However, friction between writer and director led to Iñárritu banning Arriaga from attending the 2006 Cannes screening of Babel. Nevertheless, Inarritu and Arriaga both received Academy Award nominations for their work.
On January 19, 2007, the film adaptation of his book El Búfalo de la Noche directed by Jorge Hernandez Aldana premiered at the Sundance film festival. It features an original score by Omar Rodríguez-López of The Mars Volta. The main title sequence for this movie was created by Canadian studio Mucho Motion and One Size from the Netherlands.
On 29 August 2008, The Burning Plain was premiered at the Venice Film Festival. Arriaga wrote the script and pitched it to American producers, who talked to some directors. Arriaga eventually directed the film, starring Charlize Theron, himself.
An award-winning screenwriter, Arriaga has repeatedly stated that he hates being called a "screenwriter" and that he hates screenplays being referred to as such. He claims that he and all other screenwriters are writers, and the title of screenwriter diminishes the work of screenwriters. He now continuously advocates for screenwriters being referred to as "writers" and screenplays being referred to as "Works of Film". However, in a TV interview at KUSI in San Diego on September 10, 2009, he clarified that he did not really mind the English word "screenwriter." It was the word in Spanish which he did not like. The Spanish word most often associated with screenwriters, "guionista", is also used to describe people who write tour guidebooks. He does not think of himself as a guidebook author.
Read more about this topic: Guillermo Arriaga
Famous quotes containing the word career:
“Whether lawyer, politician or executive, the American who knows what’s good for his career seeks an institutional rather than an individual identity. He becomes the man from NBC or IBM. The institutional imprint furnishes him with pension, meaning, proofs of existence. A man without a company name is a man without a country.”
—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)
““Never hug and kiss your children! Mother love may make your children’s infancy unhappy and prevent them from pursuing a career or getting married!” That’s total hogwash, of course. But it shows on extreme example of what state-of-the-art “scientific” parenting was supposed to be in early twentieth-century America. After all, that was the heyday of efficiency experts, time-and-motion studies, and the like.”
—Lawrence Kutner (20th century)
“It is a great many years since at the outset of my career I had to think seriously what life had to offer that was worth having. I came to the conclusion that the chief good for me was freedom to learn, think, and say what I pleased, when I pleased. I have acted on that conviction... and though strongly, and perhaps wisely, warned that I should probably come to grief, I am entirely satisfied with the results of the line of action I have adopted.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)