Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu

I'm always surprised when some director says, 'When I saw this film, that changed my life.' I don't have that.

It's more enjoyable for me to know that life is finite. Knowing that, I would like to go to a party. When you get to the holidays, if you think that the holidays will be forever, you just take it for granted. But, if you know that you have just three days at the beach, you will be so happy to be there every day.

You can better embrace life, you can enjoy it more, when you are conscious that it will end. You bite life.

All of us want something in life, all of us have flaws, and all of us have strengths. So, I always try to discover those things in a character and then try to expose it in one way or another.

I realized - and I am probably the last person in the world to realize this - that we live our lives with no editing.

I never deny a true experience in one shot.

Too much knowledge and analysis can be paralysis.

I've listened to music all my life. I've always felt that music tells more stories sometimes than films, with more possibilities. Every time you listen to them, songs bring different images and moods - depending on where you are in your life, you can listen to a song, and it means something different.

Actors are exposed in a way that nobody else can understand. They are subject to the likes and dislikes of people their entire life, no matter how successful they are. At the same time, in order to be liked, you have to not be yourself. So it's a very complicated human exercise - an alchemy that I have never understood.

I think I want to talk about life from the point of view of death.

I think that when we wrestle with death... we start fearing life, because then we come to terms with something that is inevitable.

When I was about to turn 50, I went into a kind of personal revision and observed my own priorities and what led those priorities in my life. And many things that, in a way, were profound.