Mexicans Became Hollywood’s Best Directors

The success of the movie, Bird­man, means Mexicans have won best director for two years running. In 2014, Alfonso Cuaron won for Grav­ity, his groundbreaking sci-film film that featured Sandra Bullock floating around a junkyard of orbiting satel­lites and made a whopping $716 mil­lion at the box office. Birdman also won for best original screenplay writ­ing and cinematography. It was shot by Mexico’s Emmanuel Lubezki, his second Oscar in a row after grabbing best cinematography for Gravity last year.

Mexican filmmaker accolades don’t stop there. Guillermo del Toro won a cabinet of effects awards for his 2013 sci-fi monster flick Pacific Rim. Rodrigo Prieto shot top flicks like Argo and The Wolf of Wall Street. So who are these band of Mexican artists and how did they fight to the top of one of America’s most com­petitive industries? The common thread is that they all take risks, They push the limits of technology, the lim­its of photography, the limits of story­telling. Together they form a genera­tion of filmmakers and friends who

worked and studied together. Hailing from largely upper-middle-class fam­ilies in Mexico City and Guadalajara, they began making movies when the Mexican industry was at a low in the late 1980s. “There was no variety of films and few options for talent. The industry was dominated by telenove­las and cheaply made films about escort bars,” says Arturo Aguilar, a Mexican film critic. But they began making new interesting films about issues such as HIV, experimental horror films or dramas with differ­ent storytelling techniques. Pioneer­ing this “New Mexican Cinema,” the Amigos worked their way into the openness of Hollywood in the 1990s. They also stood out by bringing new ideas to the silver screen. And as they got bigger budgets, they didn’t stop experimenting, but broke into even crazier terrain. They have be­come a source of pride for Mexico, but they are not really doing Mexican cinema; they are making Hollywood movies with $100 million budgets. It is hard to give that up and go back to Mexico.