Gael García Bernal: "I make movies to make friends"

PalmaGael García Bernal perfectly remembers the moment he decided to dedicate himself to cinema. He was filming Y tú mamá también (Alfonso Cuarón, 2001), while he and Diego Luna, the film's other protagonist, were carrying some boxes with cameras and other filming equipment along a beach. Suddenly, they said to each other: “This cinema thing is great, isn't it? We should dedicate ourselves to doing this.” And with that unconscious optimism of youth, they promised each other they would do it together. And so they did: they founded a production company and a festival, and above all, they remained good friends. “We continue to work together and have a very close relationship,” the actor explained this Saturday in Palma. “I thought it was the most normal thing in the world, to have a great friendship and, at the same time, a good working relationship, but over the years I’ve discovered that it’s not very common.”

García Bernal has traveled to Mallorca to receive the Masters of Cinema award at the Atlàntida Mallorca Film Fest, organized by Filmin in Palma –and which also has an online edition–. He received it on Saturday on the cool, nocturnal stage of Atlàntida, in Plaça de s’Hospital, from the hands of fellow actor Miguel Bernardeau, and dedicated it to his fellow actors. “I didn't want to be an actor because my parents were already actors, I wanted to be something else – he confessed –. But I knew I would be an actor, because if your family is from the circus, you'll always carry the circus within you.” Bernal's great fortune, and also Luna's, who is the son of set designers, was to find something of their own in cinema that allowed them to forge their own path outside the world of theater and family tradition. “And it’s a divine job that has allowed me to discover worlds, make many friends, build families, and understand who I want to be. I wish it would never end,” he said emotionally.

A few hours earlier, in a talk at Es Baluard, the actor had shared his concern about the “crisis of friendship” as a pillar of his way of understanding work. “Maybe I wasn't aware of it before, but I make films to make friends – he assured –. It was always one of my great motivations: to make friends, to have my brothers and sisters close. As the Mexican director El Indio Fernández used to say, cinema was made to make friends and eat well. But nowadays it’s very difficult to meet up with friends. I don’t know if it’s age or social media, but I don’t see them like before. There’s no time to get together to conspire or, simply, to play the guitar. So now we invent movies to be together.”

A historic debut

The actor also spoke about his beginnings and what it meant to debut in cinema in the year 2000 with Amores perros, by Alejandro González Iñárritu, an opportunity that came to him while he was studying theater in London. “Iñárritu himself called me, who had a very well-known voice in Mexico because he was a radio DJ – he recalls –. He explained the film to me and I said yes immediately. In Mexico, making movies wasn't a possibility. Hardly any films were being shot. And Amores perros almost didn't exist. The shoot was an adventure every day, we shot with leftover negative from other films and could only do one take for each shot”.

Somehow Amores perros was finished, and the film had an enormous cultural impact on the world of cinema and, of course, on García Bernal's career, even though at that time no one imagined the extent it would have. “On the last day of filming, I asked the producers for two VHS copies to show my family – he points out –. We didn't know the film would go to Cannes or that it would be a great success. Today, without Amores perros Mexican cinema is not understood, nor is Latin American cinema. But if we had thought that all this could happen... There is a verse by Pessoa that says: ‘If the heart stopped to think, it would stop beating.’ Well, with cinema, it’s a bit the same”.

Restless, García Bernal has done it all: he has worked with regular Cannes directors like Pedro Almodóvar (La mala educación), Olivier Assayas (The Black Swan) or Lav Diaz (Magallanes), in American series (Mozart in the jungle, Station Eleven), he has played an icon like Che Guevara in The Motorcycle Diaries... But the film he wanted to be screened in Mallorca coinciding with his tribute was No, the 2012 film by Pablo Larraín about the plebiscite that Pinochet called in Chile in 1988. “It was an election organized by the dictatorship, so the opposition had very few resources, but a very attractive media campaign was organized with the help of several people from the advertising world, of which my character is an amalgamation. It’s ugly to say, but it’s my favorite film of all those I’ve participated in, a very intelligent comedy, very difficult to make, and the closest to the kind of cinema I would like to direct”.

García Bernal's career as a director is still short. He directed Déficit in 2007, Chicuarotes in 2019 and in a few weeks he will premiere Hombre al agua at the Venice Biennale. For now, he resists talking about his voice as a filmmaker. “Things like style and identity should only be discussed in the first person if you are Hitchcock on your deathbed,” he jokes. And besides his films, he highlights one of the projects he created with his friend Diego Luna: the traveling documentary film festival Ambulante. “Documentaries are my favorite genre and a much more interesting way to engage with reality than a political or ideological discourse – he explains–. Chatting about this with friends, we came up with the idea of doing a kind of rock tour, but with documentaries, to share the films we liked. Today it has a structure that works very well and is independent of the whims of politicians. It's one of the best things we've done, and one of the pillars of critical thinking in Mexico.”