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 Entertainment | June 2005 
Palme d'Or Arriaga's Dream of a Lifetime
 Gamaliel Luna - El Universal
| | Mexican screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga (L) and U.S. actor Tommy Lee Jones pose with their respective Best Screenplay and Best Actor awards for Jones' film entry 'The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada' at a photocall after the awards ceremony at the 58th Cannes Film Festival. (Photo: Vincent Kessler/Reuters) |
He was running late and was dangerously close to missing his flight back to Mexico. To make up for lost time, the driver of his van was zig-zagging through traffic at speeds not allowed in France nor anywhere else in the world, for that matter. Guillermo Arriaga, his head still buzzing with the memory of a 15-minute standing ovation at the end of the showing of his film "The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada," was beginning to feel carsick.
Just then, Arriaga's mobile telephone sounded, and, trying to maintain his equilibrium, he answered.
"Don't take that flight!" said the voice of Pierre-Ange le Pogam, director of Europacorp one of the two main producers of "Melquiades," (the other being The Javelin Film Company.)
Arriaga looked at his wife, Maru, seated beside him, and then across at their fellow travelers, actor Barry Pepper and his wife, and responded: "I can't stay; I have to get back to Mexico. I have an appointment there Sunday…" "I just spoke with the committee don't take that flight," repeated le Pogam. "Stay until the award ceremony; you'll be going up on the stage."
The meaning of "You'll be going up on stage" was not lost on Arriaga: He was going to be awarded the Cannes International Film Festival's Palm D'Or for best screenplay. He turned to his wife and said: "We did it, girl, we did it!" Some days later, far removed from the zig-zagging van and the car sickness of that fateful day in Cannes, Arriaga relaxed in a Mexico City hotel lobby and reflected on his award-winning "The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada."
The film, starring and directed by Tommy Lee Jones, tells the story of ranch hand Pete Perkins (Jones) who sets out to fulfill a promise to his recently deceased best friend by burying him in his hometown in Mexico. The friend, Melquiades Estrada, has already been buried in a small, west Texas town, so Perkins kidnaps a Border Patrol officer and forces him to disinter the body. Strapping the body to a mule, Perkins heads into Mexico.
The film "speaks to a theme very close to me, and that's the value of friendship," he says. "Especially the friendship between two men from different cultures but from the same territory, and that's the border."
"(It's also about) how revenge can be justice, and how redemption is a possibility for even those human beings living at the darkest depths. The migration issue touches you, but that was really more of a pretext. What we're really talking about is friendship."
"Almost all of my films have something to do with loss, with death, and how that loss can become a pretext for reflecting on what you really have," Arriaga adds. "But I can't explain this obsession of mine. These themes are a product of an instinct and an intuition; no writer can decide upon them rationally."
Despite his triumph at Cannes, Arriaga says that he is not feeling any pressure to come up with an even better follow-up script.
"You can't think that way because if you do, the work becomes your enemy," he says. "You have to have the self-confidence as well as the humility to say 'I'll do the best that I can,' because if you start thinking that you're the winner of Cannes, you'll never write again." The only things that will keep the screenwriter up at night, Arriaga says, are the health of his children, the happiness of his wife, and the well-being of his parents. The thought of winning more prizes, he insists, will never cause him to lose sleep.
On the subject of family, when asked what films will make him cry, Arriaga says that there is one, a movie he calls "the best movie in the world." That would be the home movie that he and his wife shot of their children as babies.
As a writer, Arriaga says that he is currently at the first stage of maturity. He scorns adaptations, and he has started his own production company, La Neta films, at least in part, he says, to avoid a repetition of the "error" of the cinematic interpretation of his novel "Un dulce olor a muerte." That film, directed by Gabriel Retes, was lacking the fundamental essence of the novel, says Arriaga. "I learned a lesson with that one," he says. "Work only with people who share your same tastes. It would be difficult for me to work with someone, for example, who gets excited about a film like 'Kill Bill.'"
Arriaga grew up in Unidad Modelo (a neighborhood in the Itzacalco precinct of Mexico City), where he straddled the line between good and bad. "When I reached 20, I realized what a cheat I was," he recalls. "For my exams, I'd just read the back covers of books. I'd do anything to avoid reading, but once I finally did start to read books, I understood their wisdom."
"As far as the cinema, that was always there for me. Ever since I was little, I would imagine movies."
"La noche del Búfalo," the debut work of director Jorge Hernández, and "Babel," the last part of the trilogy of Alejandro González Iñárritu ("Amores Perros" and "21 Grams") will be the next two films released that are based on Arriaga's screenplays. The latter is already in production.
Now, with a sense of internal peace, he recalls once again the words he said to his wife during that dizzying van ride back in Cannes, in which he expressed both his own satisfaction and that of his entire country: "We did it, girl, we did it!" |
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