Alejandro González Iñárritu is a Mexican film director, producer, and screenwriter. He is the first Mexican director to be nominated for the Academy Award for Best Director and the Directors Guild of America Award for Outstanding Directing for 'Babel' (2006).
He won the Academy Award for Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, and Best Picture for 'Birdman' (2014). The following year, he won the Academy Award for Best Director for 'The Revenant' (2015). He is friends with fellow Mexican directors Guillermo del Toro and Alfonso Cuarón, collectively known as ""The Three Amigos of Cinema"".
Iñárritu began his career in 1984 as a radio host at the Mexican radio station WFM, the country's most popular rock music station, where he ""pieced together playlists into a loose narrative arc"". During his time in radio he also wrote and broadcast small audio stories and storytelling promos, that would become a reference for generations of audio producers, radio Dj's and broadcasters as to how to use radio as a more creative media outlet. He later became the youngest producer for Televisa, the largest mass media company in Latin America.From 1987 to 1989, he composed music for six Mexican feature films. During this time, Iñárritu became acquainted with Mexican writer Guillermo Arriaga, beginning their screenwriting collaborations. Iñárritu has stated that he believes music has had a bigger influence on him as an artist than film itself.
In the early 1990s, Iñárritu created Z films, a production company, with Raul Olvera in Mexico. Under Z Films, he started writing, producing and directing short films and advertisements. Making the final transition into TV and film directing, he studied under well-known Polish theater director Ludwik Margules, as well as Judith Weston in Los Angeles. In 1995, Iñárritu wrote and directed his first TV pilot for Z Films, called Detrás del dinero, or Behind the Money, starring Miguel Bosé. Z Films went on to be one of the biggest and strongest film production companies in Mexico, launching seven young directors in the feature film arena
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