Alejandro G. Iñárritu has always known how to make an entrance. The four-time Oscar winner returned to the Croisette this week, not with a new film to premiere — at least not yet — but to honor Amores Perros, the snarling, kinetic masterpiece that launched his career a quarter century ago.
The 25th anniversary screening of the Mexico City-set triptych took place Tuesday night in Cannes with Iñárritu in attendance, fresh off wrapping his latest project — a “brutal comedy” starring Tom Cruise and Sandra Hüller — in London. The celebratory event was less a retrospective than a reawakening. A new theatrical re-release of Amores Perros is slated for later this year, along with an immersive museum installation, a making-of book, and, of course, plenty of stories from the director about how the film nearly didn’t happen at all.
“Back then, in Mexico, we made maybe seven movies a year,” Iñárritu told The Hollywood Reporter at the Mondrian Hotel in Cannes, the same place he stayed back when he brought Amores Perros here 25 years ago [when it was still called The Grand]. “There was no real national cinema. If you made one film, that was it. That was your shot. And I poured everything into that film. All the contradictions, the rage, the love, the chaos of Mexico City — it’s all in there. That’s why it’s messy. That’s why it’s alive.”
Shot on a shoestring $2 million budget from private financing by Altavista Films — a rarity in late-’90s Mexico where most movies were still state-subsidized — Amores Perros was edited by Iñárritu himself, in his home, over several grueling months. Starring Gael García Bernal, in his breakout role, the film weaves together three stories connected by a violent car crash, each segment orbiting around characters grappling with love, loss, and Mexico City’s brutal underbelly.
One scene in particular — a gritty underground dogfight — was as real as it gets. No animals were harmed, but the crew nearly got dropped.
“We were shooting in one of the poorest neighborhoods of Mexico City, just overrun with gangs, crack city,” Iñárritu recalled. “One day, I was on the phone with Carlos Cuarón, the brother of Alfonso, and I felt a gun against my head. I looked back and saw my cinematographer on the ground with a gun to his head. These guys robbed us — took everything, all our equipment. I gave them my watch, my money, even a medallion that wasn’t worth much but meant a lot to me personally.” He continued, “but the location was perfect, so we went back and negotiated with them. We said: If you let us shoot, you can be in the film. And that scene? That’s them. It’s those same guys who robbed us. I asked them about the medallion, but they said they’d already sold everything.”
Alejandro González Iñárritu on the set of Amores Perros.
Federico-Garcia
Iñárritu submitted Amores Perros to Cannes but the film was initially rejected by the festival’s Latin America programmer, who deemed it too long and too violent. “We begged them to show it to the main committee. They said no,” Iñárritu recalls. “At that time, you only had American cinema, European cinema, in the main competition. Latin American film was off to the side in the ghetto they called ‘World Cinema’.”
Eventually, the film landed at Cannes Critics’ Week sidebar. The premiere screening didn’t go well.
“People were walking out, I thought: ‘That’s it. It’s over,’ says Iñárritu. “Only later did people tell me those were international distributors, going out to tell their people to buy the film.”
Amores Perros went on to win Critics’ Week. Lionsgate snatched up U.S. rights, helping the movie go global. It would eventually gross more than $5 million domestically and over $20 million worldwide. It scored an Oscar nomination for best international feature, launching the director’s career and marking the unofficial beginning of the Mexican New Wave — a movement soon joined by friends Alfonso Cuarón (Y Tu Mamá También) and Guillermo del Toro (Pan’s Labyrinth) — bringing Mexican cinema into the global mainstream. “Suddenly, we were not long outside, we were in conversation with the world,” says Iñárritu.
Iñárritu has big plans to mark Amores Perros‘s Silver Jubilee. He is following the Cannes screening with an ambitious visual installation, which will exhibit in Milan at the Fondazione Prada (September 18-February 26) and in Mexico City at LagoAlgo (October 5-January 3, 2026), with an L.A. showcase also planned. The director compiled the video installation from outtakes and never-used footage from the “1 million feet of celluloid” he shot for the original film. “When I edited my film, it was 2 hours and 45 minutes, and that was 16,500 feet. Nine hundred eighty-five thousand feet was left, stored at the National University of Mexico, like wine,” said Iñárritu. MACK Books is releasing a making-of volume on the film later this year, featuring stills, scripts, behind-the-scenes anecdotes, and essays by collaborators.
And the film is getting a proper theatrical re-release, rolling out later this year. “So that young people can see it on the big screen, not just on one of these,” Iñárritu said, waving his phone.
Iñárritu also used his Cannes visit as a soft launch for his next wild experiment, with Tom Cruise. The new film, tentatively titled Judy, just finished production in London. It marks the director’s first collaboration with the Mission: Impossible superstar.
“All I can say is it is a brutal, wild comedy of catastrophic proportions. It’s insane. It’s scary and funny and beautiful. I know comedy is not what people expect from me, or Tom, and making this film was terrifying for me,” says Iñárritu. “But I don’t like to repeat myself, and every film should scare you a little. I felt Birdman was a comedy, a dark comedy, and this one was challenging like that. And Tom makes me laugh every single day. He has this total commitment, this total madness.”
Oscar-nominated German actress Sandra Hüller (Anatomy of a Fall) is part of the ensemble cast of July, which also includes Jesse Plemons, Riz Ahmed, Emma D’Arcy, Sophie Wilde, Michael Stuhlbarg and John Goodman.
“I’ve loved Sandra since Toni Erdmann,” Iñárritu recalls. “I met her here in Cannes that year [2017] and have been wanting to work with her ever since.
Judy has wrapped production at London’s Pinewood Studios. Iñárritu said he’ll begin editing the movie “next week.” Judy is set for theatrical release via Warner Bros. next fall.
