Guillermo Arriaga on Cinema, Art and How “Masturbation is a Metaphor for Isolation”

As he took the podium before more than 100 fans and aspiring writers at the University of North Texas on Saturday, the author of Amores Perros, 21 Grams and Babel was surprised by the turnout. “Wow,” said Guillermo Arriaga, surveying the packed room at UNT’s Gateway Center. “When they told me 9 a.m. Saturday, I thought it was going to be a couple of people and myself.”

The throng was treated to a three-hour tutorial that dispensed with “the three acts, blah, blah blah” and instead moved from the use of light and space to the particular challenges of multi-linear narratives and the storytelling value of masturbation (yes, you read that right). His Saturday appearance was the culmination of three days’ worth of lectures the Oscar-nominated screenwriter gave on the UNT campus at the end of last week.

“Art is standing at the edge of an abyss and trying to see something no one’s ever seen before,” said Arriaga, “then bringing it back to share with people.”

As a screenwriter, he explained, that first and foremost means sitting
down and doing the work. The Mexico City native and former professor is
widely acknowledged as one of the most influential writers working in
cinema, and he still writes every day from 10 p.m. to 5 a.m. —
“including Sundays.” When he gets tired, he looks around his studio at
his collection of Mexican kitsch skulls and imagines them encouraging
him to continue: Arriaga, the skulls tell him, you’re going to die. Just as he pulled from Hemingway and Faulkner at various points in his
talk, here he drew on Kafka.

“Writing is my struggle against death,”
he said.

He talked about being acutely aware of light and how he used
it as an organizing principle for the structure of 21 Grams. He
recommended, to many students’ horror, never writing a piece of
dialogue longer than two lines and never writing a scene longer than
one page. He emphasized the importance of staying true to a specific
concept and/or one-word theme in each piece of work.

In his directorial
debut — The Burning Plain, to be screened at the AFI Dallas International Film Festival next month –the concept is the
four elements: water, air, earth and fire. In 21 Grams, the theme is
redemption; in Amores Perros, the theme is love, while the organizing
concept is the use of narrative parallels between human beings and
dogs. Amores Perros also wound up exploring the three stages of a man
confronting love and relationships, though that realization came only
after writing the story.

“It’s a discovery,” the writer said, adding that he
never outlines and often declines to tell producers how a particular
script will end. “If I know everything about my characters, how are they going to surprise me?”

Arriaga dedicated a chunk of time
to the impact of weather and landscape on characters. To illustrate the
effect of the environment, he played key scenes from Babel (mostly the
ones filmed in Morocco) and Tommy Lee Jones’s Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada.
Here’s where masturbation comes in.

Both films show a male character
masturbating alone amid a vast desert expanse. In Babel, it’s the young
Moroccan boy who winds up shooting a tourist. In Three Burials,
it’s the border patrol agent who’s poring over Hustler when a gunshot
ricochets against the hillside.

“I’m not saying masturbation is the
best way to spend your time,” he said with a chuckle. “What I’m saying
is masturbation is a metaphor for isolation.”