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''Babel'': Brad and Cate's dark-horse Oscar contender | 15113__babel2_l
A POINT TO GET ACROSS García Bernal tries to pass over the border
Babel: Eniac Martinez

''I am against Tolstoy,'' says González Iñárritu, referring to Anna Karenina's famous first sentence about how all happy families are alike, while unhappy ones are miserable in ways uniquely their own. ''Tolstoy said that happiness is what gets families together. I think what really connects human beings is what makes us miserable.''

He should know. The 43-year-old director has been dishing out despair ever since making his feature debut with 2001's Amores Perros, which thrust audiences into a car accident's emotional wreckage and went on to become an indie breakout hit in the States, grossing more than $5 million — an impressive sum for a subtitled movie with no stars. He then delved into the unending grief of losing a child in 2003's 21 Grams, which yielded Oscar nominations for both Benicio Del Toro and Naomi Watts. And though a few of Babel's characters do ultimately find the smallest shred of redemption, González Iñárritu and screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga, who also wrote Amores Perros and 21 Grams, put them through hell getting there. (The pair, who spent two years toiling on the script, have since decided to end their collaborative relationship. And despite rumors about a dispute over authorship, González Iñárritu's camp insists their split was amicable. Arriaga was unavailable for comment.)

González Iñárritu says he culled ideas for all four segments from personal experiences after moving to the U.S. four days before 9/11. ''With my Turkish [looking] face, people wondered if I was a terrorist,'' recalls the director, who has penetrating espresso-bean eyes and a wild tangle of brown hair. ''It's the world we live in now, where terrorists have made xenophobia and racism legal.'' He then decided to incorporate plotlines based on the disenfranchised and dislocated Mexican nanny he hired in Los Angeles to care for his kids, and the intense isolation he perceived in disabled teens he observed while publicizing 21 Grams in Japan. ''It was a cultural orgy,'' González Iñárritu says of his decision to take such a global approach to filmmaking. ''My big fear was that it would end up like four stories about Moroccans, weird Japanese, drunk Mexicans, and bad Americans.''

His best hope to avoid some of those dangers? Careful casting. In early 2005, he became obsessed with persuading a reluctant Blanchett to commit to a role that primarily consists of her writhing in pain for all of 20 minutes of screen time. He felt Blanchett's ability to communicate volumes about a character's subtext without words (think: her taciturn frontierswoman in 2003's The Missing) held the key to the success of the movie. ''I needed somebody to make people have empathy with her immediately,'' he says, ''as a woman who is uncomfortable with her husband, uncomfortable with the place, uncomfortable with herself. I had to beg her.''

Ultimately Blanchett was won over by the sheer challenge of making something out of almost nothing. ''I had one scene to communicate everything and then had to enter a [near-death] state,'' she says. ''But it was really about Alejandro's passion for me to do it in the end. We all like being flattered.''

Pitt, on the other hand, showed up like a gift on González Iñárritu's doorstep.


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