The literature programme Boek & Meester brings an international top author to Rotterdam every month. During IFFR, the Mexican author, scriptwriter and filmmaker Guillermo Arriaga talks about his new novel The Savage (El savaje). With moderator and Dutch author Ernest van der Kwast, he also talks about the scenarios he wrote for acclaimed films.
The best known of these are the ‘death trilogy’ which he made with director Alejandro González Iñárritu: Love’s a Bitch (2000), 21 Grams (2003) and Babel (2006). In addition, Arriaga wrote From Afar, which won the Golden Lion in 2015 at the Venice Film Festival. In 2008, he made his feature debut as a director with The Burning Plain, the cast of which included Charlize Theron, Jennifer Lawrence and Kim Basinger. The mosaic films that made him famous found their origins directly in the art of novel writing: “I tried to bring literary structures to the cinema”, according to Arriaga.
