When people laugh and applaud as characters are killing each other, and you never see the body that's lying there, or you never see the family that suffers, then it turns into a cool thing to do, like a videogame. Then, when you watch the news and see that 15 soldiers were killed, you start to see them as just numbers, material, information, images. We lose the real weight and real value of one simple human life.

I remember, the first time I saw a [Andrei] Tarkovsky film, I was shocked by it. I didn't know what to do. I was fascinated, because suddenly I realized that film could have so many more layers to it than what I had imagined before. Then others, like Kurosawa and Fellini, were like a new discovery for me, another country.

Every time that I'm challenged with a film I think that I haven't learned anything, that every film is different and that every thing that I have learned is useless in this new adventure.

I was a street kid, basically. But really, Mexico City has always been this big, complex monster of a city that has always had real problems and needs, and I've always found my way through it in different ways.

In the creative process, my ego has always been a huge tyrant ... a dictator and kind of rude and very misleading, because sometimes when I'm doing something, I say, "This is great! This is fantastic! Very genius!" And 20 minutes later, I feel like a dead jellyfish. "You are a stupid a**hole. This is a piece of sh*t. Nobody will care about it."

Life and death are illusions. We are in a constant state of transformation.

For me, it's not about masochism to talk about death. For me, it's about observing life through death, from the last point of it.