I was aware of the possible biases you could get as a commercial director, like being too concerned about the technical aspects of the form rather than anything of substance. If you keep working in commercials, you can get trapped in a very superficial way of thinking. I always used commercials as an exercise for filmmaking, like going to the gym.

I think the arts should get big support, but my country has a lot of needs more important than film. Medication, education, food... The poverty is overwhelming. There are simply more important things to be attended to.

I made commercials for corporations like Volkswagen and Coca-Cola, but I was always the one to write them, too, which was a very good exercise, because I learned to tell little stories.

You hear about bombings in other countries, or numbers like "10,000 people died" - you hear that number and you think, "Well, I saw that yesterday in a film, and that didn't look so bad." Younger viewers, in particular, lose perspective on reality.

There's nothing better than being in a film that translates to audiences and makes people think and feel good and walk away with great revelations in their own life of some kind. But when the process and the experience and the fun of that matches, it's a good feeling.

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 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.