Biography

His top ten films of all time are: The Young and the Damned (1950), Sansho the Bailiff (1954), A Man Escaped (1956), The Executioner (1963), Persona (1966), Andrei Rublev (1966), Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988), Mother and Son (1997), Gummo (1997) and Werckmeister Harmonies (2000).

Played rugby for the Mexican national team.

Studied law.

Martin Scorsese called Reygadas' Silent Light (2007) "A surprising picture, and a very moving one as well.".

Worked for the Mexican foreign service in Brussels.

After I make a film I psychoanalyze myself retroactively so that I can give explanations to journalists and film people. But I don't believe in those explanations myself.

[when asked what the actors in his films are doing, if not acting] They just Are. In philosophy there are two qualities. The act of being, and the act of being what they are. I wish my actors would just Be, first of all. And secondly, that they would be a chauffeur with an internal conflict. But the act of being is the one I really want to state.

[on Battle in Heaven (2005)] At the end I am not saying that having your dick sucked means this is paradise. But I am just saying that we long for things and we long for love. Hope is the most important feeling we can have.

[on the nudity in Battle in Heaven (2005)] We are all naked when we go to the shower. At least twice or three times a day we are naked. And most of us have sex, once a week or more. It's a thing that occurs often. But it's not represented ever on film. So the normal thing to do would be to ask every other director why they don't have sex in their film and not ask me about it. I am the only normal one.

I really think most of what we call cinema is not cinema. It's really film theatre or, even worse, illustrated literature. The object of the film is the story and the characters are just technical people representing something. Most cinema is comic books. In my opinion that is not real cinema. Real cinema is much closer to music. Music doesn't represent anything, it is just something that will convey feeling. It doesn't mean anything. I hate the idea that film is actually telling a story! The great part of film is to make you feel, not by the narrative. For example the first shot of Silent Light (2007) is cinematic. The light itself is beautiful. In literature, that does not exist. You can just write, "The sun came up." The beauty in my film is the sun itself. You don't have to recreate it. In cinema, the story and the photography are the same thing. It's not like, "I don't like the story, but great photography." The photography is the film itself; it's not a vehicle for the story. I don't want a story and then you illustrate it, in a way that there will always be a division between form and meaning. I think in art, form and meaning are the same thing. In that sense, music is the most noble of arts, because it does not permit you to separate the music from the meaning. When cinema is true, it is a language in itself - that is why it is an art. I hate the idea that a good film is a good story, as Hollywood people say. That's not letting cinema be totally free.