Thankful for life, love and hope

NEW YORK CITY - To understand “Amores Perros” and “21 Grams,” a pair of movies from two of the Mexican new wave’s brightest lights, director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu and screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga, you have to know this story.

The setting is a highway pass through a Mexican mountain range. Mr. Arriaga: “We were seven in the car, three kids and four adults. I was sitting in the back seat. The guy who was driving my own truck began playing, ‘Yeah! Yeah! Woo!’ … and suddenly” — he gives a long whistle, signaling a drop over a precipice.

He continues: “I was sleeping. Suddenly, I woke up, rolling, with the breaking metal and the shattering of the glass and the shouting and the kwaaaghhhh. I said, ‘I cannot die.’

“I lost my nose, crushed against a rock. I was, like, impressed by the accident,” says a matter-of-fact Mr. Arriaga.

So that’s where The Accident comes from.

Those who’ve seen 2000’s “Amores Perros” will eventually recognize the trope in “21 Grams,” which opened yesterday in area theaters: The horrific road tragedy, the interconnecting thread inexorably pulling three people who don’t know each other into its world-upending drama.

Rebecca Miller pilfered the idea for her “Personal Velocity” last year, and there’s likely one more trilogy-concluding movie on the way from Mr. Arriaga and Mr. Inarritu, who were here in Manhattan recently to promote “21 Grams,” an Oscar-buzzy movie starring Sean Penn, Benicio Del Toro and Naomi Watts.

“I wanted to write a movie of love and hope,” says Mr. Arriaga, tall, bald, strongly built but soft-spoken. “This is a movie where three characters are in hell, and they think they have overcome hell.”

Mr. Penn’s character thinks he’s beaten terminal illness; Miss Watts, drug and alcohol abuse; Mr. Del Toro, a life of criminality and prison. They’re all wrong.

“When they think they have arrived at a safe haven, circumstances take them down to the deepest hell,” Mr. Arriaga says.

That’s exactly where Mr. Arriaga, a novelist before he took to screenwriting, likes his characters: in the abyss, where even the best of humanity is capable of cruelty; where he says life is lived “in the extreme.”

An atheist, Mr. Arriaga has zero use for religion, a fact that’s made scornfully clear through Mr. Del Toro’s character, a broken man who embraces charismatic Christianity at a church of working-class people.

The character was inspired less from cultural disdain, however, than from personal pique.

Mr. Arriaga explains: “One of my best friends who was an atheist got married to one these reborn Christians, and he stopped being my friend. And he ended his relationship with his father because his wife said, ‘Everyone outside of our community belongs to the devil.’ So, I was part of the devil, and he stopped talking to me.”

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