BEYOND: The fourth amigo

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By Kelly Jane Torrance

In a story for this column two years ago headlined "The stories of three amigos," I talked to three directors about their strangely collaborative friendship in the competitive world of filmmaking.

Alfonso Cuaron, Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu and Guillermo del Toro all had critically acclaimed films come out within months of one another — "Children of Men," "Babel" and "Pan's Labyrinth." The directors, all in their 40s and hailing from Mexico, are good friends who provide very constructive feedback for one another, whether it's giving advice on scripts or cutting 10 minutes out of one another's films. The frankly gushing way they spoke about one another's work was unlike anything I had ever seen in the business.

While "The Three Amigos" seemed a fitting title for the Spanish-speaking trio, it has turned out to be wrong — there's now a fourth amigo, one who always shared that collegial friendship but has just started making feature films of his own.

Carlos Cuaron's Mexican dramedy "Rudo y Cursi" opens in theaters here today. The film reunites actors Diego Luna and Gael Garcia Bernal for the first time since 2002's surprise international hit "Y tu mama tambien," a sexy road movie directed by Alfonso Cuaron that earned a screenwriting Oscar nomination for both brothers.

Carlos Cuaron, during a recent stop in the District, says he never planned to become a director like his older brother. He decided at the age of 14 to become a writer and studied English literature at the Unversidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico. "I thought of myself, in the future obviously, as a novelist, an intellectual, surrounded probably by boring people like politicians and diplomats," he remembers. "Fortunately, that didn't happen, and that didn't happen because Alfronso introduced me to filmmaking. At some point, he said, 'You want to be a writer; help me write the scripts for the things I want to do.'"

That collaboration led to a career of his own. He went to Hollywood and earned a good living writing scripts that, as happens often in Tinseltown, never got made into films.

"In the mid-'90s, I was one day having dinner with Alfonso and Guillermo," he recalls. "I was depressed, and Guillermo asked, 'What's wrong?' I said, 'I write all these scripts, they don't get produced, and it's like giving birth to dead babies, and it's terrible.' He said, 'Why don't you direct them?' It was too obvious to him, but not for me."

He had never gone to film school, as his brother had, so he made eight short films before tackling his first feature. Mr. Cuaron, 42, also wanted to see if he actually liked directing. He did.

As a writer, Mr. Cuaron already had established relationships with the two amigos he calls "also my big brothers." He met Mr. del Toro, then a makeup artist, when he and Alfonso Cuaron were working on a Mexican television series not unlike "The Twilight Zone."

He met Mr. Inarritu when the director asked him to be literary coordinator for a series on which he was working. ("I agreed, with the condition he'd let me direct one of the scripts," the writer relates.) "There was an instant click there," he says. "We were not afraid of admitting we admired each other."