by MATTHEW HAYS

Alejandro González Iñárritu is as sexy as one of his movies. He sits, contemplative, discussing his latest timeline defying, multi-layered work at the Toronto International Film Festival in September, awaiting his flight back to Mexico.

"I think the most difficult part is deciding what you do next," he says, scratching his chin. He's talking, of course, of the big decision that had to be made after his first film, Amores perros, scored a rash of raves and netted a Best Foreign Language Film Oscar nomination. His analogy for making the decision to create the follow-up, 21 Grams? Bullfighting, naturally.

Fighting the bull

"I felt like a bullfighter. When you are dressing for the match, you are thinking about the bull. But when you're out there with a bull in front of you, you can't think about it, you have to concentrate on killing it. So I wasn't so conscious of it then."

Killing, not surprisingly, does figure in the contorted and varied plots of 21 Grams. The title refers to the amount of weight a human body supposedly loses the second someone dies. And the unique twists in the overlapping subplots demand that critics like myself keep our fat yaps shut and give away as little as possible. Suffice it to say, 21 Grams has what is perhaps the most impressive ensemble of the year - arguably matched only by Eastwood's Mystic River. Benicio Del Toro is a reformed drunk who now counsels youth as a born-again; Sean Penn is a man teetering on the brink of death, having just had a heart transplant; Charlotte Gainsbourg is his long-suffering wife; and Naomi Watts is a drug addict who ends up in a terrible accident. The characters all collide through fate, a motif that is clearly something of an obsession for Iñárritu and his screenwriter, novelist Guillermo Arriaga Jordan, who also penned Amores perros.

Iñárritu insists the shift to the English language was less about maximizing audience numbers than about securing the right cast. "I don't think in terms of box office. It's not about reaching more people. I'm more interested in stories and words. What's the best way to do that? Yes, this screenplay was originally written in Spanish, but I felt this movie needed this cast. It's like when you make a certain cake, you need certain ingredients. For this cake you need the best eggs, a certain flour, a certain kind of cheese or milk. Here, I went to France for Charlotte Gainsbourg, Australia for Naomi Watts, Puerto Rico for Benicio and to the U.S. for Sean. I wanted to put the best of these areas together."

When I bring up comparisons to Tarantino and Jarmusch - all three directors have effectively twisted time to complicate their narratives - Iñárritu nods in recognition. But he says he doesn't really work by cinematic model. "I can't really isolate which films have influenced me specifically. I think a lot of bad films have influenced me the most, actually. They've showed me what not to do."

Money and the market

And Iñárritu tends to agree with legendary American maverick John Sayles, who's stated repeatedly that the financing of movie projects rarely gets simpler, despite solid track records. "The filmmaking experience was different with 21 Grams, but what I discovered is that it's never easy to make a film. Whether it costs 200-million or one-million, there's no easy film and there's never enough money. That's the nature of the business. It's expensive and the bills pile up.

"So many films today are driven by marketing strategies. More and more, people are concerned about political correctness. Art by its very nature should not be politically correct. Art should just be what it is. When you strive for political correctness, you take the meat out of it. Films are so expensive, people end up worrying about all these different interests and people who might be offended. From the moment a film's conceived, the first question you hear is, ‘How much will it make?'

"I think you must ask, ‘What are your intentions for making a film?' If your intentions are good, you'll make a good film. If you make a film for the wrong reasons, like just the fact that it's a job, I think that's going to end up reflected in the film."

21 Grams opens Friday, Nov. 28, at the Cinéma du Parc

>> Movie Listings