Striving for Realism

Filming "Babel," recalls director Alejandro González Iñárritu, was akin to "orchestrating chaos." He shot on three continents with a new cast and crew in each location, juggled five languages, an unforgiving desert and did it all for $25 million in just 100 days.

But he credits actress Adriana Barraza, who, with co-star Rinko Kikuchi, received an Oscar nomination, for enduring the greatest personal challenges of the film as Mexican nanny Amelia. She gained 30 pounds for the role and spent a week doing 70 takes in the desert in pantyhose and high heels while lugging 8-year-old Elle Fanning on her hip in 117-degree heat.

Half a dozen burly crew members were hospitalized with heat stroke. Barraza herself suffered as well but refused to be treated. "She never gave up," said González Iñárritu, who received a directing nomination. "She was always conscious that 1,000 people die in the border every year.... That day, I wanted her to go to the hotel, [but] she kept going even with two micro heart attacks that she had."

"All these things really don't matter," says Barraza, who also starred in González Iñárritu's "Amores Perros." "The most difficult thing for me was to create Amelia's character so that it would be a real character and it wouldn't be melodramatic and it wouldn't be a cliché."

That truthfulness was also crucial to González Iñárritu, who helped conceive the screenplay. Amelia's story obsessed him, he says. "For me, Mexican nannies are responsible for, I think, the women's liberation in this country," says González Iñárritu. "Women can work because they have nannies. I think they contribute a lot to this country, but they don't have any rights. For me it was a moral thing."

For Kikuchi, who portrays Chieko, a deaf teenager grieving her mother's suicide, "Babel" was a different sort of challenge. She spent nearly a year auditioning for the role, all the while studying sign language and shadowing a deaf teen, studying how she maneuvered in the world.

Since the actress and director shared no language, González Iñárritu's direction had to be first translated from Spanish to English, then into Japanese. Ultimately, he said, he and Kikuchi relied more on nonverbal cues to communicate.

"Fortunately, there is ... body language," said González Iñárritu. "Because the character is not using words, I sometimes had to describe with my clumsy movements. These kinds of things really worked for us. Sometimes we connected mentally. Little by little, we developed our own language."

"Everything he said, everything he breathed, everything he had in him is something that I also needed to take into myself," said Kikuchi of her director, by phone and through an interpreter. "Everything he wanted, everything he felt I had to be, I was careful not to miss any of them."