He started his career as a DJ in 1984 at the top-rated Mexican radio station WFM. In 1988 he began composing music for six Mexican feature films, including "Garra de tigre" (1989).

He studied filmmaking in Maine and Los Angeles, under Polish film director Ludwik Margules and studied directing under Judith Weston in Los Angeles.

In the nineties he was in charge of the production of Televisa, a Mexican TV company. By the time he was 27 he had become one of their youngest directors.

In 1991, after Televisa, he set up Zeta Films, a society for producing advertising and short films as well as television programs and started writing and shooting TV commercials

His first half-length feature, Detrás del dinero, was produced in 1995 for Televisa and starred Spanish actor/singer Miguel Bosé.

With screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga he planned to make 11 shorts showing the contradictions of Mexico City. After 3 years and 36 drafts, they ended up expanding three stories into the feature length film, Amores perros (1999) starring Gael García Bernal. This gritty look at the underbelly of Mexican life won an Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Film as well as a BAFTA Film Award for "Best Film not in the English Language," the Critics Week Grand Prize and Young Critics Award at the 2000 Cannes Film Festival as well as many other awards from festivals and societies around the world.

Iñárritu made the final short ("Powder Keg") in the BMW The Hire series and directed the Mexico segment of the independent feature 11'09'01 - September 11 (2002), a collective movie about the influence of 9-11 on the world with Claude Lelouch, Shohei Imamura, Ken Loach, Mira Nair, Amos Gitai and Sean Penn.

The success of Amores perros won Iñárritu an invitation to the U.S. to direct the English language feature film 21 Grams for Universal. Again written by Guillermo Arriaga, it starred Benicio Del Toro, Naomi Watts and Sean Penn. Del Toro and Watts received Academy Award nominations for their performances.

He currently directed his new film Babel, which consists of three stories set in Morocco, Mexico, the US and Japan [1]. It is due for commercial release in November 2006 and stars Adriana Barraza, Gael García Bernal, Cate Blanchett, Brad Pitt and Koji Yakusho. He earned the Best Director Prize (Prix de la mise en scène) at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival.

However, González Iñarritu was severely criticized for banning writer Guillermo Arriaga from attending the 2006 Cannes Film Festival after a serious falling out between the two. The dispute is thought to relate to the authorship of Iñárritu's previous film 21 Grams, insiders have stated that Arriaga wanted the screenplay to be credited as a collaborative effort while Iñárritu claimed sole credit as the auteur of the film. Sources in the industry believe that it is unlikely that the pair will ever work together again.
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