González Iñárritu defends Sean Penn's interview of "El Chapo"

Mexican filmmaker Alejandro González Iñárritu expressed his solidarity to actor Sean Penn regarding the controversial interview he conducted with drug trafficker Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán.

"Would you interview 'El Chapo'? Would you make a movie about him?" he responded in a conversation with Spanish newspaper El País.

"I understand Sean Penn. He has been an activist for 30 years and has written many articles. He is possessed by a great curiosity and is attracted to controversial figures. Anybody has the right to go look for 'El Chapo'. He made a fantastic chronicle about how he got to him and, unfortunately, a not very successful interview because he could not ask him questions. The resulting information is poor (but) the experience is very rich," he said.

He added that Mexican journalist "Julio Scherer once said: 'If the devil gives me an interview, I am going to Hell.' I would go too."

Previously, in the same telephone interview, González Iñárritu, who is in Rome, spoke about the immigration subject in the United States and how it has been touched in his new film "The Revenant," which has 12 Oscar nominations.

"At the heart of it is the seeding of the United States, of which very little has been seen in cinema. There were French, Canadians, Spanish, we Mexicans had just obtained our independence from you ... And of course, the Native Americans. As an artist, I can only be faithful to myself and to my circumstances. And these are those of a Mexican that has lived for 15 years in the U.S. I am an outsider with my dark skin. And the current environment is not favorable to Mexicans in the country.

"This is why I have played with races. I have reflected on racism in my films. The racial purity, as promoted by (Republican presidential hopeful Donald) Trump, is a sick and non-existent masturbation: Nature is an orgy of mixing. We all have the blood of everybody else," he said.