Iñárritu: Downey Jr. Hasn’t Apologized for Cultural Genocide Remark

Alejandro González Iñárritu isn’t holding his breath for an apology from star Robert Downey Jr.

Seven years after Downey first commented on Iñárritu’s “bright” English vocabulary as a native Spanish speaker, “Bardo” director Iñárritu does not “expect” Downey to be remorseful or issue a retroactive apology.

“Of course not. Of course not. I don’t expect that,” Iñárritu told The Independent. “I honestly could not care at all. I am completely against what he said but I will defend his right to say whatever he wants. Anything he wants to say is fine, but for me it reads completely the wrong way.”

In 2015, Iñárritu told a reporter that Marvel movies were a form of “cultural genocide,” to which Downey responded in a separate interview, “For a man whose native tongue is Spanish to be able to put together a phrase like ‘cultural genocide’ just speaks to how bright he is.”

Iñarritu addressed the infamous comment while speaking with IndieWire’s Eric Kohn in September 2022. “It was like ‘Oh, you guys from your banana country,’” he said. “If I were from Denmark or Sweden, I might be seen as philosophical, but when you’re Mexican and you say things, you’re pretentious.”

Downey also recently went head-to-head with Quentin Tarantino over the Oscar winner’s claims that there is a “Marvel-ization of Hollywood” in the modern era. “I think that creatively it is a waste of time to be at war with ourselves,” Downey said. “I think this is a time when everything is so much more fragmented now that I think you have this kind of bifurcation. Throwing stones one way or another … and I’ve had my reactions in the past when people said things that I felt were discrediting my integrity … I go, ‘You know what? Let’s just get over it. We’re all a community. There’s enough room for everything.’”

Elsewhere, Iñárritu recently chimed in on the big vs. small screen debate, telling Deadline, “If you watch a Fellini or a Godard movie on your computer, it’s still a great movie. It doesn’t change the power of the idea. But I think the ideas are being reduced to computer size in terms of ideology, and I think everybody is participating in that. The reduction of the idea is what we should discuss, not the possibilities of the medium.”

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