Iñárritu became the first Mexican filmmaker to be nominated as director or producer in the history of the Academy Awards, as well as the first to win for Best Original Screenplay and Best Picture.

[3][4][5] His maternal grandfather, Alfredo Iñárritu y Ramírez de Aguilar, was a prominent lawyer, judge, and justice of the Supreme Court of Mexico with partial Basque origins.

[5][7][8] He briefly ran off with a girl from a wealthy family to Acapulco, having been influenced by the Miloš Forman film Hair, but returned to Mexico City after a week.

[5][8] Soon after, Iñárritu left home and worked as a sailor on cargo boats, taking two trips at the ages of 16 and 18, sailing through the Mississippi River and then visiting Europe and Africa.

[9][10] Around this time, Iñárritu had the opportunity to watch the Palme d'Or-winning film Yol by world-famous Kurdish director Yılmaz Güney.

[12][13] He has noted that these early travels as a young man have had a great influence on him as a filmmaker,[10] and the settings of his films have often been in the places he visited during this period.

[10][14] He worked with and interviewed artists like Robert Plant, David Gilmour, Elton John, Bob Geldof and Carlos Santana.

[14] Making the final transition into TV and film directing, he studied under well-known theater director Ludwik Margules, as well as Judith Weston in Los Angeles.

[16][17] In 1995, Iñárritu wrote and directed his first TV pilot for Z Films, called Detrás del dinero, or Behind the Money, starring Miguel Bosé.

Amores perros was the first installment in Iñárritu's and Arriaga's thematic "Death trilogy", and nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.

[19][20] In 2002, Iñárritu directed "Powder Keg", an episode for the BMW short film series The Hire, starring Clive Owen as the driver and Stellan Skarsgård as a war photographer.

[30] The film stars Brad Pitt, Cate Blanchett, Adriana Barraza, Gael Garcia Bernal, Rinko Kikuchi and Kōji Yakusho.

[44] In 2010, Iñárritu directed "Write the Future", a football-themed commercial for Nike ahead of the 2010 FIFA World Cup, which went on to win the Grand Prix at the Cannes Lions Advertising Festival.

[47] On 4 October 2012, Facebook released an Iñárritu-directed brand film titled The Things That Connect Us to celebrate the social network reaching one billion users.

[49] In 2014, Iñárritu won three Academy Awards for directing, co-writing and co-producing Best Picture winner Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance), starring Michael Keaton, Edward Norton, Emma Stone, Naomi Watts, Zach Galifianakis, and Andrea Riseborough.

[50][51] Iñárritu was also set to direct and produce the tv series One Percent, an organic farming drama which he co-created with Alexander Dinelaris, Nicolas Giacobone, and Armando Bo for Starz.

[52] Starz gave the show a straight-to-series order,[53] but dropped out in 2017 as the U.S. broadcaster of the series, with production company MRC shopping the project to other networks or streaming platforms.

[54][55] In 2015, Iñárritu directed The Revenant, initially adapted by Mark L. Smith, before joined the writing process, based on Michael Punke's novel of the same name.

[57] The film considers the nature and stresses on relationships under the duress of the wilderness, and issues of revenge and pardon via Glass's pursuit of the man who was responsible for his hardship.

The One Percent, originally planned as an upcoming American television drama series created and written by Iñárritu, Alexander Dinelaris Jr., Nicolás Giacobone and Armando Bó, was eventually postponed on early March 2017 due to Alejandro feeling burnt out after the production of The Revenant.

[67] Iñárritu's virtual reality project Carne y Arena was the first ever VR installation presented at the Cannes Film Festival in 2017.

[70] Iñárritu co-wrote, co-produced and directed the 2022 Spanish-language film Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths, starring Daniel Giménez Cacho and Griselda Siciliani.

[77] Iñarritu's cinematic influences include Max Ophüls, Robert Altman, Sidney Lumet, Ingmar Bergman, Federico Fellini, Luis Buñuel, Andrei Tarkovsky, Sergio Leone, Martin Scorsese, Yılmaz Güney,[11] and John Cassavetes.

[8][80] In 2009, Iñárritu, along with several filmmakers and actors, signed a petition in support of director Roman Polanski, who had been detained while traveling to a film festival following his arrest in relation to his 1977 sexual abuse charges, which the petition argued would undermine the tradition of film festivals as a place for works to be shown "freely and safely", and that arresting filmmakers traveling to neutral countries could open the door "for actions of which no-one can know the effects.

[64] In 2006, Iñárritu was honored at the Gotham Awards' World Cinema Tribute, alongside fellow Mexican filmmakers Alfonso Cuarón and Guillermo del Toro.