When screenwriter, novelist, and director Guillermo Arriaga was 10 years old, he practiced giving acceptance speeches with a Coke bottle. The reason, he explained to his parents, was because he was convinced he would win an Oscar, a Nobel Prize, or an award at the Cannes Film Festival. He’s already achieved one of those goals—he was honored at Cannes with Best Screenplay for The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (2005), which also won Best Actor for director Tommy Lee Jones—and he’s been nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for Babel (2006). Born in Mexico City, Arriaga is at the forefront of Mexican artists who have brought his country’s cinema to the attention of worldwide audiences in the 21st century. With director Alejandro González Iñárritu, he wrote the screenplays for Amores Perros (2000), 21 Grams (2003), and Babel, films that were praised for their unflinching view of humanity’s darkness while at the same time offering hope in the form of community and individual compassion. Arriaga directed his first feature in 2008: The Burning Plain—which starred Charlize Theron, Kim Basinger, and Jennifer Lawrence— and continued his passion for nonlinear stories and complicated, compelling characters. Throughout his work, Arriaga has explored how different languages, cultures, and borders can divide people—but as well how those divisions can be broken down in unexpectedly moving or terrifying ways. A celebrated short-story writer and sports enthusiast, he is also the author of the novels The Night Buffalo and A Sweet Scent of Death.