Alejandro G. Iñárritu returned to shoot and produce a film entirely in Mexico for the first time since Amores Brutos (2000) over twenty years ago.
Alejandro G. Iñárritu's statement for the 79th Venice International Film Festival: "A few years ago, I suddenly realized the road ahead of me was much shorter than the one I had left behind. Inevitably, I started to explore it backwards and inwards. Both paths are elusive and labyrinthine. Time and space enmesh. The narrative that makes up 'our life' is no more than a false mirage constructed of events experienced subjectively by our limited nervous system. Memory lacks truth. It only possesses emotional conviction. It is the truth in that emotion that I set out to search for in the enormous drawer of chimeras I have been carrying. I must warn you beforehand: I have found no absolute truths. Only a journey between reality and imagination. A dream. Dreams, as cinema, are real but not truthful. In both, time is liquid. BARDO is the chronicle of that journey between those two illusions whose borders are indecipherable."
Bardo, in Buddhism, is an intermediate, transitional, or liminal state between death and rebirth.
Alejandro G. Iñárritu edited the film himself for the first time since his debut feature, Amores Perros (2000).
The party scene was shot after six weeks of rehearsals, and included 800 extras.