Arturo Ripstein began his film career at a young age. As the son of film producer Alfredo Ripstein, Jr., Arturo became familiar with filmmaking when he was still a boy. At the age of fifteen he saw the film Nazarin (1958), discovering the great film director Luis Buñuel, with whom he developed a long teacher-student relationship that remained until Buñuel's passing in 1983.

 
Ripstein was an uncredited director’s assistant on the film Exterminating Angel (1962). Based on this experience and on having made two short films as a teenager, he made his debut as a film director at the age of 21.His father had acquired the rights to a script written by Gabriel García Márquez, titled “El Charro”, and allowed Ripstein to direct it on the condition that he make it as a western, a genre with great popularity at that time. The result was “Tiempo de morir” (1965), a film that had famous collaborators such as the writer Carlos Fuentes, the photographer Alex Phillips, film editor Carlos Savage, as well as the aforementioned Gabriel García Márquez.