Alfonso Cuarón Was “Terrified” Making New TV Series ‘Disclaimer’: “I’m Not Very Fast”
Self, Alfonso Cuarón, five-time Oscar winner, said he prefers to look for film scripts that will take him “out of my comfort zone. ”
And an upcoming test appeared before Cuarón with his first attempt at a big streaming series Disclaimer, and its structure. Namely the fact that it was television.
“That made me understand that I have never done something that was clearly narrative,” added Cuarón, apparently candid as ever, during a Visionaries discussion held in Toronto on Sunday that was hosted by THR’s Scott Feinberg, the publication’s executive editor of awards.
He even said to the Apple Studios executives that the television was a very long way beyond his wheelhouse. “I said, guys I don’t how to do TV, I think is too late to learn how to do TV, I’m not interested in learning how to do TV I do films an if [I do] this I will approach it as a film,” Cuarón added.
That was a mistake and a miscalculation, however, because limited TV series are normally graced with several directors and they shoot the episodes at a very fast pace. And Disclaimer consisting of seven chapters with Cate Blanchett and Kevin Klein and filmed as per the novel of Renée Knight, featuring the same title, turned into a long take.
“I know how to make films and I am not very fast,” Cuarón said of the initial discussion about whether to accept the project. Fortunately, Cuarón had his experience of the Mexican movie industry cinematographer, Emmanuel Lubezki who embraced his idea ultimately.
“At least in his collaboration we are always throwing ideas back and forth,” said Cuarón “I end up getting so involved in his lighting and he gets so involved in my directing, it is very soulful. ” Disclaimer is about Catherine Ravenscroft – a successful journalist, who based her fame on exposing people’s evils and misconducts.
However, when she gets a book, which she has never seen before written by an unknown amateur, she becomes extremely scared and realizes that she is being the heroine in the book that unveils all her secrets. In her desperate attempt to expose the writer Catherine finds herself facing her past before she loses everything as well as the husband Robert (Sacha Baron Cohen) and her son Nicholas (Kodi Smit-McPhee).
Again, Cuarón hailed Blanchett as another important co-worker. “With the script she is so in each one of them, with the screenplay triggering rewrites and with casting, I was talking to her all the possibilities and if she was unsure I didn’t go there,” Cuarón said.
And it’s that honesty among collaborators that Cuarón highlighted during his TIFF tête-à-tête on Sunday, when reminiscing about his early directorial career with Mexican directors del Toro and Iñárritu, who later became known collectively as the Three Amigos.
As the focus of this paper is on collaboration and the interaction between the filmmakers in question, as well as on their honest discussions of how they felt about their films at the earliest stages of creative process.
“We care about each other. We trust each other and we can be very harsh, very brutally and painfully candid with one another, especially when we are discussing films in a working relationship because I’m scared always. I know it can be hard. ” Cuarón pointed out.
“And sometimes me, or the other person is listening and, at the end you can tell the other person is listening and at the end is upset and for myself, I realized that I feel they didn’t understand anything,” he continued.
However the next morning Cuarón will finally ‘get it,’ and the conversation goes on.
It also has taken exception to parts of the Reunion Series and Disclaimer, a seven-part psychological thriller that Mueller will showcase in Toronto, Monday night, as a Canadian production. This case is file at Toronto Film Festival, which will last until September 15.