With Alfonso Cuarón, you never know what’s next—and sometimes neither does he. The director leaps from genre to genre: from a Dickens adaptation, to a sensual road movie about two teenage boys, to a blockbuster Harry Potter sequel, to a dystopia about infertility, to a thriller set in low Earth orbit, to a meditative drama about the housekeeper in a wealthy Mexican household, filmed in black and white. What unites these stories is Cuarón’s particular sensibility, or what he calls his “cinematic language.” His camera rarely stops moving. His films regularly deliver tiny, unexpected moments—a woman shyly revealing herself to be pregnant in Children of Men; a stranded astronaut making radio contact with an Inuit man and his dogs down on Earth in Gravity—that feel intimate and grand at the same time.
For each of his past two films, Cuarón won the Best Director Oscar. His first big project since 2018’s Roma is not a movie but a television show: Disclaimer, which stars Cate Blanchett and Kevin Kline and streams on Apple TV+. Its seven episodes are marvels of engineered tension: Mysteries turn inside out, narrators grow unreliable, facts evaporate, and the sand never stops shifting. This summer, in London, I spoke with Cuarón about what it takes to make TV feel like cinema. We also talked about science fiction. Two of Cuarón’s films, Children of Men and Gravity, routinely make lists of the best movies ever made in the genre, but he doesn’t really see them that way. His films about “the future” are, he says, studies of what life is already like for some people—and the precarious realities we don’t like to confront—here in the present day.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity, combining on-camera and off-camera portions. Check out WIRED’s YouTube channel for the video.
Samanth Subramanian: This must be your first time out talking about a big project since Roma in 2018, back before the pandemic. I thought about your movies a lot during the lockdown, for a particular reason. Every time I’ve seen a film of yours, I’ve associated it with this feeling of claustrophobia—whether it’s a physical claustrophobia, like when you’re moving the camera into Sandra Bullock’s helmet in Gravity, or an emotional claustrophobia, like the world closing in around you.
Alfonso Cuarón: First of all, I apologize for making you feel like that! [Laughs.]
It’s very effective!
I’m glad—I guess. But this is the first time I’ve been confronted with this. It was not a conscious decision. But most stuff is like that when you make a film: It’s up to the audience to make meaning.
In any case, it got me wondering, what was your pandemic like?
Well, I guess similar to everybody’s—just locked into the house. At first, I was trying to figure out if there was something I could do, and I sorted out many, many thousands of masks to be sent to Mexico for the nurses in the hospitals. Then I started working on Disclaimer.
How did that project come to your attention?
Renée Knight [the author of the 2015 novel that inspired the show] and I have acquaintances in common. She sent me the manuscript, and I really liked it. I just didn’t know how to make it happen as a conventional film. And so time passed, I went to do Roma, and toward the end of that Knight got in touch, saying, Hey, in case you’re interested, the rights are available. And that was a moment when I was very intrigued about exploring episodic TV.
I enjoy many series, and they have amazing writing and amazing acting. But only very few have a cinematic approach. So I was intrigued. How can you hijack the conventional, writer-oriented show into something that is closer to cinema?
What do you mean here by “cinematic approach”?
In film, you take images and put them in relationship with other images to convey a meaning. There’s a visual layer, a visual way in which stories are told. In order to do that, you have to surrender to it.
Many series cannot be concerned about that. They need to keep moving the narrative forward constantly. The narrative is leading the show—that’s their amazing strength. Narratively they’ve started doing way more interesting things than most mainstream American films. But in the worst cases, you can watch many series with your eyes closed.
By the way, you can still have a great time. You can actually be doing things while you’re watching your show.
My wife does embroidery while she’s watching some of these shows.
Yeah, and you’re talking once in a while. That’s their value.
Another thing is: I’d never done anything overtly narrative, and I was very intrigued by the challenge. I’d always favored a more cinematic language to convey ideas, rather than just strong narrative impulse.
Can you say a little more about what you mean by “overtly narrative”?
When you have a narrative, you can go: A, then B, then C, then D, then E, then F, and so on. In films, you have to somehow convey everything you need—and this is what I mean about cinematic language—to go from A to D.
But there are two principles that are contradictory, and I learned these by working on this show. The principle of film is time—it’s how those images flow in time, and all the emotions that they convey in time. Television, on the other hand, is about killing time. It’s killing time to keep the narrative flowing.
Doing Disclaimer, there were cinematic moments that I loved. But I also knew that if I hold the shot here, people watching are going to check their messages.
You mentioned holding a shot. There’s that moment in Y Tu Mamá También when the camera inside the car turns around, looks out of the back window, and focuses on cops stopping some men on the road, then it turns back to the front seat, where the stars are talking about foreplay. Is that the kind of moment that wouldn’t fit in a series? Because, in a series, it’s just the lead characters and their actions, one after another, killing time?
I don’t mean that in a derogatory way, by the way!
Of course. Maybe “occupying time”?
Yes, maybe that’s a less radical expression of it. The important thing in most of the films I do is to show the relationship between the character and the environment. It’s always the clash between the two. And in Y Tu Mamá, it was like: These guys are in their little, stupid drama, cruising through a greater reality that they are oblivious to.
And don’t get me wrong, so many shows have amazing cinematic moments. Chernobyl is a great example. The Bear as well. But they are not consistent throughout the whole show.
Part of the nature of most shows is that you have several directors going through each series. Different directors doing different episodes. So it’s hard to have a strong directorial point of view from A to Z—a certain attention to detail that has a causal effect in the whole show. The great ones establish a style and then different filmmakers come to honor that style through the whole series.
In the irresponsible decision I made to direct all seven episodes of Disclaimer, it’s like I’m doing a film but it’s very long.
I guess it’s your own cinematic language, as you call it, that unites all these movies you’ve made. Which, on the surface, otherwise seem very different.
More than anything, that’s a limitation, I guess.
Why would you say that?
A problem I have is that I have a very eclectic taste in cinema. I grew up loving The Poseidon Adventure, or Planet of the Apes, or Soylent Green.
All great movies.
I know—they’re great! But at the same time, I love Bergman, and I love Tarkovsky, and I love Sokurov—I admired them the most. But what they have in common is that there’s one idea they keep on developing, film after film. You can see everything that unifies Bergman or Fellini or even Kurosawa. I haven’t been able to do that. Once I finish a film, I just want to explore different realms.
Have you tried?
No, no, I haven’t even tried. [Laughs.] Some films you do because you make conscious choices. Some films you do to survive. Others come out and save your life. You cannot force these things. I have to wait for films to come to me. They have to manifest in my head somehow. Anytime I’ve tried to seriously plan to do a specific film, I end up not doing that film and end up doing something else.
You mentioned Soylent Green and Planet of the Apes, and another idea that has struck me about your work is, you apply this higher cinematic aesthetic to adaptations of pretty mass-market material. Disclaimer is a great case. The book is really like a summer beach read—a thriller. Children of Men and Harry Potter are genre fiction as well, by best-selling authors rather than literary writers. What is it about this material that draws you in?
It’s just how films come into your life. With all these adaptations, there’s a moment in which you see the film in your head—while you’re reading the book. In the case of Children of Men, I saw the film pretty much as soon as I read a one-page outline of what the book was about. So in that case, I made the conscious decision not to read the book; I didn’t want it to sidetrack me from what I was thinking. People tell me it’s great. But I guess my Children of Men times have gone.
Although given the anti-immigrant riots that happened in England recently, everything in Children of Men seems suddenly timely again.
Well, but those things were happening then. The thing is that we were living in this kind of bubble before. When I did Children of Men, it was just after the turn of the century, and I wanted to understand the things that were going to shape the 21st century. And I was reading a lot of experts—sociologists and philosophers and so on. And they were already talking about this. It’s nothing new. The difference now is that it’s coming closer to our backyard, you know? Maybe not in London, or maybe not in the London that a privileged class gravitates around—but all around the world, this has been happening.
Tell me a little bit about your parents? I gather they were in the sciences, in some way or another?
My father was a physician, and he had a specialty called nuclear medicine. In the later part of his life, he was working with the UN, with an atomic agency—but more like an inspector. And my mom was a biochemist. But when I was growing up, she went to work as a teacher. Later on, she switched to philosophy—she did a master’s, and her professional career was working in the Institute of Philosophical Investigations in a university as an editor.
I ask because I was thinking of Children of Men and Gravity, and they’re very precise in how they’re informed by science and research. In a way it’s tempting to call them “science fiction,” but are they, really?
Gravity actually doesn’t take place in the future, exactly. It’s a plausible present, in the sense that the Kessler effect is a danger. More and more, we should be terrified. The worst-case scenario is that it affects telecommunication and transportation, because we depend so much on those satellites. Forget about your TikTok!
And with Children of Men too, I wasn’t intending to do science fiction. Whatever you see in Children of Men—except for the contrivance that children haven’t been born in years—all the images you see are from the present. All the stuff in the background—we were very careful to refer to actual events that were going on around the world. The war in the Balkans, images of the north of Sri Lanka. Humans are amazing at creating atrocities. And it was clear that the sociopolitical tendency was toward a kind of populism and paranoia about immigration. That was happening already—not necessarily in our green zones in the West. Now people are saying, “Oh my God, it’s coming true.” But no. It’s always been true, it’s just that reality is closer to your backyard.
In the DVD of Children of Men, they asked me to do a “Making of,” and I was a little bored of “Making ofs,” so I did a little documentary with interviews of some of the people I was reading. There were people talking about these things in the movie happening in Mexico and many other places. We tend to forget that because we live such a sheltered existence.
But 2024 feels dystopic even by the standards of 2006, when Children of Men came out.
Even then, we were hearing about this immigration paranoia. Humans have migrated ever since we were humans. That’s the reason we’re humans—we migrated and populated everywhere. They call it a problem. No! It’s a phenomenon, and it keeps on going and will always exist. But it’s easy to blame the one who is different.
I want to go back to something you said earlier, about when you read Disclaimer and saw it as a long-format project …
I saw the possibility, but I didn’t know how to do it.
Is that why you take projects on? You find one challenge, and you think: OK, I should try to see if I can do this?
I think what motivates me is to do something I don’t know how to do. For example, Harry Potter was one of the best experiences I’ve had in my working life. I learned so much. I didn’t know a thing about visual effects, and this movie was my university for that. So much so that, toward the end of the movie, it became second nature for me to work with visual effects. I was very generously invited to stay and direct the next one. I passed because I didn’t want it to become like I was doing things by numbers.
Since Roma in 2018, filmmaking has changed so much. The kinds of movies that make it into the theaters, the kinds of audiences that receive them. What are the most interesting shifts?
Audiences are getting so comfortable with the streaming shows. Think about this: It’s still quite new, right? Earlier, there were the miniseries and the telenovelas that would run forever. But the format of the streaming series, as something that is way more structured, is kind of novel.
It’s interesting to conquer that in the name of cinema. We’re so used to saying that films are around two hours long. But cinema started with films that were one minute long, you know? And then those films grew longer, in part because people were used to the commercial paradigm of the stage. In many ways, cinema inherited this alien paradigm that was the theater. And we’ve stayed with that convention. I don’t think time should be a constraint for films.
What about the industry itself? Do you agree with people like Alejandro Iñárritu or Martin Scorsese—these guys who look upon movies like the Marvel franchise as just … I think Alejandro called it “cultural genocide.”
He stole that phrase from me! I used it in another context. He used it for the superheroes, I said it about something on Mexican TV.
The thing is the lack of diversity—when these films go and hijack all the theaters. There was a photo of a multiplex in Mexico, in which all of the theaters were showing the same film. I don’t remember which of these movies it was—I’m not very into superheroes—but it was one of those films. All except one—because they have a legal obligation to show Mexican films in a certain ratio, so they scheduled an 11:30 slot in the morning for this Mexican film. It was ridiculous.
There should be diversity. Theaters are concerned about filling seats and selling popcorn, and you can’t ignore that audiences like these movies. Except that if you keep giving audiences what they know they like, eventually you’ll dry the well.
Even on streaming, what you see is controlled by an algorithm that is completely fictitious. The algorithm prevents you from discovering stuff that is different from what you think you like. Which is why I am so grateful to companies like Criterion and Mubi, which curate and archive. So look, I’m not pessimistic about the future of cinema, because it will keep on existing one way or another. And the new generations will also show us new ways of making movies that are completely unthinkable for us right now. But the business is a different thing.
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