Five-time Oscar winner Alfonso Cuarón has finally unveiled his big-budget streaming series debut, Disclaimer.
The psychological thriller, starring Oscar winners Cate Blanchett and Kevin Kline, received its first press screenings in Italy on Wednesday at the Venice Film Festival. The director and his acclaimed cast then met with the media on Thursday at the Lido to discuss the show’s creation and themes.
Told in seven chapters, the Apple Studios series is based on the best-selling novel of the same name by Renée Knight. The cast also includes Sacha Baron Cohen, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Lesley Manville, Louis Partridge, Leila George, Hoyeon and Indira Varma as narrator.
“I read the book and it immediately triggered a film in my mind, but at the time I didn't know how to make that film,” Cuarón said, explaining why he chose to adapt Knight's book as a series. “Because the film I was seeing was way too long. It wasn't until years later that I had the idea that maybe it could work in a longer form. It's a format that I admire because I mean incredible artists, they've played with the form, from Fassbender to David Lynch to Kieślowski. So that was the starting point.”
DisclaimerThe official synopsis for 's reads: “Acclaimed journalist Catherine Ravenscroft (Blanchett) has built a reputation for exposing the wrongdoings and transgressions of others. When she receives a novel by an unknown author, she is horrified to realize she is now the protagonist of a story that exposes her darkest secrets. As Catherine races to uncover the writer's true identity, she is forced to confront her past before it destroys both her life and her relationships with her husband Robert (Baron Cohen) and their son Nicholas (Smit-McPhee).”
Cuarón said he had Blanchett in mind for the departure Disclaimer. “When I wrote the script, Cate was already there. I was terrified that [she] I would say no, because she was too present in my mind and in the way I saw the whole thing,” he said.
“I play a woman who has things that she’s buried, traumatic things that she’s buried,” Blanchett said, “and so I thought about what happens to repressed memories and things that we’ve avoided rather than faced. And I found that fascinating and quite painful.”
The idea of casting Kevin Kline, who plays a British character in the series, came to Blanchett.
“He was talking about A Fish Named Wanda [the 1988 hit which won Kline the Best Supporting Actor Oscar] and she said, Kevin! And it was immediately, yeah, why don't we think about Kevin?” Cuarón said.
Kline noted that he felt “in incredibly good hands” with Cuarón as director, noting the Rome Helmer “was very generous in explaining how he was doing at each moment,” making it easier for you to “give it your all.”
Cuarón said he took a cinematic approach to making the series. “I don't know how to direct TV. It's probably too late in my life to learn how to do TV,” he admitted. “So throughout the entire run of the series, there was never a conversation about whether we were doing anything different, with the cinematographer or anything. We're doing it like a movie. We did it like a movie.”
That didn't make things easy for the cast and crew, the director admitted, noting that his approach involved long, grueling hours of filming and a run time of nearly a year. Cuarón said it was like making “seven movies. [I] “I really feel sorry for the actors because they were trapped in their characters for too long.”
The series will premiere globally on Apple TV+ on October 11 with the first two episodes, followed by new episodes every Friday. The series marks Cuarón’s first show under his overall deal with Apple Studios.