Five-time Academy Award winner Alfonso Cuarón says he is drawn to movie scripts that “take me out of my comfort zone.”
And a looming challenge presented itself to Cuarón with his debut in a big-budget streaming series, Disclaimer, and its unique narrative structure. That is, TV.
“I realized I had never done anything overtly narrative. And maybe, okay, I don't know how to do that. [TV]. That was part of the motivation,” Cuarón said with typical honesty during a Visionaries conversation held Sunday at the Toronto Film Festival, moderated by Scott Feinberg, executive director of awards at The Hollywood Reporter.
He even told Apple Studios executives that TV was way out of his comfort zone. “I said, guys, I don't know how to do TV. I think it's too late to learn how to do TV. I'm not interested in learning how to do TV. I make movies and if [I do] this, I'm going to approach it like a film,” Cuarón recalled.
However, it was a mistake and a miscalculation, because limited TV series usually have several directors and are shot quickly. And Disclaimertold in seven chapters, starring Cate Blanchett and Kevin Klein and based on the best-selling novel of the same name by Renée Knight, required extensive filming.
“I know how to make movies and I'm not very fast,” Cuarón admitted of his initial thoughts on whether or not to take on the project. Fortunately, Cuarón worked with his longtime cinematographer, Emmanuel Lubezki, another veteran of the Mexican film industry.
“At least in his collaboration, we always exchange ideals. I get very involved in his lighting and he gets involved in my direction. It's very organic,” Cuarón observed. Disclaimer tells the story of Catherine Ravenscroft (Blanchett), an acclaimed journalist who built her reputation by exposing the wrongdoings and transgressions of others.
But when she receives a novel by an unknown author, she is horrified to realize that she is now the protagonist of a story that exposes her darkest secrets. As Catherine races to discover 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 (Kodi Smit-McPhee).
Cuarón praised Blanchett as another key collaborator. “She’s so involved in every single process, with the script triggering the rewrites and with casting, I would talk to her about all the possibilities, and if she was hesitant, I wouldn’t go for it,” Cuarón recalled.
And it’s precisely this honesty between collaborators that Cuarón emphasized during his conversation at TIFF on Sunday, as he recalled his early days as a director alongside fellow Mexican filmmakers Guillermo del Toro and Alejandro G. Iñárritu, collectively nicknamed the Three Amigos.
Because collaboration and honest conversations about how the trio perceived their films in the early creative stages were key.
“We love each other. We trust each other and we are brutally and painfully honest with each other. The conversation is not easy when we collaborate and show each other films. I'm terrified, because I know it can be hard,” Cuarón said.
“And sometimes I, or the other person, are listening and in the end you can understand that the other person is listening and in the end they are angry, and I myself have the feeling that they have not understood anything,” he added.
But the next day Cuarón will finally “understand” and the conversation will resume. Disclaimer, His seven-part psychological thriller will have its Canadian premiere in Toronto on Monday night.
The Toronto Film Festival continues through September 15.