Five-time Oscar winner Alfonso Cuaron says he’s drawn to film scripts that “brings me out of my comfort zone.”
And a looming challenge came the way of Cuaron with his big-budget streaming series debut, Disclaimer, and its unique narrative structure. Namely TV.
“I realized I’d never done something overtly narrative. And maybe, okay, I don’t know how to do it [TV]. That was part of the motivation,” Cuaron said with trademark honesty during a Visionaries conversation on Sunday at the Toronto Film Festival moderated by Scott Feinberg, executive editor of awards at The Hollywood Reporter.
He even told Apple Studios execs 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 about learning how to do TV. I do films and if [I do] this, I will approach it as a film,” Cuaron recalled.
That was a mistake and a miscalculation, however, because limited TV series usually have several directors and they’re shot quickly. And Disclaimer, told in seven chapters, starring Cate Blanchett and Kevin Klein and based on the best-selling novel of the same name by Renée Knight, became a long production shoot.
“I know how to do films and I’m not very fast,” Cuaron admitted of the early deliberations about whether to take on the project. Luckily, Cuaron worked with his longtime cinematographer, Emmanuel Lubezki, another veteran of the Mexican film industry.
“At least in his collaboration, we’re always bouncing ideals. I get so involved in his lighting and he gets involved in my directing. It’s very organic,” Cuaron observed. Disclaimer tells the story of Catherine Ravenscroft (Blanchett), an acclaimed journalist who has built her reputation by revealing the misdeeds and transgressions of others.
But when she receives a novel from an unknown author, she is horrified to realize she is now the main character in a story that exposes her own 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 (Kodi Smit-McPhee).
Cuaron praised Blanchett as another key collaborator. “She’s so involved in each one of the process, with the screenplay triggering rewrites, and with casting, I was conversing with her all the possibilities, and if she was hesitant, I wouldn’t go there,” Cuaron recalled.
And it’s that honesty among collaborators that Cuaron stressed during his TIFF conversation on Sunday, as he recalled his early days as a director alongside fellow Mexican filmmakers Guillermo del Toro and Alejandro G. Iñárritu, as they came to be nicknamed together the Three Amigos.
Because collaboration, and honest conversations about how the trio felt about their films at the earliest stages of creativity was key.
“We love each other. We trust each other and we’re brutally and painfully honest with each other. The conversation isn’t easy when we’re collaborating and showing each other films. I’m terrified, because I know it can be tough,” Cuaron argued.
“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 myself I feel they didn’t understand anything,” he added.
But the next day Cuaron will finally “get it,” and the conversation resumes. Disclaimer, his seven-part psychological thriller, will have a Canadian premiere in Toronto on Monday night.
The Toronto Film Festival continues through Sept. 15.
