Alfonso Cuarón is no stranger to well-established franchises, having directed the third installment of the ‘Harry Potter‘ saga, “Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban,” but the Mexican director almost became part of another famed establishment: Bond movies.
Speaking at the Marrakech International Film Festival where he gave a lengthy career talk, Cuarón recalled how he was offered a Bond film “ages ago” and thought it was “cool” until the team told him he was only supposed to shoot the dialogue, with another team coming in to film the action scenes.
“I felt very weird,” he said, adding that a dinner with Joel Coen sealed the matter. “I said ‘Would you do a Bond film?’ and [Coen] said ‘It probably falls in the category of a film I want to watch but not do.’ There, I learned the lesson that some films I prefer to watch, and not do do.”
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Despite turning down Bond, Cuarón fondly recalls his time within the ‘Harry Potter’ machine. When asked about how he became involved with the wizarding world, the director said “It just happened” and that he wished he “was more in control of my filmmaking career, I think it has been messy like my life. Choices have been dictated by life.”
“After ‘Y tu mamá también,’ I had written ‘Children of Men’ which nobody wanted to do and suddenly was unemployed and about to have a child, so I needed money,” explained Cuarón. ‘Harry Potter’ was offered to me and it was Guillermo del Toro who gave me shit for not wanting to do it,” recalled the director. “He called me and said he had heard I was offered ‘Harry Potter.’ I started making fun of it saying I hadn’t seen it and he told me, ‘You are arrogant. Go out immediately and buy the books.’”
Cuarón followed del Toro’s advice and immediately bought and read the books. “It was one of the best experiences in filmmaking I’ve ever had,” the filmmaker said. “I learned so much, it was a crash course experience in special effects. And the great byproduct is that when I finished ‘Harry Potter,’ they wanted to make ‘Children of Men’ and I had the special effects tools to solve things I couldn’t solve before.”
The director also recalled another conversation with del Toro, soon after the “Pan’s Labyrinth” director watched “The Little Princess” with his young daughter. “It’s the only [film] I have seen again because Guillermo once called me crying saying, ‘I know you don’t watch your films but when your daughter is eight, you have to watch that [with her],'” said Cuarón.
“I have a great memory of doing it,” Cuarón said of the 1995 film. “It was a long process. I had never thought about doing Hollywood films. My plan was to stay in Mexico and do films in Mexico. At the same time, I was in debt because I paid for part of my first film. I was offered jobs in the US, started taking it and they started sending me scripts. All the good scripts I said I wanted to do and they already like Sydney Pollack and big directors lined up and then I read ‘The Little Princess’ and loved it. I really fought for that.”
Talking about “Children of Men,” Cuarón said he refuses the idea that it was a “prescient” film. “I was very intrigued about the themes that were going to shape the following century,” he said. “When the film was released it was a commercial flop and the reviews were very lukewarm. It was only recently that people began liking it and talking about it like it is prophetic. It was not prophetic. All of what you see was based on research. The visuals were taken directly from the conflicts in Bosnia, Iraq… It was not in the future. It was already there.”
When asked why he takes such long breaks in between projects, Cuarón said he “often wonders why I don’t do more films,” adding that he likes “the gaps in between.”
“I love cinema, but I also love not doing cinema. I love life apart from film. I wish I was more prolific. So many of my friends do one film after the other and I admire the amazing imagination they have,” he added. “I often think of projects but there are ones when I think someone else can do them. For good or for bad, I want to do something that only I can do.”
The director reiterated he likes “to be challenged,” which is reflected in the diversity of his filmography. “I tend to like films that I have no idea how to do. I can think about a project for two months and then I realize I know how to do it and then psychologically I get less excited,” he said.
“[Cinema] is present all the time, it’s a beautiful curse,” continued the filmmaker when talking about where he finds inspiration. “I like old films but I like to see what’s happening now. I see many filmmakers I admire who have cautionary tales about how they didn’t connect with what was happening in cinema and their later films became irrelevant. The new generation is where the new masters are. There is only so much you can get from old masters.”
Out of the new crop of film talent, Cuarón highlighted Robert Eggers and Ari Aster as some of his favourites. “I haven’t seen ‘Nosferatu’ yet but I am dying to see it,” he said. “I think ‘Beau is Afraid’ is an incredible film.” Elsewhere, Cuarón spoke about his lengthy partnership with cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki, comparing their relationship to that of “an old married couple” and emphasized how filmmakers shouldn’t feel contained by the boxes they are often put into.
“However people perceive you is irrelevant to what you do,” Cuarón said. “No matter what you do, people are going to perceive you one way or the other and put you in boxes. You cannot be guided by these definitions. Something I learned early on is that you are not going to please everybody.”
