Children Of Men

[Ravi]

Especially not in a museum.

[MacGuffin]

Source: Hollywood Elsewhere

a 39-minute portion of yesterday's conversation with Children of Men director-cowriter Alfonso Cuaron. A lot of it won't add up for those who haven't seen the film, but Cuaron's obvious intelligence and his very precise choice of words deliver a kind of contact high if you listen for a few minutes. That and his laughter, which has a wonderful eruption and spontaneity.

Cuaron really knows his stuff, and he obviously respects to the nth degree and swears by the great Emmanuel "Chivo" Lubezki, his director of photography who refused to use any sort of artificial lighting or green screens in the making of Children of Men. This is a film that uses CG visuals allthrough it, but with one or two exceptions it's very hard to identify them.

Cuaron's long experience making Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban provided a master course in state-of-the-art visual effects, and strengthened his hand in discussing what was possible or not possible in the making of Children of Men. But I'm delighted that he and "Chivo" were dead-set against using anything that looked in the least bit like a visual effect. (One surprise for me is that a bit in which Clive Owen and Julianne Moore play a mouth-to-mouth game of "catch" with ping-pong balls is digitally composed.) And I love that Cuaron values (along with "Chivo" and their collaborator and unofficial co-writer Clive Owen ) the on-camera benefits of minor filming accidents.

And I loved that when I mentioned the apparent influence of Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket in Men's final battle sequence, Cuaron said that the bigger visual references in the making of this film were Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange (because of the futuristic-but-battered London settings) and F.W. Murnau's Sunrise.

We talked about how some older viewers have expressed dismay or outright dislike, even, for the sense of futility that, in their opinion, the film imparts. It's obvious to me that anyone who comes away with this view isn't paying attention. "This film has gotten very strong reactions -- younger people find the film hopeful, older people find the film very depressive," Cuaron admits.

"I've heard people say this is just another chase movie. It's like people are so jaded about the telling of pictures. As opposed to have to engage with the specific cinematic elements and different approaches. I have a very bleak view of the present, but a very hopeful view of the future. For me the film is about hope in the end, but you cannnot dictate a sense of hope in a viewer because that is very personal and internal. [In our film] we basically allow audiences to fill in the blanks and make their own conclusions."

I mentioned that the head of a distribution company who saw Children of Men at the Venice Film Festival recently complained that it departed significantly from the P.D. James novel. "We used the premise...only the premise of female infertility," Cuaron responded. "But we received a statement from [original author] P.D. James, saying she fully admires and is pleased with the film and is very proud to be associated with it. For which I'm very thankful.

"I was not interested in constructing a back-story [about what caused female infertility]," Cuaron says. "Because if I did that, a lot of the movie would then have to be about that. For me, female infertility was basically a metaphor for the fading sense of hope. And the Human Project...if I have to explain who they are and the whole background of that, that also would have consumed a significant portion. The Human Project is a metaphor for human understanding. For me that was sufficient."

[MacGuffin]

Men Looks At Future, Present
Source: Sci-Fi Wire

Alfonso Cuarón, director of the upcoming SF movie Children of Men, told SCI FI Wire that the movie is set in 2027 London but allows him to comment on such hot-button issues of today as illegal immigration, environmental pollution, birth control, terrorism and the plight of disenfranchised poor people.

"I have a grim view, not of the future, but of the present," Cuarón said in an interview. "I believe that evolution is happening and human understanding is occurring and that the young generation is the one that is getting some new perspective of reality of what's going on in the world. The new generation will prove that the Earth is going around the sun, not the sun going around the Earth."

Based on P.D. James' apocalyptic novel, Children of Men is set in a world where the human race has ceased reproducing. Clive Owen plays Theo, a man who gets sucked into an activist role while trying to help Kee (Claire-Hope Ashitey), the first woman to become pregnant after two decades of worldwide sterility. Theo's ex-wife, Julian (Julianne Moore), has become an activist/terrorist, along with a team that includes characters played by Chiwetel Ejiofor and Charlie Hunnam. Theo seeks help from his reclusive friend, Jasper (Michael Caine), and ends up being chased into a brutal refugee camp.

Cuarón admitted that he wasn't impressed at first with the draft of the screenplay. While on vacation in Santa Barbara, Calif., shortly after finishing Y tu mamá también, he read the premise, but decided he didn't want to do an SF project. "But I became haunted with the idea for weeks and weeks and weeks," Cuarón said. "Obviously this takes place in the near future, but the only reason it does is because of the infertility of the people. The infertility we use as a metaphor, and if it were a pure science fiction movie we would go into the whys and the reasons for the infertility. We decided that we didn't care about it."

The futuristic world Cuarón helped design is familiar, but tweaked. "They are not supersonic cars, but ones that are familiar, but if you look closely you will never have seen that car before," Cuarón said. "The billboards are familiar, but different. ... I brought the art department pictures from Sri Lanka, Iraq, Northern Ireland, Somalia, Chernobyl, the Balkans. ... We had to reference things today that have become part of the human conscience."

Despite the film's focus on social issues, Cuarón said that he didn't want to make a message film. "I didn't want to make a movie about messages per se, even though there are mentions of Homeland Security and things like that," he said. "There are a lot of metaphors that work. ... We don't know who the father is of this child. The pregnant girl is African, and that has to do with how humanity started in Africa. We have put the future of the world in the hands of the dispossessed, the lower caste of humanity, and create a new humanity."

Cuarón is aware of the irony that the bleak film, which hints at a possible immaculate conception, is coming out on Christmas Day. "People will have to draw their own connections," he said with a smile.

[MacGuffin]

Exclusive: Filmmaker Alfonso Cuarón
Source: ComingSoon

The movie stylings of Mexican filmmaker Alfonso Cuarón have ranged from the character-driven road movie Y Tu Mama Tambien to the high fantasy of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, two movies that helped put the director on the map.

Cuarón's latest movie Children of Men ventures more into futuristic sci-fi territory, being based on P.D. James' novel about a dystopian future where no one's been able to have kids for nearly 18 years, creating turmoil and chaos worldwide. It stars Clive Owen as a British government official who finds himself working with the mysterious activist group called The Human Project to find a solution.

ComingSoon.net talked to the director via the phone after he had spent a long day doing press for the film.

ComingSoon.net: You started working on this movie some time ago, so what took you so long to finally make this movie?
Alfonso Cuarón: I wrote with Tim Sexton the screenplay right after "Y Tu Mama Tambien" and then it didn't happen, but "Harry Potter" happened, then finally this one happened. It was just one of those things that actually, I'm thankful that it happened the way it happened. Because the way it happened, I had the amazing opportunity to work with Clive Owen. Because of the way it happened, I had the opportunity of doing "Harry Potter" before and that gave me the opportunity of having two years of work relationships in Britain, in London. I got to experience the social dynamics of the British psyche that was so important, then I realized how flawed our approach was of British reality.

CS: Obviously, the world has changed a lot since you wrote the screenplay, maybe getting closer to the reality in the movie then when you started. The world has gotten a little more dangerous.
Cuarón: We were just waiting for Bush to invade another country.

CS: So then before the end of the year, you're thinking? The movie's look into the future is pretty amazing. Was a lot of that taken from the book?
Cuarón: Well, from the book we took the premise of the infertility of humanity, but then we took it as a point of departure to explore the state of things in the first part of the 21st Century, then that triggered a completely different story. Now, I'm very thankful with P.D. James' premise, because it really triggered my creative process.

CS: In the book, does it ever explain why or how this thing happened?
Cuarón: It's pretty much a thing that happened, just that the approach is a completely different approach. In the book, there's not such a thing as the immigration issue. Let me put it this way, in the book, the character of Key doesn't exist.

CS: So that was one of your own additions, including all the immigrant stuff?
Cuarón: It's an invention based upon exploring the state of things. You realize that two of the biggest issues in the times we're living are the environment and immigration.

CS: We really only see England in this movie, though other places are mentioned. Are we to assume that the rest of the world is actually much worse?
Cuarón: Yeah, in this scenario, pretty much the world collapsed. There's a film by Michael Haneke called "The Year of the Wolf" and I was saying, "Okay, while our movie is happening, in the rest of Europe is 'Year of the Wolf' and maybe in America is the new Cormac McCarthy novel. He just released a book that is about the United States having collapsed ["The Road"]. The Coen Brothers are doing his next movie ("No Country for Old Men").

CS: Even though this takes place in the future, you've been trying to brush off the "sci-fi" label. To me, the movie had the feel of a Stanley Kubrick film, something that's hard to put into words. Are you a fan of Kubrick?
Cuarón: Ah, very much so. I'm a huge fan of Kubrick but who that is a filmmaker is not? For me, the important thing of Kubrick is not so much about speculating about the future, it's about taking different premises as a point of departure to make conceptual explorations of humanity. I think that's a big important thing of Kubrick is how the abstraction, based on very simple premises.

CS: The dialogue in the movie is fairly minimal, at least compared to "Y Tu Mama Tambien," yet you have a lot of writers on this. I assume some people started it, and then you worked on it with your writing partner, but was it deliberate to keep the dialogue so minimal?
Cuarón: Yeah, what happened and there are so many writers because the writers' guild. Actually, you're usually invited to be a part of the writing team; they invite everybody. There are two writers I never met, I never read the material. There's another writer who was doing stuff while I was doing "Harry Potter" just to keep the project alive. I have to say that for me, this movie is 100% written by Tim Sexton and me. And definitely there's another writer and that writer is Clive Owen.

CS: So all those writers on the movie is a contractual thing?
Cuarón: More than a contractual thing. There's a Writers Guild thing that if one of the writers is a director, you have to punish the director. It's an old story and it's boring stuff, so I prefer not even getting into it. Suddenly, just by the fact that I'm a director, they don't respect or give you any rights as a writer anymore. It's so sad.

CS: What was it about Clive that made you think he could pull off some of the difficult things he has to do in the movie? There really are some tough scenes in this due to the long single shots you did.
Cuarón: It's really difficult because part of the thing is the immobility of the character. It's the opposite of the conventional Hollywood hero, in which he's coming up with plans and solutions. That he's very active about engaging and deciding. Here, it's the other way around. It's the inactivity that is in the core of this character, and a profound sadness. By the same token, he has to be our emotional vessel to connect with this world. On one hand, it's this amazing inactivity and the other hand, it's the generosity of being this window.

CS: Right, because there's so much going around him and he's very much like the viewer in that he's seeing it all for the first time just as we are. Did he know when he signed on that you planned on doing these elaborate long shots?
Cuarón: Yes, but without having the awareness that they were going to be so complicated. I knew that the approach was going to be the same as "Y Tu Mama Tambien," in which character is as important as social environment. We don't have close-ups, because that is to give more weight to character vs. environment. How to create the moment of truthfulness in which the camera is just registering that moment of truthfulness, so that was the point of departure, except in "Y Tu Mama," the social environment was Mexico. In this film, we have to recreate the social environment. In "Y Tu Mama," it was just two characters talking and maybe having sex, and here we have battles and wars and stuff.

CS: You weren't able to get a ménage a trois into this movie. I was kind of surprised.
Cuarón: Man! No, I know! I couldn't fit it in, man!

CS: There really are some amazing scenes in this like the tracking shot as Clive is going through the refugee camp and seeing all hell break loose. Are you able to do multiple takes of something like that or is that just setting it up and going for it?
Cuarón: How many shots do we have of that? We did, after prepping for something like ten days, one afternoon we tried and we blew it very quickly. The next morning was the last day we had in the morning. Seven minutes into the take, the camera operator slipped and fell, and then just in the nick of time, when the light was about to disappear and the sun was about to fade, is when we achieved the shot.

CS: I know there are limits to the amount of film you can have in hand-held cameras.
Cuarón: No, we had plenty of footage, because none of these shots are over ten minutes. We were very concerned about that and that was the constant tension. There was a point in which it was not only about if the choreography is fine and everything is fine, it was about whether we had enough film in the mag.

CS: Did you have any sort of chance to rehearse or run-through those scenes before doing them?
Cuarón: That's the thing. The last scene in the movie, in the schedule say we have 14 days to do that scene. In the conventional way, from the first day, you're shooting and doing inserts and doing little bits and pieces, and here, we hit Day 11 and we haven't really rolled camera, and believe me, that creates a lot of tension and anxiety.

CS: Especially having actors waiting around for things to be set-up.
Cuarón: Well, no, actually the actors were fantastic. It's more about in paper, in terms of the accountants, you're ten days behind, and then the thing is that you catch up and you end up doing your scene and you put it in the can and you end up shooting the same 14 days that you were supposed to shoot.

CS: At one point, the movie was going to come out in August or September but then it got moved. Did it need more work done at that point or was it just a positioning thing?
Cuarón: Yeah, they changed the whole thing. That was the beauty of it. When Universal saw the movie, and actually, I think that San Diego Comic-Con was a fundamental moment for that. Suddenly, the studio decided to be more aggressive with the film.

CS: Now, it's coming out mere days before Guillermo del Toro's movie.
Cuarón: Yeah, that is so great. Now is "Babel," then is going to be "Children of Men" and then it's Guillermo's movie. It's so great. I consider those three movies like sister movies.

CS: They're very different, but I guess I can see some parallels between the three movies in terms of the way they look at the world.
Cuarón: Oh, man. It's about how ideology becomes communication and it's about how all the atrocities that people do to people.

CS: So you're okay with how so many lazy journalists have lumped the three movies together?
Cuarón: I'm more than okay. I'm so proud of that. Guillermo, Alejandro and I are receiving the Gotham Award, so that's also very cool and I'm very happy about that.

CS: Are you going to try to schedule your next movies together, too?
Cuarón: That's the thing. You cannot plan those things. That's what's been so enjoyable about this thing. We came from three parallel experiences and that was not by design, it was just by coincidence. I don't know if you can force these things.

CS: Do you have something else lined-up that you've been wanting to do now that you've finished this?
Cuarón: I want to do a tiny movie in Mexico at this point. I don't know what it is, but it has to be something very tiny.

CS: Any plans of getting back together with Gael or Diego or some of the other actors from your previous films?
Cuarón: This is actually something I've been discussing. My brother Carlos is writing a script that is with Gael and Diego that he's going to direct. He wrote "Y Tu Mama Tambien" and he's going to direct this one. And with Gael, I've been talking about the possibility of a film in the future as well.

CS: Will this be your brother's first film as a director?
Cuarón: Long feature, yes, he's done a bunch of shorts.

CS: Has he been on your sets enough to know what's involved with directing a feature and do you expect to offer him some tips?
Cuarón: Well, I help in the sense of the creative collaboration that I have with other people, but this is pretty much his baby.

CS: What's going on with your distribution deal? Do you have any new movies coming out next year?
Cuarón: We're waiting to see what's happening with a couple of tiny things that we're trying to land. I hope that everything comes together and those things happen.

CS: Are there any new things you're producing that you're excited about?
Cuarón: There's also a couple of things that I'm doing with Guillermo del Toro as well. I want Guillermo to produce for me the tiny thing I want to do in Mexico. Now, I'm getting exhausted about the amount of work that is required when you direct a movie, that I think I'm going to slow down a little bit in the production thing, because I want to have time to live.

CS: Because the last two movies you did were pretty expansive...
Cuarón: Yeah, they were so absorbing.

CS: At one point, you were going to do a movie about the Mexican revolts in 1968. Is that something you're still interested in doing?
Cuarón: Well, yeah, but I need to do two things. I need to do more research around it and also now, after coming out of this movie that has all these massacres, I need to take a break before going into new massacres.

CS: Maybe do something a little cheerier or happier?
Cuarón: I don't know about happier, but at least not so violent.

Children of Men opens in limited release on Christmas Day.

[Redlum]

A barebones Region 2 DVD of Children of Men is out January 15th with this shameful "art"work.

http://www.dvdtimes.co.uk/content.php?contentid=63503

[I Love a Magician]

That is ridiculously, embarrassingly bad.

[grand theft sparrow]

I guess that's what we have to look forward to in April or May.

Wouldn't it be cheaper to just use the posters?  That's what I never understood about these atrocious covers.

[nix]

they're selling the star and misleading renters into thinking it's an action film. They see it as a chance to remarket the movie. Deplorable but a hard fact.

[Pubrick]

well it's not entirely inaccurate. he is the whole reason for watching it, and the girl.

i saw this ages ago and forgot to review it. basically chunks of the movie are forgettable. the arc of clive's character and the presence of the girl are what save it. there's one supporting character, however, who almost single handedly sinks the entire film. i hated her so much. julianne is pretty useless in it too. anyway, back to the worst performance of the year.. just watch it and you'll see.

technically it's brilliant of course. but who, apart from flagpolespecial, really cares about that. there is one shot where technical bravado and emotional catharsis come together in sweet transcendence.. it's like a brilliant note held for like a minute or two. i don't think it was the much talked about uncut shot, which i didn't even notice to tell you the truth. eh.. kind of loses steam in the end like this review.

[Alexandro]

well it's not entirely inaccurate. he is the whole reason for watching it, and the girl.

i saw this ages ago and forgot to review it. basically chunks of the movie are forgettable. the arc of clive's character and the presence of the girl are what save it. there's one supporting character, however, who almost single handedly sinks the entire film. i hated her so much. julianne is pretty useless in it too. anyway, back to the worst performance of the year.. just watch it and you'll see.

technically it's brilliant of course. but who, apart from flagpolespecial, really cares about that. there is one shot where technical bravado and emotional catharsis come together in sweet transcendence.. it's like a brilliant note held for like a minute or two. i don't think it was the much talked about uncut shot, which i didn't even notice to tell you the truth. eh.. kind of loses steam in the end like this review.

in general, i dont think you and i were watching the same movie. but i can't really deduce that character you say that single handedly sinks the movie, or almost sinks the whole movie. i felt it was technically brilliant but not that well developed the first time around, but i gave it a second chance and it's one of the best of the year, easily. so maybe you should give it a second chance.

[Pubrick]

in general, i dont think you and i were watching the same movie. but i can't really deduce that character you say that single handedly sinks the movie, or almost sinks the whole movie. i felt it was technically brilliant but not that well developed the first time around, but i gave it a second chance and it's one of the best of the year, easily. so maybe you should give it a second chance.

i'll be watching it again cos i mostly enjoyed it due to my man crush on clive owen.

the character i was talking about was Miriam. the fat useless broad who tags along with them for a while and overacts every line, action, and silent moment given to her. she was nothing, i could give two shits what happened to her. she's like some clingy outsider who tags along when you're out with close friends trying to hav a good time, and everyone is thinking "who invited this guy??"

[MacGuffin]

There's no place like hell for the holidays
Director Alfonso Cuarón intensifies a novelist's grim vision in 'Children of Men.'
By John Horn, Los Angeles Times

As imagined by British novelist P.D. James in "The Children of Men," the very near future isn't a place you'd ever want to visit.

A worldwide infertility crisis threatens the human race, terrifying gangs prey upon the dwindling populace, and the desperate and elderly queue up for government-sponsored euthanasia. Yet as bleak as James' vision might be, it can't compare to the horrors dreamed up by filmmaker Alfonso Cuarón in adapting her novel for the screen.

Hollywood stands rightly convicted of whitewashing previously published material, but Cuarón and his "Children of Men" creative team are not ones to follow show business precedent. The director didn't just want to make "Children of Men" more visceral, he also tried to make it additionally prophetic. And that's when Cuarón and his collaborators found that the more suffering they invented, the more credible they believed their movie became.

"We didn't want to do a science fiction movie," says Cuarón, the director of "Y Tu Mamá También" and "Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban." "We wanted to do a movie about the state of things."

The state of things, as the movie has it, is one narrow step shy of the apocalypse. Almost all of the cataclysms imagined by James remain, but in the film they're juiced on steroids: Infertility shares the stage with an all-out war against immigrants, and the environment is collapsing at an alarming rate. The crumbling social and political infrastructure from the novel has become in Cuarón's movie a chaotic mix of anarchy and totalitarianism.

When it was published in 1992, James' book was set 29 years ahead — 2021. It took more than a decade to turn "The Children of Men" into a movie, but in the intervening 14 years, the gap between the present and the story's imagined future contracted; the drama now unfolds just 21 years over the horizon.

"It's more relevant than most movies that are set in the present," says Clive Owen, who stars in the film as its reluctant protagonist, Theo. "It's not farfetched. It's a cautionary tale."

Although "Children of Men" tries to end with a hopeful development, it's not the kind of film typically associated with holiday cheer — the film opens on Christmas Day.

"It's a very expensive movie," Cuarón says of his production's $87-million budget (which will be reduced to about $75 million through British incentives). "And our co-lead is a black girl with an African accent."

A Sisyphean task

When Hilary Shor read James' book, the producer's first child was not yet 2 months old. "There is something organic that happens to you when you've had a child," says Shor. "When you have to protect this little baby."

The little baby in "The Children of Men" wasn't yet born. Like the movie, the novel opens with the death of the youngest person alive — in the book he's 25; in the movie he's 19.

It's symbolically crushing news, but soon thereafter, a woman becomes pregnant. It's only one person, one baby, but it signals salvation for a collapsing world. Theo, who has grown apathetic as the world falls into ruin, becomes the guardian of the mother-to-be.

A former talent agent, Shor promptly optioned the James book in her first deal as a producer. "Then it was like Sisyphus pushing a rock up a mountain," she says.

James insisted (and was granted contract language guaranteeing) that the movie be set in Britain. "Certain writers would come in and say, 'Let's do an 'Independence Day' version of the movie, something set in the United States,' " Shor says. "And I would say, 'That isn't going to fly.' "

But the story's location wasn't its primary impediment. "A lot of directors saw it as science fiction," Shor says. "I saw it as something more humanistic. This is not about a bunch of guys flying around in saucers with silver lamé suits."

Eventually Shor partnered with "Spy Game" producer Marc Abraham, and Cuarón was approached. At the time, the Mexican writer-director had made "A Little Princess" and "Great Expectations," but his "Y Tu Mamá También" had not yet opened.

That Spanish-language movie became an art house hit, but right on the heels of Sept. 11. Cuarón says the terrorist attacks didn't necessarily stall "Children of Men," but the project failed to generate sufficient momentum at Universal Pictures. "They were not ready to do it — the studio, the producers," Cuarón says. "They didn't get the movie."

Cuarón promised Shor he would return to "Children of Men" after he made his "Harry Potter" sequel. Unlike so many Hollywood promises, he was true to his word.

"You never know if people are going to come back," Abraham says. "But he came back with fire in his belly."

Cuarón's "Harry Potter" had made the director even hotter (the film grossed $249.5 million), and his spending two years in London making the movie changed his view of the world.

"A film set is a microcosm of society. It's almost like a caste system — people know their place," Cuarón says. "Class in Britain is pinpointed by accents. And I had an accent."

With television writer Tim Sexton, Cuarón set out to rework the half-dozen or so "Children of Men" scripts. The aftermath of Sept. 11 gave the project new topicality. "The world of them and us came into such clarity," Shor says.

Cuarón and Sexton also found that real-life current events — the spirited debate over the U.S.-Mexico border, charges of American soldiers' abuse of prisoners of war, more foreboding evidence of global warming — informed the screenplay's evolution.

"What we kept on doing with the script was to update," Cuarón says. "We wanted the script to be referential."

Those contemporary references, however, clashed with the film's initial production design, which looked more Buck Rogers than urban decay. One of the initial design presentations included futuristic floating cars. "I said, 'This is amazing. But this is not the movie we are going to do,' " Cuarón says.

Rather, the filmmaker wanted the future to look much like today, just worse — technology, in Cuarón's framing of the movie, stopped evolving in 2014. Besides saving a bundle on set and costume design, the choice meant the movie would seem more realistic, more possible.

"We didn't want to be distracted by the future," Cuarón says. "We didn't want to transport the audience into another reality."

That reality wasn't filled with a lot of exposition and character study. The movie isn't interested in explaining why everyone's infertile or how a democracy turns into a military dictatorship. "I was very concerned about trying to explain too much," Cuarón says. "That to me is a corruption of cinema storytelling."

That meagerness made at least one of Cuarón's actors nervous. And what is clear in Cuarón's head may leave some moviegoers scratching theirs.

"When I first got the script, I wasn't sure what I could do with the part — he's an elusive character," Owen says of Theo. But when the "Closer" actor met with Cuarón and heard his vision of London in the future, Owen signed on. "He wanted the movie," Owen says, "to discuss things that are freaking out people now — immigration, environmentalism and terrorism."

Use of long takes

Movie directors love to show off, and one of the ways they strut their stuff is with long, single-take shots — they're a hallmark of Brian De Palma.

Cuarón and longtime cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki also were drawn to such lengthy shots but for a different reason: They felt they would immerse the audience in the story. Rather than offer close-ups of the actors' faces, Cuarón and Lubezki focused their cameras on the performers running around their crumbling world.

"I think they are pretty staggering, but they are not showy," says Owen, who was called on to perform scenes 10 minutes and longer, many of them filled with gunfire, explosions and crashes. "They are trying to put you viscerally in the middle of things — to make you feel you are in the situation."

To film such long takes required days of rehearsal, and on some days, not a foot of film was shot. "You can imagine the phone calls," Owen says. But Abraham says he was more worried when they were filming: "The only time you get nervous is when it's going and it's for real," he says. "You just want one in the can."

James says that even with its many departures, she very much enjoyed the film — amazingly, the first feature made out of any of her 17 novels.

"It's not very much like the book, but that always happens," she says. "I described much more the loss of hope. The movie is more of an adventure film. And there's far more open violence in the movie, undoubtedly. It's a brutal picture of a society in complete breakdown. The film does grow out of the book, there's no doubt. The ideas are just treated in very different ways."

James says that even though the book and novel "are not really credible," she says both are grounded in indisputable truths — the falling birthrate in some parts of the world, the marginalization of the elderly.

James says she isn't sure how prophetic her book might be, and Cuarón certainly hopes his movie isn't describing an imminent crisis. But the filmmaker still sees "Children of Men" as making a statement, reverberating long after the movie is finished.

"Enjoyment of the present — I think that's what modern capitalism is about: Our immediate needs, without consideration for the consequences of our actions," Cuarón says.

"We wanted to make a movie that begins when the lights come on."

[MacGuffin]

Children of Men is the best film you will see this year. The new film by Mexican born filmmaker Alfonso Cuarón has everything in it any SuicideGirl will ever need. The film is set in Britain in the near future where no babies have been born for 18 years. Britain is the only place left where a free man can be safe and that's just what former activist Theodore Faron [played by Clive Owen] thinks until an encounter with his ex-wife and her army of rebels known as The Fishes convinces him that he must escort the last pregnant woman on Earth to safe area outside the UK. Cuarón has combined the character study skills he honed with Y tu mamá también with the special effects experience he picked up by directing Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban to make Children of Men one of the most fascinating and riveting films ever.

Daniel Robert Epstein: I thought Children of Men was fantastic.

Alfonso Cuarón: Thank you.

DRE:My wife cried quite a bit during it.

AC:I'm sorry.

DRE:[laughs] A film like Children of Men really shows you that within the science fiction genre you can do anything.

AC:Well, I was not thinking so much about the genre because what I was afraid of was to do a film that could be perceived as a science fiction film. I wanted to do a film that would speak about the present in a more direct way. Science fiction is amazing in how it can be a metaphor about our reality but I wanted to not to make a metaphor but to make a visual journey through reality.

DRE:Everything about the film felt so relevant, it was as if you just finished the film a few days before. How much of what has happened in 2006 influenced the film?

AC:Tim Sexton and I wrote the script right after Y tu mamá también. Then what happened was I went to do Harry Potter [and the Prisoner of Azkaban] and then finally Children of Men happened. What we were very cautious about was to try to keep on updating the issues. Thematically we felt very strongly about the main thematic elements of the film but it is about the state of things. There is a state of things that withstand history and is about the human condition. That, in a way, is timeless. I think that the way brutality infuses over humanity is something that is timeless. By the same token, by combining that timelessness with very specific iconography that is engraved in human consciousness, that iconography comes from media and news. We were thinking that would be the sense of immediate reality.

DRE:Being that you work in American films you are an immigrant in a way.

AC:I guess so. If you have to define me as an immigrant then yes I would belong to that minority that is known as partial immigrant. That has nothing to do with experience of the immigrant that has to immigrate because of economic needs or oppression.

DRE:Right, but you could relate to the characters on that level?

AC:I can relate in the characters that I don't understand borders. For me human beings are human beings. I was watching last month as they were fixing the Hubble Telescope. In maps you always see these images of the beautiful planet but I didn't see all the little colors that they show in maps. It was this amazing, beautiful, organic thing.

DRE:Technically I thought Children of Men was nearly flawless. What did you like about using such wide shots such as when Michael Caine is confronting The Fishes outside his cabin?

AC:[cinematographer] Emmanuel Lubezki, who we call Chivo, won the award best cinematography in Venice for this film. From the get go, Chivo and I decided that no matter how big this film got, our approach was going to be the same as Y tu mamá también, where social environment is as important as character. So there's an avoidance of close-ups to give weight to character vs. environment. It's about keeping a very objective distance. Also trying not to sentimentalize the moment or trying to effect things through editing or montage. There's the temptation of having Michael Caine, who is such an amazing actor with such an amazing face, of trying to milk a moment to the enjoyment of your star. It was about trying to keep a distance because we felt that certain things would be more brutal to watch from a distance.

DRE:What's interesting in this world in film is the act of sex seems to have gone to the wayside. It doesn't seem like such a sexually charged society like we have in America.

AC:It is more in the texture of the meaning. There are a lot of little parts about sex companions and prostitution and stuff. But what we were trying to avoid is the idea of a romantic outcome. We were trying to avoid the idea of the metaphor about creating a new baby, one that would represent the hope for humanity. We were trying to avoid the idea of the creation of a new lineage.

DRE:In many science fiction films that use the idea of having to bring someone somewhere, usually the person that's bringing them is absolutely right but there's certainly an argument to say that the baby should stay with The Fishes.

AC:There's an argument. The problem is you would sink deeper and deeper into the quicksand ideology because there is an ideological problem in that the needs of humanity are subordinating to ideological needs.

DRE:Do you know what you're working on next yet?

AC:I'm hoping to do a tiny film in Mexico. I'm still not very clear what it is going to be but I think its going to be something there in Mexico, very tiny.

DRE:I also saw Pan's Labyrinth this past year.

AC:Amazing.

DRE:It's an amazing movie. How involved were you with Pan's Labyrinth beyond your friendship with Guillermo [del Toro]?

AC:When Guillermo and I were in our very early 20's we did some TV programs together. He wrote a screenplay that I directed which was like the seed for Pan's Labyrinth. It was about ogres not Pan and it was performed by Guillermo in latex. Then a couple of years ago we were having dinner and he told me this story and I said, "Let's do it." From that moment we started pre-production. There was no script but we had so much faith in this project that we started paying for things and making deals with actors out of our own money while we were putting everything together.

DRE:Would the two of you ever work on a film 50-50?

AC:We always talk about it. Doing a film with me, Guillermo and Alejandro Iñárritu. At one point Guillermo wanted to do a story of a kidnapping seen from three different points of view and for each one of us to take a different character for a different point of view of the same situation.

DRE:That'd be wild!

AC:That would be very interesting.

DRE:Alfonso, thank you so much for talking with me. I really appreciate it.

AC:No, thank you. Thanks so much for connecting with the film.

DRE:Oh no problem. The film was is just stunning. I don't really cry at movies but if I could I would cry at that one.

AC:Oh come on, don't be a wimp, cry.

DRE:I can't cry at movies [laughs].

AC:Come on.

DRE:I cry at real life, how's that.

AC:I'm not a girl; you don't have to tell me that. You're so sensitive, right. I don't cry at movies, I cry at real life. Is that your pickup line? 

[MacGuffin]

Interview: Children of Men Director Alfonso Cuaron
Source: Cinematical

Talking with director Alfonso Cuarón (Y tu mamá también, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban) is a bit like trying to follow the lightning-fast motion of a hummingbird's wings. Get him started on a topic he's passionate about -- such as his latest film, Children of Men, which opens today -- and he metaphorically takes flight; you find yourself trying to think two paces ahead of him to where he's going, just to keep up with the rapid-fire pace of his thoughts.

Cuarón very kindly sat down with Cinematical recently to talk about Children of Men, his philosophical view of the world, and what might be next for him ...

Cinematical: I've heard that you didn't read the (P.D .James) novel before you started working on the film.

Alfonso Cuarón: What I was attracted to was the concept of infertility as a premise. I was not really interested in doing a science fiction film, so I had completely disregarded it. But the premise kept haunting me. It was not until I realized that the premise of the film could serve as a metaphor for the fading sense of hope, that it could be a point of departure for an exploration of the state of things that we're living in now, the things that are shaping this very first part of the 21st century, that I wanted to do it.

So that was the point of departure, because when I understood that, then I saw clearly a movie. So I asked my writing partner, Tim Sexton, to read the book, and I said, okay, I don't want to read the book because I don't want to sidetrack myself or second-guess myself. I had a very clear vision of the movie I wanted to do. So I said to him, you read the book, and based on this movie I'm telling you, there are elements of the book which you will write into the movie. That's what happened.

Cinematical: So you didn't even have a script you were looking at, at that point.

AC: No, no. I'm sure there are producers (pauses) -- this is Hollywood, I share credit with, I don't know how many other writers on this film, and I'm sure they have other projects on this book they never brought to fruition.

Cinematical: I was going to ask you about that -- IMDb lists, I think, three other writers besides yourself and Tim Sexton with screenplay credit.

AC: You see, as far as I am concerned, those other guys have nothing to do with my movie.

Cinematical: So those other writers who have writing credit, they were not sitting around a table with you and Tim, writing the screenplay?

AC: No, no, not at all. It's all a big game, you see. If you are a writer who chooses also to direct, your guild is going to punish you. And deal with credits in a different way than if you were not directing. But anyway, that's the way it is.

Cinematical: That's interesting to hear, because when I saw the film, I knew there were five writers credited, and often that makes for a film that's a mess. But your film doesn't feel that way at all.

AC: Well, that's because these other writers, they did not exist in this movie. It was me, and Tim Sexton, and Clive Owen. That's all. And by the same token, I'm willing to give credit to whoever really deserves credit for the film. And except for Tim Sexton and myself, for me, all these other writers, it's just studio development work that I'm not even interested in discussing, because I don't know what they did, and I couldn't care less.

I met with one writer who was trying to turn this into a generic action movie, and the other two I didn't even meet, didn't even know existed. But by the same token, Clive Owen, now he was a writer. He got involved in this project with Tim and myself, we locked ourselves in a hotel room, and first we went over his character. And he had so much insight that we decided, Tim and myself, that Clive should be involved with the rest of the writing process, even if it was not about his character. I started to admire his instincts, and I asked him to be involved with the rest of the process.

For me, he is also a co-filmmaker. He had a constant awareness of the film we were trying to do; he was not only performing for the film I was doing, he was trying to achieve from a filmmaker's standpoint, not just an actor. Trying to facilitate for me the kind of film I was trying to do. He understood that we were going to do these one-shot deals, and from that he understood the rhythm of the scenes -- that we were not going to use editing to create rhythm. So that it would have to be about what we crafted.

So it was a constant involvement in the discussions about how we were going to deal with the timing of things. And when you have somebody who is aware and concerned about time in this media – that is what you call a filmmaker. Time is intrinsic of the cinema, just like it is in music. Timing is what dictates the movie that you are doing.

Cinematical: Can you talk more about the decision to make the film using one-shots?

AC: The reason for that is, we don't want to favor character over the environment, we want to keep a balance. And that means that you don't do close-ups, because then you are favoring the character over the environment. So you do only very loose shots, because then the character, ideally, blends with the environment and, hopefully, has a conflict. So you can have tension between background environment and your character.

Another thing is not to use editing or montage, trying to seek for an effect. It is to try to create a moment of truthfulness, in which the camera just happens to be there to just register that moment. So that leads into the long shots. Because then you just register the moments as they go. So what becomes important, then, is not the camera, but the moment. If you are going through life and something happens, you don't have the luxury of going , "Stop, stop, guys, and let me get a close-up!"

Now, by the same token, if we failed, if the camera itself, the shot we were taking, was cutting away from that moment of truthfulness, that is when we decided to cut. That battle scene at the end, that shot kept on going. And we said, no, we are losing the sense of the moment, and becoming more about "look, no hands," and so we decided to cut from that moment. It was about trying to achieve the balance of that, about trying to register that moment, making that moment the most important aspect of the whole thing -- not the shot.

But sometimes just by the fact that you're following the moment and you don't cut, it can begin to feel like you're doing it for the sake of your own artistry or whatever, and that was the moment at which we would choose to cut. Because these one-shot deals are not only in the action scenes -- most of the movie was shot that way. So the weight goes onto the actors ... (chuckles) and I don't have to work too much. I just sit back, relax and enjoy the show.

Cinematical: Can you talk a bit about the casting of Julianne Moore and Michael Caine?

AC: Michael Caine -- ever since we were writing the script, we used to refer to Jasper as the "Michael Caine" character.

Cinematical: I didn't even recognize him until I saw his name in the credits.

AC: (laughs) His own wife didn't recognize him! One time he was dressed up in character, and his wife walked into the room and asked for Michael, and he was right there next to her. And that's when he knew, this is how he wanted to play this character. He wanted Jasper to be like an older John Lennon – he was friends with Lennon -- and he wanted the body language and the nasal voice and the cadence of how he portrayed this character to reflect the way he said Lennon used to talk. And then after we shot some scenes, I saw some old footage of Lennon and it was identical.

With Julianne, now, it was so important to get somebody who would have first of all the credibility of leadership, intelligence, independence.

Cinematical: She's not just a "pretty face" actress.

AC: Well, let's be honest (laughs) -- she is absolutely stunning. But that was not what was key here. She is a very beautiful woman though. But what comes in the foreground with Julianne Moore, that which I so admire, is that strength, that independence. Even when she plays the character of the wife who is oppressed, you have the sense of that intelligence, that mind, that is behind there.

Cinematical: You get the sense that you wouldn't want to mess with her.

AC: (laughs) Oh-ho! You bet you don't want to mess with Julianne! But I have to say, she is just so much fun to work with. She is just pulling the rug out from under your feet all the time. You don't know where to stand, because she is going to make fun of you.

Cinematical: Without giving too many spoilers away -- you made the decision to kill off a couple of key characters early on in the film, which really keeps you on edge, because then you don't know what's going to happen next.

AC: Because, that is life, that's the way it works! That was the point of the thing, this getting rid of the safety net of your preconception that, you are going on a journey with the hero and so everything is going to be fine.

Cinematical: I want to talk about the visual design of the film. I've heard that other people were pushing to give the fill a more futuristic look and that you fought against that.

AC: Well, it was not pushing, really, it was just -- you say, I'm going to do a film that is set in 2027, and you have an art department that gets so excited because, finally, they get to execute concept designs that they've been dreaming to do, for all these futuristic buildings and cars. And gadgets -- they had a lot of gadgets. But the fact is that we didn't want to do a science fiction film.

In this movie, I told them, you unfortunately have to leave your imagination outside. It's kind of like, you know, when you go to a writer's workshop and you have the creative workshop? This film was not the creative workshop, it was the essay workshop. It's not about imagining and being creative, it is about referencing reality. So -- the cinematographer, he said that not a single frame of this film can go by making a comment about the state of things. So everything became about reference -- and not reference about what is around, like, oh, I'm walking around, and this is what I saw on the street, but about how this has relevance in the context of the state of things, of the reality that we are living today.

And most of those things we tried to make references coming from the media, referencing that they had become a part of human consciousness, and that maybe we don't fully remember, but when you see it you recognize something that rings true because you have seen it in reality -- even if you don't really remember it consciously. And so the exercise was to transcend not only reality, but also to cross-reference within the film to the spiritual themes of the film.

So I will give you an example: They exit the Russian apartments, and the next shot you see is this woman wailing, holding the body of her son in her arms. This was a reference to a real photograph of a woman holding the body of her son in the Balkans, crying with the corpse of her son. It's very obvious that when the photographer captured that photograph, he was referencing La Pieta, the Michelangelo sculpture of Mary holding the corpse of Jesus. So: We have a reference to something that really happened, in the Balkans, which is itself a reference to the Michelangelo sculpture. At the same time, we use the sculpture of David early on, which is also by Michelangelo, and we have of course the whole reference to the Nativity. And so everything was referencing and cross-referencing, as much as we could.

Cinematical: I've read also that because of 9/11, you really wanted to make this film relevant to today.

AC: Well, I really wanted to make a film that would speak to the 21st century. And the specific dynamics that the 21st century has taken as opposed to the 20th century. I think it's important to separate those elements out, because, I think, there's a certain nostalgia for the 20th century that I don't know is healthy. There's this whole idea of tyranny being created by a single figure, a dictator. In the book, there actually is a dictator of Great Britain, you know, this notion of a Big Brother, a dictator. And we wanted to make this world, this universe, a democracy. Britain is a democracy. But, by the way, being a democracy doesn't mean people are choosing the right things or what is just.

Cinematical: Having the freedom to choose doesn't guarantee people will make the right choices.

AC: Exactly! So that is part of it. I mean I think it is something that is so important, to be very aware of the direction in which the 21st century is going with all this blind faith in democracy. And by the way, I am not against democracy -- I am against the blind faith that is being put in democracy. And any tyranny now can have the makeup of a democracy, and then in a way, you can start to justify all the elements of a tyranny. And suddenly a democracy starts to lose its meaning. Democracy used to be a point of departure – to challenge these things! To challenge tyranny! And now democracy is becoming an instrument to justify a system.

Cinematical: Well, we live in a democratic republic, with the right of freedom of speech, but these days, if you challenge or speak out against the government, that's un-American.

AC: Yes! And together, slowly, in the same way, we are allowing the idea of democracy to drift into an area where democracy becomes a matter of faith. It is an issue of faith, a destination rather than a point of departure. And so you start wrestling with these concepts, with certain concepts like gated communities, and to build up walls instead of building bridges.

Cinematical: You really hit on that in the film by discussing the issue of immigration, and of shipping people off who aren't citizens.

AC: And again -- democratically chosen. It's not that there is this bad guy doing it like Hitler, it is a democratically chosen position. And the idea of tyranny -- a democratically chosen tyranny -- that as a humanity, we are making our choices.

Cinematical: Before we end, can you talk briefly about your next project? IMDb lists several ...

AC: Oh, IMDb -- you cannot believe anything you see on there! I get so mad when I look there sometimes, I don't know where they get this from. All I have right now is one very small film I am just starting on, that is all. No, I am too lazy to direct all that stuff.

Cinematical: Would you ever consider directing another Harry Potter film?

AC: Well, we will see. Let's see how the seventh book ends up, maybe that one -- maybe. It was the best two years of my life, working on Prisoner of Azkaban, so I am not going to say I wouldn't do another one.

[Gamblour.]

I haven't had time to read all the interviews, but does ANYONE talk about the amazingly long/impossible shot inside of the car?? I thought that was the long take everyone was talking about, it's pretty incredible and kinda took me out of the moment due to its technical virtuoso.