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Trailer here. (http://www.apple.com/trailers/universal/childrenofmen/)

Release Date: September 29, 2006 Nationwide 

Starring: Julianne Moore, Clive Owen, Michael Caine, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Charlie Hunnam

Directed by: Alfonso Cuarón 

Premise: A futuristic society faces extinction when no children are born and the human race has lost the ability to reproduce. England has descended into chaos, until an iron-handed warden is brought in to institute martial law. The warden's ability to keep order is threatened when a woman finds that she is pregnant with what would be the first child born in 27 years.

wow, if i saw that without having any knowledge of who made it, i would've said it looked like the worst movie EVER.   :shock: but, since i like who made it, i will see this anyway.  that said, it seems like the kind of movie that will be forgotten quickly.  the september release date only goes to confirm that.

I think this looks decent.  Good cast. 

I don't know.  I like dramas disguised as sci-fi.  I'm interested enough to see more even though I kept thinking during the trailer that Danny Boyle should have done this.

And is the pricetag on imdb right?  $116 million?  :shock:

I think this could be awesome. Or it could be slightly awkward. But I'm leaning toward awesome. I love Cuaron, I love strong sci-fi. It's been too long since Solaris.

Although this won't hold a candle to The Fountain.

That looks really incredible. Michael Caine as some aging hippie? Fucking awesome. The idea of the youngest person in the world dying and that event being so important....it's very very interesting to me. Sure it's no Fountain, but I just really want a few surprise films to be outstanding, this year has been fairly disappointing.

Quote from: hackspaced on July 20, 2006, 06:12:33 PM
And is the pricetag on imdb right?  $116 million?  :shock:

From the look of the trailer, I doubt it.  What we saw did not cost that much, and I wouldn't believe a trailer holding back on whatever set pieces might have cost that much.  And it's IMDb.  So even though Cuaron has handled a giant budget before with Harry Potter, I'd say no on that $116M for this movie.

I think it looks good, though.  I love Cuaron a lot.  If you saw the trailer for A Little Princess, you wouldn't necessarily think it'd be the best movie of all time, and yet it is.  Cuaron's best touches are not the sort of things they can put in a trailer, anyway.  The concept is interesting, as is the tone.  I'm definitely looking forward to seeing it.

Great and intriguing concept and Having Julianne in it only sweetens the deal.

I'm also a Cuaron fan (really looking forward to his new Criterion disc) and what intrigues me most about this flick (more than the cast or even director) is just the idea of a time when we may never be able to have children. I just find that kinda scary.

Having Sigur in the trailer is also a huge plus for me.

Quote from: edison on July 21, 2006, 12:17:51 AM
Having Sigur in the trailer is also a huge plus for me.

Having an orchestral version of Gimme Shelter by the Rolling Stones in the trailer is a huge plus for me

Quote from: modage on July 20, 2006, 05:52:43 PM
wow, if i saw that without having any knowledge of who made it, i would've said it looked like the worst movie EVER.   :shock: but, since i like who made it, i will see this anyway.  that said, it seems like the kind of movie that will be forgotten quickly.  the september release date only goes to confirm that.

what hell are you on modage? what exactly about this trailer implies a shit movie?

i think this looks freaking amazing. forget the release date, it's completely meaningless (along with most other aspects of promotional material like what music appears in a trailer). in a year who's gonna care when it was released? the trailer delivers on the premise with the promise ( :shock:) of a hugely emotional dramatic arc. saving the last hope for humanity! what an awesome premise. this film relies on the pay off, our investment in the "high concept", what's gonna happen to that kid, what's the deal with julianne moore and clive owen's character, not on the release date.

Quote from: Pubrick on July 21, 2006, 04:02:22 AM
what's gonna happen to that kid...

premature birth and then shortly after, neonatal death

Ghostboy and Pubrick

Cuarón Unveils Children of Men

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Mexican director Guillermo Del Toro did a fine job interviewing his fellow countryman, director Alfonso Cuaron, on his new film Children of Men. Universal is clearly 100 % behind this movie, as studio chief Ron Meyer turned up, sitting in the front row of the VIP section. He had never been to the Con before, he admitted, and was turning around and jetting back after the presentation, but he wanted to see what it was all about. 

The trailer and preview footage of Children of Men were impressive (aint-it-cool-news reviewed the whole film July 7). Cuaron's been wanting to make this Dystopian sci-fi adventure since Tim Sexton's first script in 2001. It's set in 2027, when civilization is in ruins, human beings have become infertile and the world is dying. "It's the anti-Blade Runner," Cuaron said. Clive Owen is our cynical hero who stops pouring whiskey into his coffee to join the fight to save the human race. Julianne Moore is his ex-wife and counter-revolutionary. Michael Caine is an entertaining pothead who tokes joints on screen. "9/11 dictated the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st century. We're bringing things going on to the world of the 21st century, like immigration. I said, 'Let's do the Battle of Algiers for the 21st century.'" Cuaron and Del Toro turned to the audience and grinned: "We have our green cards with us!"

Cuaron shoots super-long takes, to heighten the movie's super-realism. One ten-minute battle scene is one of the most exhilarating complex single-takes I've ever seen—explosions, shootings, tanks, Owen running down a street ducking in and out of cover. "I wanted a documentary kind of immediacy," Cuaron said. "It takes five days to shoot. At the end of the fourth day I have not rolled camera. On the fifth day, the first take doesn't work. On the second the squibs are burned out. I only have one chance and magically at the last moment when everyone is stressed it works."

Cinematical was bummed by the trailer, maybe because the movie looks serious, dramatic, and scary: think an arty cinema verite-style Fahrenheit 451 meets the end-of-the-world of Terminator 2, with a steadicam right in the middle of all that action.

Finally Cuaron cited his two caballeros, Del Toro and Alejandro Gonzales Inarritu, who also have fall films, Pan's Labyrinth and Babel: "These three films are from three friends of the same generation; they show who we are thematically; we share the same ideology about what is coming in between the communication of people."

Quote from: edison on July 21, 2006, 12:17:51 AM


Having Sigur in the trailer is also a huge plus for me.

you really gotta stop doing that.

most of the time, what i meant to post has already been posted. i'm slow.

i do admire how well you keep track of my posts though

Quote from: modage on July 20, 2006, 05:52:43 PMit seems like the kind of movie that will be forgotten quickly.  the september release date only goes to confirm that.

Box Office Mojo is reporting that Alfonso Cuaron's Children of Men has been pushed back to 12.25.06 from the previous 9.29 date.

Quote from: MacGuffin on August 12, 2006, 02:02:37 PM

Quote from: modage on July 20, 2006, 05:52:43 PMit seems like the kind of movie that will be forgotten quickly.  the september release date only goes to confirm that.

Box Office Mojo is reporting that Alfonso Cuaron's Children of Men has been pushed back to 12.25.06 from the previous 9.29 date.

Wow... using the specious reasoning that cinematic quality can be determined by release date, this movie's going to great after all!

Aargh. Pleasure delayers!

Quote from: polkablues on August 12, 2006, 02:17:26 PM

Quote from: MacGuffin on August 12, 2006, 02:02:37 PM

Quote from: modage on July 20, 2006, 05:52:43 PMit seems like the kind of movie that will be forgotten quickly.  the september release date only goes to confirm that.

Box Office Mojo is reporting that Alfonso Cuaron's Children of Men has been pushed back to 12.25.06 from the previous 9.29 date.

Wow... using the specious reasoning that cinematic quality can be determined by release date, this movie's going to great after all!

fantastic news!  hopefully a non-sucky trailer to follow!

I think it's certain lines of dialogue that makes things like this seem silly. When people say things like, "We will get you to the Human Project" or "Even since women stopped making babies," it seems rediculous, regardless of how pertinant it may be to the perticular film.

But this still looks great.

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I don't think I've watched a trailer as much or as longingly as this one for about a year. I expected it to be great (to the point of having a general feeling of well-being and confidence as I took my seat)...and it was.

Technically its a perfection of some of what Spielberg did in War of the Worlds but much more realistically executed with beleivable characters and a stronger narrative to back it up. The vision of the future is a near-perfect extrapolation (in movie terms) of our current situation and I would imagine coming out of a cinema in London after seeing this would be odd to say the least.
The long, uncut sequence you've probably all read about is mesmerising and far bigger than anything I imagined.

Clive Owen is perfect as the reluctant hero. He is more than that though - disenchanted but never a bore; his sense of humour (and the films) makes him really likeable. Claire Hope Ashitey as the mother to be is a strong female lead and nothing at all like the weak, dewy-eyed girl in the trailer. She sharply puts the usual, boring cries of christian allegory to bed (although I'm sure the new US Christmas Day release will be a marketing opportunity too deliscious to refuse).

Don't expect the film to be any more of a commentary on current issues than you can draw from the surface of level of each scene for yourself. There are no significant explanations or expositions as to most of what goes on. The viewer is placed in the same confused and jaded barrel as everybodyelse and its that immediacy is its biggest success and what ultimately stops the film from falling victim to "silliness".

i agree with a lot of what flagpole says, but for me i thought the music choices were quite nice. i mean, how much good music couldve been produced when everyone was worrying about extinction? i bet everything written post-no-baby-time sounds like an amateur 'sea changes.' the long full metal style shot i thought was amazing. yes maybe too showy but it didnt take me out of the picture at all. it was increasingly chilling. and the "messiah" moment i found to be absolutely transcendent. flagpole you seem to not like the only sequences in the film that are not EXTREMELY subtle. everything but these two pieces were so played down! agree on the 28 days later vibe, and also that this is better. and as variety pointed out, this is what dystopia london should look like, not that v for vendetta bullshit.

michael caine=just gosh wow

but how bout julian moore? didn't see that coming...

Spoilers

Quote from: flagpolespecial on October 19, 2006, 05:44:32 PM
spoilers
people still have jobs, why? to pay for self suicide kits? i doubt that's the only purpose. people were still watching greyhounds a somewhat normal thing, life goes on...til it doesn't, but you know that.

Remeber this is Britain! The only country in the world to hopelessly soldier on! Everywhere else in the world was in total chaos. Interestingly (edit: perhaps not), a friend was telling me how when he was playing an infuriating computer game called 'Rise of the Nations', the only country that would not surrender to his Nuclear super-power and his impending global domination was Britain.

Quotethe baby and the ping pong ball were digital right? if so, that was fucking brilliant.

Yeah that baby was a combination of anamatronic and CGI - see Here (http://www.vfxworld.com/?sa=adv&code=3631a5a1&atype=news&id=18187). I think all the effects in this film are outstanding and almost completely invisible. Surely the best we'll see this year.

I thought the music choices were excellent. Especially King Crimson - "In the court of the crimson King". People would be even more nostalgic for the old stuff than they are now.

Ahem, excuse me, without the word "SPOILER" attached... can you please give me your thoughts on the movie?

I actually want to see this, without having it ruined.  Thus, all of your posts went unread.  Give me a spoil-free review dammit!   :yabbse-angry:

Here's a good review Cronopio suggested to me. It starts with a nifty F. Scott Fitzgerald quote that does a nice job of summing up the feeling of the film.
http://film.guardian.co.uk/News_Story/Critic_Review/Observer_Film_of_the_week/0,,1879597,00.html

Quote
Children of Men
Philip French

In his great essay 'The Crack-Up', written at a personal low ebb in 1936, Scott Fitzgerald said: 'The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.' When facing the future knowing that hope invariably turns to disappointment or when confronted by depressingly apocalyptic science fiction, I always think of Fitzgerald's words.

Inevitably, they came to mind last week seeing the British SF movie Children of Men, directed by versatile Mexican Alfonso Cuaron, who last worked in this country on Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, the darkest and, many believe, the best of the JK Rowling films. Children of Men is adapted by Cuaron and American television writer Timothy J Sexton from an uncharacteristic 1992 novel by the genteel British thriller writer PD James, a woman of conservative views and strong Anglican convictions.

The setting is the hideously polluted, run-down London of 2027 in an authoritarian Britain, the only functioning nation in Europe and, possibly, in the world and, thus, a magnet for refugees. A brutal paramilitary police force is barely in control of a general chaos. Its chief role appears to be rounding up immigrants, referred to sneeringly as 'fugees', either shooting or forcibly deporting them. The principal countervailing force to a corrupt government is an underground resistance group known as the Fish, made up of immigrants and their British sympathisers, called 'Cods'; they seem to be internally divided between agitators seeking to influence a demoralised public and outright terrorists.

This is familiar stuff, the subject of recent British films as different as Danny Boyle's 28 Days Later and James McTeigue's V for Vendetta. The former presented a Britain suddenly reduced to barbarism as a result of a plague and a dangerous, denuded, rubbish-strewn London; the latter gave us a future Britain in which a dictatorial government ruled through violence and a masked avenger incited the public to fight back.

A similarly oppressive atmosphere is palpably rendered in Children of Men by production designers Geoffrey Kirkland and Jim Clay, one American, the other British, and Mexican cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki. The picture is of almost unrelieved gloom, nearer to Nineteen Eighty-Four than to the first great British futuristic picture, the Korda version of HG Wells's Things to Come. There is, perhaps, some consolation for local audiences in feeling that London is once again the hub of the Empire and that they are at the centre of the apocalypse, rather than observing it from the periphery. Old patriotic emotions are aroused by the sight of a future Britain devastated on screen rather than the spectacle of Los Angeles being laid waste or Martians landing in New Jersey instead of, as HG Wells told it, menacing the Home Counties.

The movie that Children of Men most brings to mind is the 1990 adaptation by Harold Pinter of Margaret Atwood's novel The Handmaid's Tale. Both are examples of what might be called obstetric or gynaecological dystopian sci-fi. The Handmaid's Tale, as a film at least, is a glum, portentous feminist take on Nineteen Eighty-Four set in an America run by right-wing fundamentalists, where blacks, homosexuals and radicals are either exterminated or deported to death camps abroad. The few fertile women are forced to serve as handmaids, bearing the children of the nation's leaders whose wives are barren. Children of Men moves rather more briskly but has a similar theme. For no specific reason, no child has been born in this ghastly new world for 18 years, which is to say since 2008. Pollution, genetic experimentation and uncontrollable diseases are suggested as the causes. I believe PD James hints at a judgment of God, her novel being Christian and moral, whereas Atwood's is social and political.

But this impressive, properly pessimistic film doesn't need conventional comic relief. What the narrative demands, and what Cuaron provides, is moral ambiguity and a teasing hopefulness that suggests the possibility of redemption.This is quite an achievement.

Interview : Alfonso Cuaron
Source: Moviehole

When filmmaker Alfonso Cuaron got together with the art department of "Children of Men" to discuss coming up with a realistic futuristic milieu – he didn't mean flying cars, holographic bank-tellers or push-button bicycles.

"When you start talking to artists about doing a film that is set in the future, everyone tends to get a little bit excited and start thinking in terms of Bladerunner", laughs the Mexican writer/director. "I love that film, but this was to be the anti-Bladerunner"

"Children of Men" is a post-911 thriller in which a world one generation from now has fallen into anarchy on the heels of an infertility defect in the population. One man, a former activist, agrees to help move an inexplicably expectant woman to a haven at sea, where her child's birth may assist scientists save the future of civilization.

It was important to ground the film in reality, so palpable technological advancements would have to be at a minimum, insisted Cuaron.

"It was difficult, because people with amazing concepts and imagination came in and suggested some wild things – but I just didn't want imagination in this movie, I wanted reference. I wanted a future that didn't automatically tell the audience it was the future, the audience had to figure it out for themselves – for instance, though the cars are from the future, they look almost normal, its hard to spot their differences", the director, whose other credits include "Y tu mamá también" and "Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban", says. "We didn't want to do a future that was about the future – but about the present".

Not surprisingly, Cuaron became interested in the picture after 911. "I started writing the project in 2001 – and yes, the mental factor in the writing of this film was September 11 obviously. Because of those events, it was important to set the film in more of a 21st century, than a 20th century, because the world as we know it has changed considerably since then."

The film, he says, may differ a little from the P.D James authored book of the same name – because, well, he doesn't know it. "I have to mask a confession. I've never read the novel. I was afraid I would start second guessing things. It was the script that sparked my interest – and it didn't at first, I have to admit, but I eventually found something in it that really grabbed me. Again, I think it was how emblematic of our times it is."

Fortunately, the studio was familiar with the book and they insisted the film remain pretty close to it. "It took place in England, and the studio felt very comfortable about the premise and the integrity of that aspect. That was good, because it would be very hard, especially visually, for this film to take place in America – if only because part of the premise of the film is that the world has fallen apart and England is an island that's separated itself and is run with a very regressive democracy. You could not set that in America. The film would have been much different. England doesn't have the kind of control that you have in America, ya know?"

When studio executives informed the director that they wanted a big name for the film – he never expected Clive Owen's name to be on the list. "When the studio gave the greenlight to the film, they immediately started talking about Clive Owen for the lead - I was so thrilled! I was a fan of Clive. I thought they would suggest a very big star, and even though Clive is becoming a very important leading man, he's an actor more so than a star. I was really thrilled. He really understood this character was not a superhero, but a complete regular Joe. He grounds the film."

An unlikely casting choice was Michael Caine as Jasper, a retired newspaper cartoonist that spends a lot of his time smoking pot.

Caine himself didn't even think he was right, until "we were doing make-up, hair and costume at his house", explains Cuaron. "[And] once he had the clothes and so on, on, and stepped in front of the mirror to look at himself, his body language started changing. Michael loved it. He believed he was this guy".

Caine decided to play the character as an older John Lennon, says Cuaron, and "It is the first time that he farts on screen, and the first time that he smokes joints on screen", he laughs.

Cuaron, who decided to do "Children of Men" over a film version of Yann Martel's "Life of Pi", was as nervous about the film working, as Caine was about the role – but it all came together.

"I was very nervous. You've spent five days on a scene, and by the fourth day you still haven't rolled camera, and on the fifth day the first take doesn't work?" says Cuaron. "Magically it always comes together in that last moment when everyone is stressed and worn".

HOW'D THEY DO THAT?
It was a long shot, but the effort paid off in exhilaration
Source: Los Angeles Times

THE scene would be complex by any standard — for roughly 15 minutes we follow Clive Owen as he navigates three blocks of intricately choreographed urban warfare in a deconstructing British society, circa 2027, as envisioned in director Alfonso Cuarón's "Children of Men." Typically a scene like this would be shot in multiple takes and from different angles, with editing magic turning it into a seamless narrative.

But Cuarón and cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki decided they wanted "Children of Men," their fifth collaboration and due in theaters here Dec. 25, to have a more realistic aesthetic. To get there, they used long, extended shots and wide lenses so characters could always be seen in context. Natural light and lots of hand-held camerawork ruled the set. Inserts, those additional shots to "fill in the blanks" in a scene, were verboten.

The result is a film that departs from cinematic convention, providing some of the longest uninterrupted and yet most synthesized live-action sequences in recent history. And with violence that seems raw and real, not glamorized.

In the case of the 15-minute scene, Lubezki, George Richmond, a British Steadicam operator who'd worked on Oliver Stone's "Alexander," and a focus puller followed the actor — in one section running backward up stairs — as he raced through what amounted to a three-block-wide live set teeming with armed extras in riot gear.

Cuarón, who usually stands next to the camera, ran behind until certain sightlines required that he duck out of view, although a wireless device and a portable video monitor kept him connected to the action.

As Owen ran through the maze of buildings and abandoned buses, across streets and past moving tanks, amid gunfire and explosions, the hand-held camera, operated by Richmond, followed right behind, capturing the 15-minute action sequence in real time.

"The energy is so different than if you're just shooting a little moment where a scene plays out in front of the camera," Lubezki said. "Everybody begins to believe they are in the middle of this war and people start screaming and shooting. By the time the camera got to block three, the extras are really going nuts and you have to be careful that a tank doesn't roll over an extra and you aren't injured by close-range gunshots."

The movie was shot for 60 days on location in wintry London, then in a studio outside the city. A typical day provided six hours of naturally gray light. The company spent two hours a day traveling, setting up and eating. The remaining four hours were used to rehearse, then, if they were lucky, nail a take before the light faded. The hope was that the camerawork, natural light and push to replicate the texture of reality would allow the audience to experience the sense of inescapable desperation and oppression that comes from living in a brutal world facing extinction.

It seems to have worked. The futuristic dystopian thriller, starring Owen, Julianne Moore and Michael Caine, first drew notice when it premiered at the 63rd Venice Film Festival in September, earning Lubezki an award for outstanding technical contribution.

WOW LONG SHOTS!  What is that?  That's NEVER been done before.

Especially not in a museum.

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Source: Hollywood Elsewhere

Here's (http://hollywood-elsewhere.com/images/column/112406/cuaron2.mp3) 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."

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.

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.

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

That is ridiculously, embarrassingly bad.

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.

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.

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.

Quote from: Pubrick on December 15, 2006, 03:16:16 AM
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.

Quote from: Alexandro on December 17, 2006, 07:09:30 PM
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??"

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."

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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? 

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.

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.

Quote from: Gamblour le fountain on December 28, 2006, 07:24:35 PM
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.

that's all they talk about in the interviews.

Quote from: Gamblour le fountain on December 28, 2006, 07:24:35 PM
I haven't had time to read all the interviews, but does ANYONE talk about the amazingly long/impossible shot inside of the car??

It's as if the Times heard you:


It was 'all or nothing'
Cuarón and Lubezki filmed 'Children's' tough chase scene without breaking their rules.
Source: Los Angeles Times

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Here was the challenge director Alfonso Cuarón posed to his longtime cinematographer, Emmanuel Lubezki, when the two were filming "Children of Men": Cuarón wanted to cover 12 script pages in one continuous take from inside a compact Fiat Multipla stuffed with five passengers trying to flee terrorist assailants on motorcycles.

It's sort of a high-stakes game between the two. For each movie they make, they draw up the film's rules of engagement, vowing to carry out what Lubezki describes as "intricate cinematic codas," no matter how difficult.

"When I work with Cuarón, we make radical decisions about how we're going to shoot," Lubezki says. "It's all or nothing, according to strict rules we create for ourselves."

The director and cinematographer — former film school classmates in Mexico City — have held fast to these self-made doctrines for the past two decades.

"While we're shooting, we're always suffering," Lubezki says. "At some point, I say to myself, 'Oh, my God. What am I doing? This is a soap opera.' "

And so the soap opera of the Fiat unfolded on a road under cloudy skies, which meant the exteriors were five times brighter than the inside of the darkened car, making it difficult to photograph both without over-or- underexposing the shots. Not to mention the difficulty of fitting a camera and operator into the car to film each of the five actors in close up, Lubezki adds.

"I said, 'Cuarón, this is practically impossible to do,' " Lubezki recalls. " 'You really have to let me think about this shot.' "

They had just a month before they had to shoot the scene, which "sounds like a long time, but it's not for this type of complicated setup," he says. "It's like trying to build a building in a week with a number of unknowns."

First, Lubezki and his camera department attempted a standard car rig.

"One of the rules for us is always try to keep it simple and if you can't ..., go from there," he says.

When the easy-does-it approach didn't work, he and Cuarón tried to figure a way to re-create the whole sequence digitally.

But even the CG-savvy director of "Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban" and the cinematographer behind "Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events" were unable to figure out a way to simply shoot the actors against green screen and then later insert photographic backgrounds without racking up an enormous visual-effects bill and adding days to the postproduction schedule.

Besides, a laborious digital approach would have broken their own rules: Try to shoot on location. Try not to light it. Shoot with the lead actors and with real backgrounds.

With just three weeks before filming of the four-day sequence was to start, Lubezki called Doggicam Systems' Gary Thieltges, a Los Angeles-based camera-rig guru.

They removed the car roof and installed a rail system that allowed the camera to operate on a two-axis grid, controlled by a joystick. Lubezki, his focus puller and a dolly grip sat above the actors in an enclosed translucent loft. The car seats were modified so the actors could use levers to tilt and lower themselves out of the camera's path as it zoomed in and out.

The result is a remarkably intense chase scene in which the claustrophobic fear of the passengers in the car is palpable.

Still in the exhaustion of the moment, the cinematographer imagined breaking the rules or dropping the shot: "If I was directing 'Children of Men,' it may have been, 'You know something? This scene is too hard and it's getting too expensive. Let's just cut it,' " Lubezki says. "That's why you need Cuarón. You need that energy."

i've never been happier to be proven wrong.  this movie was AWESOME.

This is one of the best films I have ever seen. 

I now understand why some folks refuse to waste their time watching even marginally sub-par work.  I just got home from seeing this and I'm ready to sell half my DVD collection because it just doesn't make the nut.  I don't think that the quality of a film (both the story being told and the execution of the storytelling) has ever had such an impact on me.  This is what Hollywood should be making every time out.  My only hope is that the marketing department at Universal makes TV spots with enough explosions in them to trick people who wouldn't otherwise go see it into seeing it.  That and that it holds up with repeat viewings, which I anticipate it will.

It's likely that I will get into a fight in the next couple of months over this movie.

Emmanuel Lubezki, 'Children of Men'
Source: Variety

Awards: Three-time Oscar nominee; three-time Mexican Ariel winner; won the Venice Film Fest's Golden Osella and the Los Angeles film crix prize for "Children of Men."

Tools: Lubezki opted for the lightweight Arricam LT, which allowed him to maneuver easily, and shot the entire pic on Kodak 5229, based on early tests for the audacious car sequence. "I needed a stock that you could expose for the interior and still have information outside," he says.

Aesthetic: Instead of glamorizing the violence in director Alfonso Cuaron's grim near-future vision of Britain, Lubezki follows the action like an objective reporter. Each of the movie's big set pieces is contained within a single unbroken take, the longest one running nearly eight minutes. "The camera goes in and tries to find the moments, the way you would if you were in the middle of a war with a camera on your shoulder," says Lubezki. His gaze occasionally drifts away from the main characters to capture "what Cuaron called 'the state of things,' what's happening around the characters, how the world is collapsing," an approach they first tried on "Y tu mama tambien."

Visual references: Considered a carefully designed Kubrickian approach, but opted for the more immersive handheld style instead. "We were prepping the movie after the (July) bombings in London," Lubezki says. "The real direct references were a lot of press and documentaries about the war in Iraq and what's going on in Lebanon."

Challenges: Rehearsing each of the action scenes, while remaining open to things that didn't go as planned. "You don't want to have a guy fall in front of a tank because you'd make a tortilla," jokes Lubezki. Trickiest sequence was Clive Owen's farmhouse escape, when he rolls the car down the hill as dawn is breaking. Lubezki shot it in reverse order over several nights at dusk, timing each segment precisely to get the lighting right.

What's next: Completely burned out after "Children of Men," Lubezki took a year off. "I've been spending time with my family, waiting for someone to call," he says.

Quote from: pete on October 31, 2006, 02:01:25 AM
WOW LONG SHOTS!  What is that?  That's NEVER been done before.

i'm assuming you hadn't seen the movie when you wrote this, because that shit was amazing. probably the most technically impressive movie i've ever seen.

yeah, you're right, and I'm a big fan of lubezki.  I was mocking the article though, not the movie.

I also have to say that this was, in many ways, one of the most amazing movies I've ever seen.  It works beautifully on all levels, but I can't remember being more flat-out amazed by a movie.  That, yes, is due to the technical mastery on display here, which is used wisely, I feel.  With all of the hype surrounding some of the shots (two shots in particular), I'm happy to report that, one, they surpassed the hype for me, and two, they were entirely appropriate to the story.

Beyond that, I found the film to be very solid.  This might be my favorite of the year.  Cuaron has been one of my favorites for a long time, and he continues to impress.  This film had me scared, shocked, amazed (as I said earlier), angry, tensed, and teary.

So yeah, I liked it.

I think Cuarón and Lubezki deserve a lot of praise, not only for technical virtuoso reminiscent of 'the thin red line', but for stripping any sensationalism whatsoever from their film. I absolutely loved the fluid, natural way the story infolded. Cuarón definitely got a chance to show how much he trusts his audience, foregoing the clunky, expository dialogue that could have ruined this in the hands of another potential director.

I also thought Clive Owen was great. Cheers all around for this one:  :bravo:

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Sounds to match to the 'Children of Men' vision
Rather than start-to-end scoring, director Alfonso Cuarón mixes a variety of music genres and sound effects.
Source: Los Angeles Times

CRITICS have rightly lauded the dynamic visuals of "Children of Men," citing the work of director Alfonso Cuarón and cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki. In depicting the story's breakneck action through the totalitarianism and decay of 2027 Britain, the filmmakers have created a vision of the not-so-distant future that is both alien and terrifyingly familiar.

Similarly perceptive is Cuarón's use of sound — especially music — in delineating a world where Britain appears to be the last society standing, immigrants are caged or forced into refugee encampments and a baby has not been born in 18 years. Eschewing a traditional score, the director combines rock, pop, hip-hop and classical pieces to create one of the most unconventional cinematic soundscapes in recent memory.

The music is used inventively and sparingly, saving us from the wall-to-wall scoring that plagues so many films and providing the film's protagonist, Theo — an activist turned minor bureaucrat, played by Clive Owen — with a sonic path through London, East Sussex and Kent. Burned out and alcoholic, Theo is appalled at the state of things when he is drawn into the plans of a radical group seeking rights for immigrants, headed by a former paramour (Julianne Moore).

The movie's London is a bustling police state in which people still stop off for coffee on their way to work but must pass through checkpoints and barricades to do so. Cuarón mixes the sounds of traffic, barking dogs and a narcotized stream of media messages (including ads for a state-sanctioned suicide kit) with grimy hip-hop dubs to create an urban audio rumble.

Outside the city, life appears serene — save for the marauding hordes, who have a penchant for ambushing passersby, and the piles of burning cattle corpses. Theo takes the train to visit his old friend Jasper (Michael Caine), a former political cartoonist who lives with his comatose wife (it's indicated that she's the victim of terrorism) in a secluded house where he grows gourmet pot. He's an old-time hippie with long hair, leftist politics and John Lennon glasses, and his car radio blasts Deep Purple's "Hush." In the context of the movie, the song becomes a sly lullaby for a world without babies. Cuarón later repeats this suggestion of an empty lullaby with his prominent placement of King Crimson's "The Court of the Crimson King" ("... three lullabies in an ancient tongue").

It's not surprising that Jasper would be fond of classic rock, and twice at his home we hear a melancholy cover of the Rolling Stones' "Ruby Tuesday." Sung by Italian songwriter Franco Battiato, it underlines Jasper's sympathies and foreshadows the cacophony of accents heard later at a refugee camp.

In the film's second half, Cuarón uses less pop music and relies more heavily on augmenting silence with jarring sound effects — the burst of automatic weapons fire, say, or the squawk of loudspeakers ordering fugees, as illegal immigrants are called, through a maze of cages. The coastal town of Bexhill, transformed into a giant refugee camp that operates as a Third World city with a black market economy, is chaotic and troubling. Into the anarchy, Cuarón injects classical works by Handel and Mahler as well as "Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima" (1959-1961) by Krystof Penderecki.

The thread that holds this crazy quilt of sounds together is British composer John Tavener's "Fragments of a Prayer," a 15-minute commissioned piece that Cuarón envisioned as "a spiritual comment rather than a narrative support." Tavener wrote it based on the screenplay, in contrast to the traditional method of scoring to a film's images.

The director initially introduces the piece after a tragedy and then strategically places segments throughout the film, developing it as a motif. A sacred entreaty with recurring hallelujahs, it features mezzo-soprano Sarah Connolly and powerfully reinforces the idea of faith defying the blind malevolence of chance. By the end of Theo's journey, the theme has built to a complex emotional level that coincides with the film's climax.

After a provocative ending that keeps audiences in their seats for the credits, "Children of Men" continues to reward aurally, finishing strongly with two politically pointed songs. Leaving us with Lennon singing the anti-nationalist rant "Bring on the Lucie (Freda Peeple)" and Jarvis Cocker declaiming global society's ills with an unprintable refrain in "Running the World," Cuarón emphasizes the timelessness of this future-set film and stamps it with a humanistic double exclamation point.

I really did enjoy the visual aspect of the action scenes, these were nicely done and kept interest in the movie.
But overall, I wasn't too keen on the film. It's kind of discouraging to say this when most of you absolutely love it, however, as far as the story goes I wasn't as involved and maybe that's why. I think it relies so much on the audience buying the concept of such a doomed fate for man kind (where everything is a series of misfortunate events)... but visually it was great. And that's part of good film-making I suppose.

Yes, I enjoyed the movie.. it might even make my top ten list, but I was hoping for more after all the rave reviews you guys have posted.

A few too many cliches and a bit too slow in parts, but overall very enjoyable.
"The Shot": while I was expecting it, still made me comment out loud twice (I think I said "SHIT!" and "that was awesome"... I say dumb shit when I'm dumb founded).

One thing about it is that it's haunting me...  the more I think about it, the more I want to see it again.

I saw this Friday night and again yesterday afternoon. I was affected more emotionally by Children of Men than it appears many of the previous posters. Most of this comes from the ultimate sense of hope Cuaron has crafted. He offers that something exists, in our current world even, that may be able to unite languages, religions and politics, overturn apathy and even bring armies to an utter standstill (if only temporarily). I do not believe his goal was a specific answer, but rather to shed light on the idea of such a possibility.

The technical brilliance of Children of Men is unquestioned, but I was never taken out of the film and on more than one occasion I found myself holding my breath and forgetting to blink. The audacity of the shots pales in comparison to how well they service the film. Please...please see this...as soon as possible. If you've seen it already, go again.

i'm going with pubrick on this one and NOT going to say it's the best movie i've ever seen or that it is uninhibitedly awesome, because it isn't.  outside of the technical achievement and a moment towards the end, this is a disappointingly flaccid film, one that seems like it was written by kids in middle school for an assignment where they had to imagine some sort of dystopia.  cuaron makes the most out of very little--the scenes everyone talks about are really amazing--but the film suffers from the all too common among film students, there's-more-in-the-filmmaker's-head-that-isn't-on-screen, and the wow factor can only carry for so long.

...and the fat bitch is worthless.

I thought that this movie surpasses a lot of stuff coming out as nationwide releases as far as technical achievement (which now that I reread that sentence, it does seem to narrow down the accomplishment).  It was very entertaining to watch, but this movie went overboard with its preaching and obvious imagery.  I know that the points might need to be made, but they seemed to muck up the movie by shoving it in our faces. 

I liked it, but when I read reviews for it I can't help but think that the reviewers might have added to the movie what they wanted to get something more from it. 

But maybe this movie was such a parrallel that it skips storyline points and an exit strategy in favor of pushing beliefs around.

what obvious imagery?  shoving what in our faces?   this movie was so understated.   

Quote from: JG on January 09, 2007, 01:44:27 PM
what obvious imagery?  shoving what in our faces?   this movie was so understated.   

I agree. Cuaron used visual motifs and imagery to convey ideas as opposed to just telling us, or making it obvious. Sure, the baby was an obvious Christ figure, but it was done well, as opposed to, say, The Matrix. But other things like the animals I don't think average viewers would even notice if it wasn't brought to their attention (except the pig balloon).

I also found it interesting that the baby was computer-generated (it was right? I plan on seeing it again).

It's not my favorite of the year but it's up there, so far. I will say that Cuaron and Lubezki probably deserve any award that comes their way.

I thought this movie was breathtaking.

WARNING! LOTS AND LOTS OF SPOILERS FROM HERE ON.

There were moments that just felt so real.  It was bleak and cynical -- no hope in the last generation of people.  The unexpected explosion in the beginning set up the entire movie.  I was at the edge of my seat.  I enjoyed the subtlety of the political statements -- the politics acted more as the setting, which I think added to the realism.  The story was so suspenseful and constantly bombarding you with explosions and twists.

Clive Owen was great in this movie.  His face after Michael Caine's character died was so so soooo heartbreaking.  Also, Julianne Moore can do no wrong.  She's so amazing.

As for interesting technical elements, the one part that really stood out for me was the blood on the camera lens following Clive Owen into the building in the camp.  It was a fairly long shot, and the blood stayed on there.  I felt it gave the scene a documentary-like feel of a warzone.  I didn't really find the long shots very distracting -- I guess I was too busy clutching the armrest.

One issue I had with the movie was the blatant symbolism in naming the boat "Tomorrow".  It made me twitch a little.  It seemed a little forced, considering the future was what this movie was all about.  The need to reiterate it in this way seemed phony. 

END SPOILERS

I haven't been able to see many movies in the last few months, but I'm very glad I was able to see this one.

Quote from: JG on January 09, 2007, 01:44:27 PM
what obvious imagery?  shoving what in our faces?   this movie was so understated.   

The only image I can think of of having something shoved in my face was this one. This was in the background when Marian was kicked off the bus.

(https://xixax.com/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.stageleft.info%2Fblog-images%2Ftorture.jpg&hash=52c6ddaa0ff137f69d0a4a7cd5a19dbf39e02e74)

Hey, someone fix this:

News: Children Of Men, the last great film of 2005, is now playing in theatres!

Quote from: Gloria on January 09, 2007, 04:46:06 PM
Also, Julianne Moore can do no wrong.  She's so amazing.

i don't remember her character doing much of anything other than *you know what.* her role and dialgoue were entirely expository, she talked and talked and i could barely remember anything she said cos she didn't deliver it with any discernable intention behind it. it was like watching her read her script for the first time.

it baffles me, but at the same time i understand why this and little miss fat girl are getting so overrated. we can't wait for the big movies of 2007, we are in a hopeful state of mind and so these two films are the perfect conduits for our dellusions. nah that's bullshit. the truth is that maybe some of you went to this with low expectations and were surprised to find a good movie. and i never said it wasn't good. or you expected a good movie and got one, and that's enough apparently to herald something as brilliant. and then some of you went to little miss adorable little girl and got ONE good basic story with many other threads left hanging loose, and were happy to just have one satisfying arc that ended at its climax.

they were good, but in any other year they would not be praised so readily without acknowledging their flaws. little abigail is a revelation, and here the black girl is also. let's be thankful for that, and not get carried away to the point where everyone is ignoring MIRIAM in this movie and the absence of julianne moore's soul, or the absence of any satisfaction outside the title character in little miss ray of light.

things that are good are being billed as brilliant or "great", i haven't seen any other year with standards being lowered so much. this is the exact reason The Departed (who?) was overpraised. it was a competent film that even scorsese must be wondering why he made it in the first place... oh right, he needed a hit so he could make something he actually gives a shit about.

Quote from: samsong on January 08, 2007, 03:03:55 PM
i'm going with pubrick on this one and NOT going to say it's the best movie i've ever seen or that it is uninhibitedly awesome, because it isn't.  outside of the technical achievement and a moment towards the end, this is a disappointingly flaccid film, one that seems like it was written by kids in middle school for an assignment where they had to imagine some sort of dystopia.  cuaron makes the most out of very little--the scenes everyone talks about are really amazing--but the film suffers from the all too common among film students, there's-more-in-the-filmmaker's-head-that-isn't-on-screen, and the wow factor can only carry for so long.

Put me in this pile.

It made me appreciate how great Time of the Wolf is - there's a film with the true intention of exploring despotic perversity and human ego.  Children of Men had hollow, archetypal characters void of tangible emotional substance and the whole thing was this big Amazing Baby Race plot drenched in drab visuals.  There wasn't anything for me to cling onto - character or otherwise.  How can a film that is so intent on providing dismal presages of the future, and a film that does have this atmosphere, be content with resting its narrative in gimmicks and hashed false pretense opportunities?  On the Panic in the Streets commentary they talk about the difference between Panic in the Streets and Outbreak, how for all Outbreak's technology it simply leaves behind its characters so the tension of the pandemic never leaves the screen.  This is how I felt about this one.

spoils

- i didn't like any of the characters. they weren't very nice. except for caine, but he was still kind of weird with his newfangled music. not to say that many of the characters weren't good people. they were just kind of.. passive-aggressive and narcissistic? i'm not sure how to best describe the overall unlikability in the writing/acting, but this hindered the movie so much.
- the idea that a government would produce advertisements saying it's still around despite lots of other governments falling with lots of pride is not right/would not happen.
- i did not buy the idea that the youngest person in the world would be a celebrity who clearly hated his fame and fans and would be mourned like he was princess diana.
- jullianne moore was surprisingly bad/awkward, but i'm glad a well known person was cast because it made her death a little bit more shocking.
- i knew clive owen would die about an hour in because the heroic story of a man who used to care but doesn't anymore and then does and dies because of it was becoming pretty clear. not sure if that's a bad thing alone, but here it seemed unoriginal. maybe it's because five people wrote it.
- i truly don't know how they did some of the shots aside from actually doing them. they were astounding. eventually i gave up and let the movie be impossible.
- there are tons of genuinely thrilling, suspenseful, wonderful moments because of the use of all-in-oners. like the chase down the hill with the broken car. you get the sense it's not rigged because you can see the chasers chasing and the chasees escaping in the same frame. i really felt like maybe they'd be caught. and when owen was about to be executed, even though i knew he was going to get out of it, i had no idea how because i also knew he was going to do it all in one shot.
- i want to see it again.

I was astounded by this film. There was so much tension, more so than a horror film, that I had no idea what was going to happen next and what direction it would take. It did a nice job of putting danger at every corner. This became the forefront for me that noticing the long takes was almost an afterthought for me. I was that focused and into the story.

I can tell already... this movie is going to be the cause of the Great Schism in Xixax.  Brother will fight against brother, and the series of tubes that is the internet will run red with blood.  And it's all going to end in one big apocalyptic "West Side Story"-style dance-off.

EDIT: In this analogy, the people who liked Children of Men are the Jets; those who don't are the filthy PRs.

picolas...just wanted to respond to a few things you wrote:

** SPOILERS **

Quote from: picolas on January 15, 2007, 12:04:47 AM- i didn't like any of the characters. they weren't very nice. except for caine, but he was still kind of weird with his newfangled music. not to say that many of the characters weren't good people. they were just kind of.. passive-aggressive and narcissistic? i'm not sure how to best describe the overall unlikability in the writing/acting, but this hindered the movie so much.

I felt this way at the beginning of the film and I'm sure that was the intended reaction. What characters (besides the one that is in a wonderful state of hash heaven 24/7) in that world aren't going to be 'passive-aggressive and narcissistic'? I think Theo's general demeanor and state of mind at the beginning of the film seemed quite true to his character and, for me at least, made his actions and his journey all the more meaningful.

Quote from: picolas on January 15, 2007, 12:04:47 AM- the idea that a government would produce advertisements saying it's still around despite lots of other governments falling with lots of pride is not right/would not happen.

Impossible for anyone to know, but I disagree with your certainty. Advertisements/propaganda are a great way to drum-up a nationalistic/herd behavior and especially when the viewers' country is the only surviving nation. Whether that was actually true, or just the way the British government wanted to portray it, I imagine it had an effect of pacifying the nation in regard to anarchy and concurrently stimulating hatred against non-nationals. Once again, I found it true to the narrative.

Quote from: picolas on January 15, 2007, 12:04:47 AM- jullianne moore was surprisingly bad/awkward, but i'm glad a well known person was cast because it made her death a little bit more shocking.

I thought she was a little awkward as well, but she was given a thankless part. What more could she do with it? But I was just as shocked by how quickly she exited the film.

Quote from: picolas on January 15, 2007, 12:04:47 AM- i knew clive owen would die about an hour in because the heroic story of a man who used to care but doesn't anymore and then does and dies because of it was becoming pretty clear. not sure if that's a bad thing alone, but here it seemed unoriginal. maybe it's because five people wrote it.

Am I the only one that thought Theo's mortality at the end of the film was ambiguous? Also, I think the screenwriting credit is a little misleading. Cuaron has repeatedly said that three of the credited writers didn't do anything and were forced credits by the guild. He is adamant that what is on screen is his product along with one of the other writers.

Quote from: picolas on January 15, 2007, 12:04:47 AM- i truly don't know how they did some of the shots aside from actually doing them. they were astounding. eventually i gave up and let the movie be impossible.
- there are tons of genuinely thrilling, suspenseful, wonderful moments because of the use of all-in-oners. like the chase down the hill with the broken car. you get the sense it's not rigged because you can see the chasers chasing and the chasees escaping in the same frame. i really felt like maybe they'd be caught. and when owen was about to be executed, even though i knew he was going to get out of it, i had no idea how because i also knew he was going to do it all in one shot.
- i want to see it again.

I couldn't agree more and I would definitely recommend a second viewing...it will do nothing but add to any positives you took away the first time around.

samsong wrote: "...this is a disappointingly flaccid film, one that seems like it was written by kids in middle school for an assignment where they had to imagine some sort of dystopia".  I couldn't disagree more.  Have you looked at the images coming out of Iraq, Lebanon, Darfur, and other war-torn regions currently scattered across this increasingly chaotic world of ours?  They look hauntingly, nervously similar to Children of Men.  I thought this film might have been one of the more detailed, powerful, and authentic visions of a crumbling society ever put on film.  At times, it was positively chilling.  And I don't think technical achievement is the only thing the film has going for it – the characters were very well developed for what is mostly a "chase" or "action" film – Clive Owen's relationship with Michael Caine's character, especially, was very tender and believable.  Overall, a haunting film that I can't shake. 

Quote from: picolas on January 15, 2007, 12:04:47 AM
i didn't like any of the characters. they weren't very nice. except for caine, but he was still kind of weird with his newfangled music. not to say that many of the characters weren't good people. they were just kind of.. passive-aggressive and narcissistic? i'm not sure how to best describe the overall unlikability in the writing/acting, but this hindered the movie so much.

That was one of the qualities I kind of liked about it.  How exactly would people act as no one can reproduce, so the current society as we know it is going down the shitter.  Also, on the music, because it's roughly 18 years into the future, rap would be sort of like oldies and songs like King Crimson's "Court of the Crimson King" would come off as more classical as the luxurious car pulls up.  It wasn't a too distant future, so the music was subtle enough to present that.

Quote from: Sunrise on January 15, 2007, 08:41:34 AM
I felt this way at the beginning of the film and I'm sure that was the intended reaction.

i think so because the arch of owen is the guy who doesn't care ends up caring, but there were many other moments that seemed like they were supposed to be endearing somehow like when owen met the only pregnant girl and the first thing she said was "the fuck you looking at?" it was such an utterly stupid line/moment that it was tough to look beyond it and sympathize/root for her for the rest of the movie.

Quote from: Walrus on January 16, 2007, 03:44:50 PM
How exactly would people act as no one can reproduce, so the current society as we know it is going down the shitter. 

maybe people would realize the importance of their lives and generally hold each other closer. that tends to happen in other good movies about survival. it seems tougher/more exhausting to use your dying moments to be an ass than to be a non-ass.

This is possible my second fav. film of 2006. The first one being Inland Empire.  I couldn't find any flaws. I wasn't really looking for any ones anyway. It really just blew me away. It was going on all cylinders and I was completely floored by the experience. If you haven't seen it, any I doubt most people on here have not, GO....Now!

Part of me was going into this expecting it to be brilliant part of me felt it wouldn't live up to the love it's getting on here and elsewhere. I'm glad the love is completely justified. Such a brilliant film where all the elements click into place and work perfectly. Clive Owen's performance as a great modern anti-hero has completely changed my perception of him as an actor. But he's not the only one acting his socks off: Michael Caine, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Clare-Hope Ashitey, Peter Mullan (and others) all deliver and create complex characters often with limited screen time. Nuffs been said about the technical excellence of the flm but I'll just say I was sitting there with my jaw open and squealing at some points.
Having only recently seen Y Tu Mama Tambien and loving it as well, Cuaron has become one of my favourite directors.

Quote from: gob on January 19, 2007, 02:08:05 AM
Having only recently seen Y Tu Mama Tambien and loving it as well, Cuaron has become one of my favourite directors.

Watch A Little Princess!!!  It's an amazing film, also directed by Cuaron.

Quote from: Losing the Horse: on January 12, 2007, 02:47:08 PM

Quote from: samsong on January 08, 2007, 03:03:55 PM
i'm going with pubrick on this one and NOT going to say it's the best movie i've ever seen or that it is uninhibitedly awesome, because it isn't.  outside of the technical achievement and a moment towards the end, this is a disappointingly flaccid film, one that seems like it was written by kids in middle school for an assignment where they had to imagine some sort of dystopia.  cuaron makes the most out of very little--the scenes everyone talks about are really amazing--but the film suffers from the all too common among film students, there's-more-in-the-filmmaker's-head-that-isn't-on-screen, and the wow factor can only carry for so long.

Put me in this pile.

It made me appreciate how great Time of the Wolf is - there's a film with the true intention of exploring despotic perversity and human ego.  Children of Men had hollow, archetypal characters void of tangible emotional substance and the whole thing was this big Amazing Baby Race plot drenched in drab visuals.  There wasn't anything for me to cling onto - character or otherwise.  How can a film that is so intent on providing dismal presages of the future, and a film that does have this atmosphere, be content with resting its narrative in gimmicks and hashed false pretense opportunities?  On the Panic in the Streets commentary they talk about the difference between Panic in the Streets and Outbreak, how for all Outbreak's technology it simply leaves behind its characters so the tension of the pandemic never leaves the screen.  This is how I felt about this one.

Look, Time of the Wolf tries, but despite it's noble efforts it really is exasperating and boring. I felt as it was almost lazy. I'm supposed to be horrified with something that looks and feels as if shot and rehearsed by a bunch of first timers, truly. I wouldn't  talk so bad about it if it wasn't because you have no problem with bashing COM the same way. I was astounded in Time of the Wolf at the boringness of it all. I couldn't believe Huppert, specially after The Piano Teacher...COM is not resting on gimmicks...what's a gimmick, anyway? Would you care to define?

Title: Children of Men
Released: 27th March 2007
SRP: $29.98 & $39.98

Further Details:
Universal Home Video has sent over early details on Children of Men which stars Clive Owen, Julianne Moore, and Michael Caine. The Alfonso Cuarón directed drama will be available to own from the 27th March, and should retail at around $29.98. The film itself will be presented in anamorphic widescreen, along with an English Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround track. The extras haven't been revealed in full I'm afraid, although we can confirm that the disc will include deleted scenes, featurettes and more. A HD-DVD/DVD Combo release will also be available from the 27th for $39.98. We'll bring you further details shortly.

fairly shitty package art here: http://www.dvdactive.com/news/releases/children-of-men3.html

that box art is actually the last thing i expected. i'm surprised they didn't try to package it like a romantic action movie with Clive Owen running away from an explosion with Jullianne Moore and the pregnant woman and Michael Caine w/a giant fucking semi-transparent face in the background. and reviews/top ten lists covering everything.

Quote from: picolas on February 11, 2007, 03:44:27 AMi'm surprised they didn't try to package it like a romantic action movie with Clive Owen running away from an explosion with Jullianne Moore and the pregnant woman and Michael Caine w/a giant fucking semi-transparent face in the background. and reviews/top ten lists covering everything.

You mean, like this?:

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yes. but more

(https://xixax.com/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fi139.photobucket.com%2Falbums%2Fq293%2Fnoveltyhat%2Fchildrencover.jpg&hash=c70245983334bfcc64e316cc73c74e916145c165)

SPOILERS

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4A55xTYXMpI

The making of the movie "Children of Men". Mainly focuses on the long takes and visual style of the film.

Universal has just revealed that Children of Men will street on DVD and HD-DVD/DVD Combo format on 3/27. The DVD will carry an SRP of $29.98 and will include anamorphic widescreen video, Dolby Digital 5.1 audio, deleted scenes, the Possibility of Hope documentary and 4 featurettes (Theo and Julian, Futuristic Designs, Visual Effects: Creating the Baby and Men Under Attack: Children of Men). The HD-DVD version will add a U-Control option, picture-in-picture video and "Ads & Propaganda".

ALFONSO CUARÓN WANTS TO CHANGE THE WORLD
Source: CHUD Contributing sources: Universal/Amazon.com

Children of Men, one of the two best movies of 2006 (it was a good year) hits DVD this coming Tuesday, and Universal is going out of their way to make sure you know about it, and that you talk about it. And CHUD is happy to help them with this because we like this movie more than we like some of the people we have slept with.

One big aspect of their push has been to make director Alfonso Cuarón available to talk about the movie, and he'll be doing just that on Monday in a live, interactive web thing at Amazon, where he will talk with fans about the social issues raised in Children of Men. You can submit your questions to Alfonso by going here (http://www.amazon.com/specialfeatures), and the actual event will happen Monday at 9pm Eastern/6pm Pacific at www.amazon.com/dvd. All the details are below in the official press release.

Of course some CHUD readers have already submitted questions to Cuarón – we'll be running his video responses to three of those questions tomorrow. I have seen the video, and I think the guy gives some solid answers (and by the way, we submitted some pretty fucking excellent questions. Go Chewers!).

Amazon.com Teams with Universal Studios Home Entertainment to Host Live, First-Ever Global Fan Summit with Academy Award®-Nominated Filmmaker Alfonso Cuarón.

First-of-its-kind interactive video interview offers Amazon.com customers exclusive access to Cuarón on the eve of the DVD and HD DVD release of his Oscar®-nominated Children of Men

SEATTLE - March 21st, 2007 – Amazon.com (NASDAQ:AMZN), in collaboration with Universal Studios Home Entertainment, today announced it will host the first-ever Global Fan Summit: an exclusive, live interactive interview on its Web site with Academy Award®-nominated director/screenwriter Alfonso Cuarón. The live Web cast can be seen only at www.amazon.com/dvd and will begin Monday, March 26, at 6:00 p.m. PDT, the eve of the highly anticipated DVD release of his Oscar®-nominated motion picture Children of Men. Cuarón will answer real-time questions from Amazon.com customers watching the interview from around the world. Customers can also submit questions ahead of time by visiting www.amazon.com/specialfeatures.

The live, interactive video interview is a first of its kind for the world's largest online retailer and is a natural expansion of the numerous features the site offers customers to inform them about the products Amazon sells. The Web cast will be archived at www.amazon.com/specialfeatures for future viewing.

Leading up to the DVD release of Children of Men on March 27, Amazon.com is now featuring exclusive early excerpts from two of the DVD's compelling bonus features, titled Under Attack and Possibility of Hope. Under Attack, offers an inside look at how the filmmakers created the movie's most breathtaking scenes. Possibility of Hope, is Cuarón's personal documentary on how the film's revolutionary themes relate to contemporary society. These excerpts can be seen at www.amazon.com/specialfeatures.

'We are pleased to offer our customers a rare opportunity to watch and interact directly with one of today's most intriguing movie directors, Alfonso Cuarón,' said Peter Faricy, vice president of movies at Amazon.com. 'We continue to find new and innovative ways to help our customers make more informed buying decisions and be entertained in the process.'

'By partnering with Amazon on this innovative event, we are offering DVD consumers direct access to one of today's most acclaimed filmmakers who, in the past year, has created one of the most provocative and well-crafted films of our time,' said Craig Kornblau, President, Universal Studios Home Entertainment. "This is a perfect example of how by continuing to aggressively harness digital technologies, we can allow audiences to play a more interactive role in shaping and enriching their own entertainment experiences.'

No children. No future. No hope. Children of Men is a story set in the year 2027, eighteen years since the last baby was born. Disillusioned Theo (Clive Owen) becomes an unlikely champion of the human race when he is asked by his former lover (Julianne Moore) to escort a young pregnant woman out of the country as quickly as possible. In a thrilling race against time, Theo will risk everything to deliver the miracle the whole world has been waiting for. Co-starring Michael Caine, filmmaker Alfonso Cuarón's Children of Men is the powerful film Pete Hammond of Maxim calls 'magnificent...a unique and totally original vision.'

EXCLUSIVE: ALFONSO CUARÓN ANSWERS YOUR QUESTIONS
Sorce: CHUD

A couple of weeks ago we asked you to submit your questions for Children of Men director/professional genius Alfonso Cuarón, which he would answer in a videotaped interview. With Children of Men hitting DVD on Tuesday, we got those answers back – and here they are.


In the PD James novel, it's men who are infertile. In the movie, it's women. Is it just coincidence that each of you blames the opposite sex?
- Luke

Alfonso's response in Quicktime! (http://www.chud.com/Answer%201_700k.mp4)


Throughout the film you show us that Theo seems to have a strange connection with animals. Many people have their own thoughts on why this is - what's yours?
- CT

Alfonso's response in Quicktime! (http://www.chud.com/Answer%202_700k.mp4)


Alfonzo, my name is Santiago and im from Argentina and the vision of the future that you show in Children of Men reminded me a lot of the Dictatorship government that we had in my country in the 70's. So obviously this movie hit me very close to home. So my question is, Since you are Mexican, Is this vision of the future that you provide in the movie a vision much more closer to Latinoamerica, or was just your take on North America politics, or a vision of the state of the world in general?
- Santiago

Alfonso's response in Quicktime! (http://www.chud.com/chudanswer3.mp4)
And that one was so long they included the clip in its own file! (http://www.chudbackup.mp4/)

those were great questions and his answers were much better than the film.

too bad that last one isn't working.

WOW.

I loved this.

For some reason it took me a long time to see this. I bought the DVD weeks ago.

It was really good. I loved the long shots. Everything went perfect and even being predictable most of the time I was still on the edge.

Clive Owen was great, and Cuaron should have won something at the Oscars. I dont know if it was the best movie of the year (XIXAX AWARDS), but it was damn good.

At one point in the refugee camp at the end it looked like a real version of Call of Duty.

Forgot to post my review from the film's release.

POSSIBLE SPOILERS


Alfonso Cuaron's "Children of Men" opens with the stunned faces of Britain's citizens in a coffee shop as they watch the horror unfold on a television. The "youngest person in the world" has just been murdered and society's downward fall into anarchy and infertility continues. In walks the film's gritty, depressed hero - Theo (played magnificently by Clive Owen). As he exits the coffee shop, we view a world clearly deteriorating as the date "November 2027" flashes onto the screen. As Theo casually stands on the sidewalk, he is immediately terrified when a bomb hits nearby killing and injuring many. Cuaron's camera hurries into the destruction where we view the horror. It is a perfectly contructed scene for a launching point into this world.

As the film progresses, Theo is sent on a mission to help a (surprise!) pregnant young woman reach a point of safety called "The Human Project". This mission if successful could determine the fate of the world's future for mankind. But Theo is not alone. There are rich supporting performances by Michael Caine, as his friendly aging hippie, and Julianne Moore, as Theo's ex-lover still grieving over the death of their son. Owen and Caine's scenes are the most touching and bring life to an otherwise bleak but thrilling story.

Director Alfonso Cuaron could have made a preachy political thriller without much interest in the human condition. But alas, he never does. There are glimpses and echoes of issues such as Iraq throughout, yet they never draw too much attention to themselves. Cuaron is much more fascinated with the emotions of his characters and their hope for survival. We are absolutely riveted as his camera catches the appropriate essence of each scene (including two gorgeous action sequences occuring in one continuous shot). By the end of the film, we have been shocked, scared, and moved. Yet, the film ends on a note that is appropriate and in it's own way - quietly perfect.

"Children of Men" is a rare kind of film that simply doesn't get made anymore. It will provoke audiences to think and feel with as much a sense of realism as any film I've seen. There is a general rule that audiences today do not want to be challenged or provoked. If this is the case, "Children of Men" will have to find it's fans over time. There is already one here.

Quote from: RedVines on April 30, 2007, 11:53:22 PM
Forgot to post my review from the film's release.

POSSIBLE SPOILERS SUMMARIES


Alfonso Cuaron's "Children of Men" opens with the stunned faces of Britain's citizens in a coffee shop as they watch the horror unfold on a television. The "youngest person in the world" has just been murdered and society's downward fall into anarchy and infertility continues. In walks the film's gritty, depressed hero - Theo (played magnificently by Clive Owen). As he exits the coffee shop, we view a world clearly deteriorating as the date "November 2027" flashes onto the screen. As Theo casually stands on the sidewalk, he is immediately terrified when a bomb hits nearby killing and injuring many. Cuaron's camera hurries into the destruction where we view the horror. It is a perfectly contructed scene for a launching point into this world.

As the film progresses, Theo is sent on a mission to help a (surprise!) pregnant young woman reach a point of safety called "The Human Project". This mission if successful could determine the fate of the world's future for mankind. But Theo is not alone. There are rich supporting performances by Michael Caine, as his friendly aging hippie, and Julianne Moore, as Theo's ex-lover still grieving over the death of their son. Owen and Caine's scenes are the most touching and bring life to an otherwise bleak but thrilling story.

Director Alfonso Cuaron could have made a preachy political thriller without much interest in the human condition. But alas, he never does. There are glimpses and echoes of issues such as Iraq throughout, yet they never draw too much attention to themselves. Cuaron is much more fascinated with the emotions of his characters and their hope for survival. We are absolutely riveted as his camera catches the appropriate essence of each scene (including two gorgeous action sequences occuring in one continuous shot). By the end of the film, we have been shocked, scared, and moved. Yet, the film ends on a note that is appropriate and in it's own way - quietly perfect.

"Children of Men" is a rare kind of film that simply doesn't get made anymore. It will provoke audiences to think and feel with as much a sense of realism as any film I've seen. There is a general rule that audiences today do not want to be challenged or provoked. If this is the case, "Children of Men" will have to find it's fans over time. There is already one here.

fixed.

Eick Adapts Children For TV
Source: SciFi Wire

Bionic Woman executive producer David Eick told SCI FI Wire that he's working on a pilot script for a proposed TV series based on Children of Men, P.D. James' SF novel, which also inspired Alfonso Cuaron's 2006 film of the same name.

"It's really taking root more in the origins of the novels in that it will focus on the cultural movement in which young people become the society's utter focus," Eick (Battlestar Galactica) said in an interview at SCI FI Channel's upfront presentation to advertisers in New York on March 18. "Much like our culture, whenever Lindsay Lohan does something [and] it becomes the headline of every news show, it's about how, when you don't have a responsibility to the next generation and you're free to do whatever you want, where do you draw the line?"

Eick added that Children of Men will question how society defines responsibility, freedom and a sense of values when it doesn't necessarily believe humans will survive as a species. "So it's a very compelling, I think, human question that science fiction has always explored extremely provocatively," he said. "It's not really a war show like the movie was. It's more an exploration of that issue."

Eick is writing Children of Men now, even as he closes out SCI FI Channel's original series Battlestar Galactica and prepares for production on SCI FI's recently green-lighted prequel series Caprica. Eick's Bionic, meanwhile, has been canceled by NBC.

I just want to say Children Of Men is the most immersive film I have probably ever seen. In light of studio's heavy stance on 3D to create an immersive experience on the viewer, they can never.. ever come close to the sheer brilliance of Children Of Men.

I remember not particularly loving this film in it's release, but re-visiting it on Blu-ray, has made me have a complete 180 on how I view this film. One of the best of the last decade for sure. And probably the best Sci-fi/Post Apocalyptic film in the 21st Century so far.

Can't wait for Cuaron's Gravity.