As the guest of honour at the most recent instalment of the well-liked masterclass series of the Locarno Film Festival, Alfonso Cuarón was being thoughtful yet humorously lighthearted. The main focus of the conversation was on Cuarón’s background and most popular work, all of which he has previously talked extensively about. Nonetheless, the four-time Oscar winner shared some details about his unfinished projects.
“My aspiration is to one day do a horror film,” he declared to the raucous patrons of the chic alfresco Spazio Cinema in Locarno. “I love Rosemary’s Baby, and the other Polanski films, and films like The Babadook. They’re so grounded in reality and in character so I love those,” he said. “As a spectator, I have a wider taste but anything I feel I could do would need to be more grounded. I’ve been trying to write something like that, but somehow, it doesn’t fully work.”
Gravity (2013), featuring Sandra Bullock and George Clooney, was the one genre movie Cuarón did effectively premiere and go on to garner him monetary success. According to Cuarón, the multiple-Oscar-winning undertaking was one of the movies that “came to save my life” during a difficult period.
“After Children of Men, which was a complete commercial flop, the appetite to work with me plummeted,” he said. “So I started writing and developing a film with my son. I started prepping and the cast featured Charlotte Gainsbourg and Guillaume Canet. It was about a road trip from the South of France to the north of Scotland. It was very difficult to finance and the film fell apart. At the same time, I was going through the worst times in my personal life.”
Cuarón informed his partners that he was “completely out of money” and that he ought to “write something but no arty shit.” “A screenplay that would let a studio give me a cheque” was what he required. “That same evening we came up with the outline of Gravity,” he said.
Cuarón stated Warner Bros. agreed to his idea when he and his son Jonás wrote a decent script, but they refused to pay him any money. After accepting, he took the manuscript to DoP Emmanuel Lubezki, a longstanding collaborator. He claimed that at that moment, they concluded that the film industry hadn’t made enough breakthroughs in technology to support a production as grandiose as Gravity.
“Fincher told us to forget about it, there’s no tech, wait 6 years. And he wasn’t wrong,” Cuarón stated. “James Cameron told us how we could do it but that was a 400 million dollar film. We told him only you can do that. And he said yeah you’re right. So we developed our own way.” Cuarón and Lubezki’s “own way” comprised a blend of live-action and animation cinematography work that made use of The Volume, an LED-based StageCraft innovation from Industrial Light & Magic. “We developed the film over three or four years technologically,” he said. “Thank God we had an Exec who was very geeky.”
Cuarón had further issues with Gravity after that. Notwithstanding his misgivings, he informed the Locarno gathering that Warner Bros. was determined to test the movie with viewers. The intricate visual effects in the movie were still unfinished. The movie did not test well, as Cuarón had anticipated, with viewers criticising the images. Cuarón claimed that after that, the studio started to lose interest in the movie and that the only reason it was a financial success was “film festivals.” He seemed extremely grateful to film festivals.
“It opened at Venice and the reception was amazing,” he said. “That’s when the studio started to love it.”