When Alfonso Cuarón approached Apple with his idea to turn Renée Knight’s 2015 novel “Disclaimer” into a five-and-a-half-hour psychological thriller, he was very clear about one thing. “I don’t know [how] “To work in television.”
“For me, it was too late to start learning,” Cuarón says, recalling the first screening he gave as he prepared to screen Disclaimer at the Toronto Film Festival after its critically acclaimed Venice premiere. Instead, Cuarón says, he and his co-stars Cate Blanchett, Kevin Kline and Sacha Baron Cohen chose to “approach the film the way I approach films.”
There were precedents in film history that he pointed to for this kind of long, dense narrative; Reds, 1900, Fanny and Alexander, Once Upon a Time in America, and even Twin Peaks served as inspiration for what he hoped to achieve. Many of these films had been set in the past, using historical settings filled with war and revolution to justify their epic length.
“Disclaimer” is a very modern work, addressing today’s concerns through the story of Katharine Ravenscroft, a veteran documentary filmmaker and journalist (Blanchett), whose luxurious life is turned upside down after she receives a book that threatens to expose parts of her life she desperately wants to keep hidden. Cuarón’s sequence moves back and forth through time, following Katharine as she grapples with a crisis that could destroy everything she’s built, and a past encounter with the deceased son of Klein’s character, Stephen Brigstocke, a cruel and conniving widower who holds a grudge. It’s a show that works as a powerful thriller as well as a thorny examination of prejudice and public shaming.
“One of the very important aspects for me was how we perceive narrative and how we create our own narrative based on those narratives,” Cuarón said at a press conference. Varieties “Obviously, the issue of narrative is very important in the world of fiction. But I think we are now more than ever in a period where narratives are dominating the scene… and you can see that in the political realm, more and more all the time.”
To illustrate his point, Cuarón points to what Christiane Amanpour said during a scene where she presents Catherine with an award and an awards ceremony: “Beware of narrative and form. Their power can bring us closer to the truth, but they can also be a weapon with great power to manipulate.” It’s not hard to see how that could apply to everything from the rise of authoritarianism and political extremism to the dangers of deepfakes.
Cuarón is one of the most celebrated directors of our time, having won Oscars for Roma and Gravity. This has enabled him to build a cast of top actors who have become known for their cinematic work. Blanchett is best known at festivals and for her collaborations with fellow “three amigos” Guillermo del Toro and Alejandro G. Iñárritu on films such as Nightmare Alley and Babel.
“We discuss doing our laundry together,” Cuarón jokes when asked if he has reached out to his friends for information about working with Blanchett.
Then there was Klein, one of the biggest stars of the ’80s and ’90s, who had been largely inactive in movies (at least in major films). “One of the sins of cinema is how neglected it has been over the last two decades,” Cuarón says. For Steven, the director was looking for “someone unexpected.” When Blanchett suggested Klein, Cuarón recalled the actor’s wide range in projects as diverse as “Sophie’s Choice,” “The Big Chill” and “A Fish Called Wanda.”
Baron Cohen, the star of Borat, was a longtime friend of Cuarón’s. “We always talked about working together… We would bounce ideas around, but they were all comedic. So when I sent him this, he said, ‘Well, I’m a little scared because this isn’t what I do.’”
“Disclaimer” reunited Cuarón with his longtime cinematographer, Emmanuel “Chivo” Lubezki, who was busy with other projects when it came time to make “Roma” after handling the camera on nearly every previous film by the director. But the collaborators decided to add another talent to the mix, enlisting Bruno Delbonnel, a favorite of the Cohen brothers and Wes Anderson, to serve as co-cinematographer. Although “Disclaimer” includes many of the long, sweeping, almost documentary-like takes that have characterized Cuarón’s previous work, those shots are usually reserved for scenes involving Blanchett. To capture Stephen’s plots and schemes, Cuarón opted for tighter framing and didn’t let the camera run for long. “It’s a lot of cuts,” he says.
As with Your Mother, Cuarón’s latest film also uses voiceover to reveal characters’ motivations and thoughts, as well as to comment on the events. But here the form takes surprising turns—Stephen’s narration has a Machiavellian flavour, while Catherine alternates between a second-person and a kind of third-person narrative.
“Each of these voices leads to a completely different understanding,” Cuarón said. “You approach the conversation differently depending on the voice in which it is being narrated to you and the tension in which it is being narrated to you.”
When “Disclaimer” premiered at the Venice Film Festival alongside Luca Guadagnino’s “Queer” and Halina Rehn’s “Babygirl,” it was seen as part of a new wave of sexually explicit films and series. The series opens with a scene of a couple having passionate sex in a train car, for example. Cuarón isn’t averse to eroticism, but he’s not entirely convinced that “Disclaimer” is part of a revolution in sexual frankness on screen.
“We've had amazing works of erotica since silent cinema,” he says.
“Sexuality is part of humanity,” Cuarón adds. “As long as it's used to convey that human experience, I think it should be used and embraced.”
The series turned out to be more difficult to make than Cuarón envisioned, taking more than a year to film, in part due to Covid restrictions and delays. He admitted it was “really draining” for the cast, who had to give up other jobs to finish the project and had to live with their characters longer than they anticipated.
“My miscalculation was that it took too long to shoot,” he says. “I'm not the fastest cameraman in the world when I shoot my films, and this took five and a half hours.”
After making his version of “Reds” or “Fanny and Alexander”, what's next for Cuarón?
“I would like to make a 90-minute film like this,” he says.
