When Alfonso Cuarón approached Apple with his idea of turning 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 do television.”
“For me, it’s a bit too late in the game to start learning,” he says, thinking back to that initial pitch as he prepares to screen “Disclaimer” at the Toronto Film Festival following its acclaimed debut at Venice. Instead, Cuarón says he and stars Cate Blanchett, Kevin Kline and Sacha Baron Cohen opted to “approach it in the way that I do a film.”
And there were precedents that he points to in cinema history for this kind of sprawling, narratively dense work; “Reds,” “1900,” “Fanny and Alexander,” “Once Upon a Time in America,” even “Twin Peaks” served as inspirations for what he was hoping to pull off. Many of those films were set in the past, using historical settings filled with wars and revolutions to justify their epic length.
“Disclaimer” is very much a modern work, dealing with present-day concerns with its story of Catherine Ravenscroft, a veteran documentarian and journalist (Blanchett), whose posh life is upended after she receives a book that threatens to expose parts of her life that she desperately wants to keep hidden. Cuarón’s series moves backwards and forwards and time, following Catherine as she grapples with a crisis that could destroy everything she’s built, and a past encounter with the deceased son of Kline’s character, Stephen Brigstocke, a crusty and conniving widower with a grudge. It’s a show that works as a propulsive thriller, as well as a thorny examination of bias and public shaming.
“An aspect that was very important for me was how we perceive narrative and how we create our own narratives based upon those narratives,” Cuarón said at Variety’s Toronto Film Festival studio presented by J.Crew and SharkNinja. “The whole question of narrative, obviously, is relevant in fiction. But, I think that, more than ever right now, we are experiencing a period in which narratives are taking over…You can see it in the political realm, more and more all the time.”
To illustrate his point, Cuarón references something that Christiane Amanpour says during a sequence where she gives Catherine a prize 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 a 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 deepfake videos.
Cuarón is one of the most acclaimed directors working today, having won Oscars for “Roma” and “Gravity.” That enabled him to build an A-list ensemble filled with actors best known for their film work. He knew Blanchett from the festival circuit and from her collaborations with his fellow “three amigos” Guillermo del Toro and Alejandro G. Iñárritu on films like “Nightmare Alley” and “Babel.”
“We discuss our laundry together,” Cuarón jokes, when asked if he reached out to his friends to get the lowdown on working with Blanchett.
Then there was Kline, one of the biggest stars of the ’80s and ’90s, who hasn’t been as active on films (at least major ones). “One of the sins of cinema is how neglected he had been for the last couple of decades,” Cuarón says. For Stephen, the director was looking to cast “someone unexpected.” When Blanchett proposed Kline, Cuarón thought back to the vast range the actor displayed in projects as diverse as “Sophie’s Choice,” “The Big Chill” and “A Fish Called Wanda.”
As for Baron Cohen, the “Borat” star had been a longtime friend of Cuarón. “We have always talk about working together and…we’ve been bouncing back and forth ideas, but all of them were comedies. So when I sent him this, he was like, ‘Well, I’m a bit daunted because this is not what I do.’”
“Disclaimer” reunited Cuarón with Emmanuel “Chivo” Lubezki, his longtime cinematographer, who had been busy with other projects when it was time to shoot “Roma” after having handled the camera on nearly every one of the director’s previous films. But the collaborators decided to add another talent to the mix, enlisting Bruno Delbonnel, a favorite of the Coen Brothers and Wes Anderson, to serve as co-cinematographer. And though “Disclaimer” includes many of the long, swooping, almost documentary-like shots that characterize previous Cuarón works, those are usually reserved for the scenes involving Blanchett. To capture Stephen’s plotting and scheming, Cuarón opted to use a tighter framing and didn’t let the camera run as long. “It’s a lot of cuts,” he says.
Like “Y Tu Mamá También,” Cuarón’s latest also deploys voiceover to reveal the characters’ motivations and thoughts, as well as to slyly comment on the action. But the form here takes surprising turns — Stephen’s narration has a Machiavellian flavor, while Catherine’s alternates between second-person and a sort of third-person narrative omniscience.
“Each one of those voices leads to a completely different understanding,” Cuarón said. “You approach a conversation differently according to the voice in which and the tensing is narrated to you.”
When “Disclaimer” premiered at the Venice Film Festival alongside Luca Guadagnino’s “Queer” and Halina Reijn’s “Babygirl,” it was viewed as part of a new wave of sexually forward films and shows. The series, for instance, starts with a scene of a couple having enthusiastic sex in a train car. Cuarón has no aversion to eroticism, but he’s not entirely sold on the idea that “Disclaimer” is part of a revolution in on screen sexual candor.
“We have had amazing works that deal with eroticism since silent cinema,” he says.
“Eroticism is part of humanity,” Cuarón adds. “And as long as it is used to convey that human experience, I think it should be used and embraced.”
Pulling off the series, turned out to be more of a struggle than Cuarón imagined, taking him more than a year to shoot, partly do to COVID restrictions and delays. That was something that he admits was “really draining” for the actors, who had to pass on other jobs in order to finish the project and had to live with their characters much longer than they had bargained.
“My miscalculation is that it took a long time to shoot,” he says. “I’m not the fastest shooter in the world when I do my films, and this was, you know, five and a half hours.”
Having made his version of a “Reds” or “Fanny and Alexander,” what’s next for Cuarón?
“I would love to do some 90-minutes kind of film,” he says.
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