Alfonso Cuarón on Disclaimer, Why He Doesn’t Call His Work Sci-Fi, and the Future of Cinema
With Alfonso Cuarón, you can never guess what project he’ll tackle next—and half the time, neither can he. The Oscar-winning director leaps freely between wildly different genres and tones: from a lush Charles Dickens adaptation, to a raw, sensual coming-of-age road trip for two Mexican teen boys, to a blockbuster Harry Potter sequel, to a chilling dystopian drama about global infertility, to a heart-pounding thriller set in low Earth orbit, to a quiet, meditative black-and-white drama about a housekeeper working for a wealthy Mexico City family. What unites these seemingly disconnected stories is Cuarón’s singular creative vision—what he calls his own “cinematic language.”
His camera is almost constantly in motion, and his films are packed with small, unexpected, unforgettable moments: a woman quietly revealing her pregnancy in Children of Men; a stranded astronaut making surprise radio contact with an Inuit hunter and his dogs on Earth’s surface in Gravity—beats that feel both intensely intimate and sweeping all at once.
Cuarón has taken home the Best Director Oscar for his last two feature films, and his first major project since 2018’s Roma is not another movie—it’s the Apple TV+ limited series Disclaimer, starring Cate Blanchett and Kevin Kline. Across its seven episodes, the show crafts masterful, tightly wound tension: mysteries flip upside down, narrators can’t be trusted, supposed facts dissolve into uncertainty, and the ground never stops shifting under the audience’s feet. This summer, I sat down with Cuarón in London to talk about reimagining television through a cinematic lens, and his unconventional take on science fiction. Two of his most beloved films, Children of Men and Gravity, regularly top lists of the best sci-fi movies ever made—but Cuarón does not classify them that way. His stories set “in the future,” he says, are actually deep dives into the realities many people already live with today, and the fragile, uncomfortable truths we often refuse to confront.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity, combining both on-camera and off-camera conversation. Watch the full video on WIRED’s YouTube channel.
Samanth Subramanian: This must be your first major interview discussing a big new project since Roma premiered in 2018, back before the pandemic. I thought about your films constantly during lockdown for one specific reason: every one of your projects leaves me with a distinct feeling of claustrophobia. Sometimes it’s physical, like when your camera pushes right into Sandra Bullock’s astronaut helmet in Gravity, and sometimes it’s emotional—like the whole world slowly closing in around your main characters.
Alfonso Cuarón: First off, I’m sorry I made you feel that way! [Laughs]
It works, then!
I guess that’s a win, then? But this is the first time anyone’s pointed this out to me—it was never a conscious choice. That’s true of most things when you make a film, anyway: meaning is for the audience to make, not for the director to dictate.
It got me wondering: what was your pandemic experience like?
It was pretty much like everyone else’s—stuck at home. At first, I tried to figure out something useful I could do, and we sorted thousands of masks to ship to Mexico for hospital nurses. After that, I started working on Disclaimer.
How did this project first cross your desk?
Renée Knight, author of the 2015 novel Disclaimer that the show is based on, has mutual friends with me. She sent me the manuscript, and I loved it immediately—but I couldn’t see how to adapt it as a traditional feature-length film. Time passed, I went off to make Roma, and toward the end of that production Knight reached out again: she told me the rights were available again, if I was still interested. That timing lined up perfectly, because I was already really curious about exploring episodic TV.
I love a lot of TV series—they have incredible writing and incredible acting. But very few approach the form from a cinematic perspective. So that got me hooked: how can you rework the conventional, writer-first structure of modern TV into something that feels much closer to cinema?
What do you mean when you talk about a “cinematic approach”?
In film, you build meaning by placing images in conversation with one another. There’s a whole visual layer to how stories are told, and you have to fully commit to that visual language to pull it off. A lot of TV series can’t prioritize that—they need to keep the plot moving forward nonstop. The plot drives the whole show, which is actually their great strength. Narrative-wise, modern TV has done far more innovative work than most mainstream American films these days. But at their worst, you could watch most series with your eyes closed and still follow everything that’s happening.
Don’t get me wrong—that’s not a bad thing! A lot of people do other things while they watch TV, and that’s totally fine. My wife embroiders while she watches some of her favorite shows, and we chat off and on while it plays. That’s part of what makes TV great for a lot of people. The other thing that drew me to Disclaimer is that I’d never worked on anything that’s such a straightforward, overt narrative before, and I was curious about the challenge. I’ve always leaned on cinematic language to convey ideas, rather than leaning solely on a strong, forward-driving plot.
Can you expand a little on what you mean by “overtly narrative”?
It’s a linear, step-by-step plot: A happens, then B, then C, and so on, all the way to the end. In film, you use cinematic language to jump straight from A to D, conveying everything you need along the way without spelling every step out. But working on this show taught me that film and TV have two completely contradictory core principles. Film is built around time—how images flow through time, and how that flow conveys emotion. Television, on the other hand, is built around occupying time. It fills time to keep the narrative moving from episode to episode. I loved a lot of the cinematic moments we created for Disclaimer, but I also knew if I held a shot too long, most viewers would pull out their phones to check their messages.
You mentioned holding a shot. There’s that iconic moment in Y Tu Mamá También: the camera inside the car spins around, looks out the back window to focus on police stopping a group of men on the side of the road, then spins back to the front seat where the two leads are chatting about foreplay. Would that moment not work in most series? Because most series only focus on the leads and their plot, one beat after another, filling time?
I don’t mean that as an insult, by the way! Of course. Maybe “occupying time” is a softer, less provocative way to put it. For most of the films I make, the whole point is to show the relationship between a character and their surrounding environment—it’s always the tension and clash between the two. In Y Tu Mamá También, that moment is there to show: these two boys are wrapped up in their silly, small personal drama, driving right past a much bigger, darker reality they don’t even notice.
And don’t get me wrong, there are so many great series that have incredible cinematic moments—Chernobyl is a perfect example, and The Bear too. But that cinematic eye isn’t consistent across the entire run of most shows. Part of that is just the nature of most series: they split directing duties across multiple directors, each handling one or two episodes. It’s really hard to maintain a single, strong directorial vision from the first episode to the last—one consistent attention to detail that shapes the entire story. The best shows set a clear creative tone, and then different directors come in and honor that tone across the whole season. When I made the reckless decision to direct all seven episodes of Disclaimer myself, it ended up feeling like just a very long film.
It feels like your own cinematic language, as you call it, is what ties all your wildly different projects together—on paper, they don’t look like they have much in common.
More than anything, that’s just a limitation of how I work, I think.
Why would you call it that?
I have incredibly eclectic taste in film. I grew up loving movies like The Poseidon Adventure, Planet of the Apes, Soylent Green—all of those are great, by the way. All fantastic films. I know, they are! But at the same time, I also love Bergman, Tarkovsky, Sokurov—I admire those filmmakers more than almost anyone else. What they all have in common is that they keep developing one core idea, film after film. You can see the throughline that unites every work by Bergman, or Fellini, even Kurosawa. I’ve never been able to do that. As soon as I finish one film, all I want to do is explore something completely new.
Have you ever tried to stick to a consistent throughline?
No, I haven’t even tried! [Laughs] Some films you make from conscious choice, some you make to keep working, some just come along and save your life. You can’t force any of it. I have to wait for projects to find me, for them to start taking shape in my head on their own. Every time I’ve tried to strictly plan out a specific film I want to make, I end up ditching that project and making something else entirely.
You mentioned Soylent Green and Planet of the Apes, and another thing that stands out about your work is that you bring that high cinematic aesthetic to adaptations of very popular, mass-market material. Disclaimer is a perfect example: the book is a classic summer beach thriller. Children of Men and the Harry Potter film you directed are also genre fiction from best-selling authors, not literary work. What draws you to that kind of source material?
It’s just how projects find you. With every one of these adaptations, I can already see the film playing out in my head while I’m still reading the book. With Children of Men, I saw the whole film almost as soon as I read a one-page summary of what the book was about. So I made the deliberate choice not to read the full novel—I didn’t want it to throw me off from the version I was already seeing in my head. People tell me the book is great, but that version of Children of Men I had in my head just clicked for me.
And that’s even more relevant now, with the recent anti-immigrant riots in the UK—everything in Children of Men feels suddenly, shockingly timely again.
But those trends were already there back when I made the film. We were all living in a bubble back then. When I made Children of Men, it was just after the turn of the century, and I wanted to explore the forces that would shape the 21st century. I read a ton of work from experts—sociologists, philosophers, you name it—and they were already talking about these exact trends. Nothing in the film is new. The only difference now is that these realities are moving closer to home, you know? Maybe they weren’t visible in London, at least not in the London that privileged people move through, but they’ve been happening all around the world this whole time.
Can you tell me a little about your parents? I understand they both worked in scientific fields, right?
My father was a doctor, specialized in nuclear medicine. Later in his career, he worked for the UN’s atomic energy agency, mostly as an inspector. My mom was a biochemist, but when I was growing up she started working as a teacher. Later, she switched focus to philosophy—she got her master’s, and ended up working as an editor at the Institute of Philosophical Investigations at a Mexican university.
I ask because Children of Men and Gravity are both rooted in really precise science and research. It’s easy to call them science fiction, but do you actually think of them that way?
Gravity doesn’t even take place in the future, really. It’s a plausible present-day story—because the Kessler syndrome is already a real, growing danger. It should terrify us more and more every year. The worst-case scenario would take out most of our telecommunications and transportation, because we rely on those satellites so much. You can forget about even accessing TikTok at that point!
And I never set out to make Children of Men as sci-fi either. Every single thing you see in Children of Men, except for the plot device of global infertility, is pulled straight from the present day. We were very careful to base every background detail on real events happening around the world when we made it: the Balkan War, the civil conflict in northern Sri Lanka. Humans have always been incredibly good at creating atrocities. Even back in 2006, it was clear that the global sociopolitical trend was leaning toward populism and paranoia around immigration. That was already happening—it just wasn’t happening in the safe, wealthy “green zones” of the West. Now people say ‘Oh my god, this movie came true!’ But it was always true—reality just got closer to people’s backyards. When they asked me to do a making-of for the Children of Men DVD, I was bored of the standard making-of format, so I made a little documentary interviewing the experts I’d read while working on the film. They talked about how all these themes in the movie were already playing out in Mexico and dozens of other countries. We tend to forget that, because we live such sheltered lives.
But 2024 feels far more dystopian even than it did back in 2006, when Children of Men came out.
Even back then, we were already talking about this immigration paranoia. Humans have migrated since the beginning of our species—that’s how we became who we are, how we populated every corner of the globe. People call it a crisis. It’s not a crisis—it’s just a natural human phenomenon, it’s always been with us and always will be. But it’s easy to blame people who are different for all your problems.
I want to go back to what you said earlier about reading Disclaimer and seeing it as a long-form project… You saw the potential, but didn’t know how to pull it off at first. Is that how you pick all your projects? You find a challenge you don’t know how to solve, and you think okay, I have to try it?
That’s exactly what motivates me: working on something I don’t already know how to do. For example, directing Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban was one of the best work experiences of my life. I learned so much. I knew nothing about visual effects before that project, and that movie was like film school for me. By the end of production, working with VFX was second nature. They were very kind to invite me back to direct the next one, but I turned it down. I didn’t want to end up just going through the motions, checking boxes.
Since Roma came out in 2018, filmmaking has changed so much—what kinds of movies get theatrical releases, how audiences engage with film. What do you think are the most interesting shifts we’ve seen?
Audiences are so comfortable with streaming series now. Think about it: this is still a pretty new format, right? We had miniseries and endless telenovelas before, but the structured, high-budget streaming limited series is still pretty new. It’s really exciting to approach that format from a cinematic perspective. We’re so used to saying films have to be around two hours long. But cinema started out as one-minute shorts, you know? Then films got longer, partly because audiences were used to the commercial model of theater. Cinema inherited this foreign framework from theater, and we’ve stuck with that convention ever since. I don’t think runtime should be a constraint for cinema at all.
What about the film industry itself? Do you agree with filmmakers like Alejandro Iñárritu and Martin Scorsese, who criticize franchise films like Marvel movies—Iñárritu even called it “cultural genocide”?
He stole that line from me! I used it in a different context, talking about something on Mexican TV, he used it for superhero films. The real issue is lack of diversity. These blockbusters take over every screen at every multiplex. I saw a photo of a multiplex in Mexico not long ago where every single screen was showing the same superhero film. I don’t even remember which one it was, I’m not that into superhero movies, but it was one of them. Only one screen had a Mexican film, because they’re legally required to show a certain percentage of local films—so they scheduled it for 11:30 on a weekday morning. It’s ridiculous.
We need more diversity in what’s available. Theaters care about filling seats and selling popcorn, and you can’t ignore that audiences love these movies. But if you only keep giving audiences what you already know they’ll like, eventually you’ll dry up the well of new creativity. Even on streaming, what you get to see is controlled by an algorithm that’s really limiting. The algorithm never lets you discover something new that’s different from what you already think you like. That’s why I’m so grateful for companies like Criterion and Mubi, that curate work and preserve it. I’m not pessimistic about the future of cinema, by the way—cinema will exist one way or another, and new generations will come up with completely new ways of making films that we can’t even imagine right now. The business side of things is a different story, though.
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