Alfonso Cuarón and Jonás Cuarón shared their thoughts on the future of the theatrical experience, teased a few details of upcoming projects and discussed Korean cinema during their first visit to Busan International Film Festival (BIFF) today.
BIFF is hosting both a special IMAX screening of Gravity, the Oscar-winning movie that the father and son filmmakers co-wrote, and the Asian premiere of Jonas Cuarón’s most recent film, Campeon Gabacho, the story of a Mexican immigrant in New York, which premiered at this year’s SXSW.
“I believe that the theatrical experience will keep on existing, and I hope so because I love the theatrical experience, but I think it’s going to coexist with more forms,” said Alfonso Cuarón, a four-time Oscar winner for Gravity and Roma.
“And I’m very pleased about that, and I’m also very afraid,” he continued. “But I want to learn from the new generation about how they take this new world and turn it into art, and that’s at the end of the day what I’m putting my focus on.”
Cuarón said he’s already learned from his son, despite initially trying to dissuade him from a career in cinema: “When he was growing up, I consciously pushed him away from studying or getting involved in film. We went to the movies together and he shared my love of cinema, but I told him I can’t encourage you to study film.”
Although he took that path anyway, Cuarón said: “It was very refreshing to see that he was developing a language so different from mine. Selfishly, it was a language I could learn from.
“From his first film, that was all done with still photography, and then his second film Desierto, when I read that script, I said I wanted to write something like that. So I feel in many ways, he has pushed me in my own language to explore further. He has a deep belief in audiences and a deep belief in the power of of film.”
Continuing the theme of appealing to audiences, Jonás Cuarón shared his love of genre cinema and the fact that he’s currently working on a script for a horror movie: “I like the way genre connects with an audience, like with the audience here yesterday for Gravity, you could see they were really stressed out for Dr. Ryan Stone. And horror is a really great genre in that sense of connecting with the audience. It’s similar to comedy; that when you see a horror you really get a communal reaction.”
Both father and son expressed an appreciation for Korean cinema. Jonás Cuarón said: “Something in Korean cinema that really connects with me, and that I’ve always tried to do in my films, is bringing in social semantics, but under the guise of genre and particularly also with humor.
“A lot of movies that I really respect from The Host and Parasite, to recent Korean films like Hope and No Other Choice, they all share what I love about cinema, which is that they talk about social issues but connect with the audience through genre, and a sense of humor that I really connect with.”
Speaking with Korean director Yeon Sang-ho (Colony, Paradise Lost) later today in a masterclass, Alfonso Cuarón noted how failure can be an important component in success: “I have way more projects fall apart than the projects I made; and perhaps they could be considered as failures, but thanks to those failures, I managed to do some other films that were well received in one way or the the other.”
Busan International Film Festival is taking place October 6-15 at Busan Cinema Center and multiple venues across the city. The festival’s industry platform, Asian Contents & Film Market (ACFM), kicks off on Saturday, October 10 and runs until Tuesday, October 13.
English (US) ·