Alfonso Cuarón Subverted Sci-Fi and Fantasy. Now He’s Coming for TV

How did that project come to your attention?

Renée Knight [the author of the 2015 novel that inspired the show] and I have acquaintances in common. She sent me the manuscript, and I really liked it. I just didn’t know how to make it happen as a conventional film. And so time passed, I went to do Roma, and toward the end of that Knight got in touch, saying, Hey, in case you’re interested, the rights are available. And that was a moment when I was very intrigued about exploring episodic TV.

I enjoy many series, and they have amazing writing and amazing acting. But only very few have a cinematic approach. So I was intrigued. How can you hijack the conventional, writer-oriented show into something that is closer to cinema?

What do you mean here by “cinematic approach”?

In film, you take images and put them in relationship with other images to convey a meaning. There’s a visual layer, a visual way in which stories are told. In order to do that, you have to surrender to it.

Many series cannot be concerned about that. They need to keep moving the narrative forward constantly. The narrative is leading the show—that’s their amazing strength. Narratively they’ve started doing way more interesting things than most mainstream American films. But in the worst cases, you can watch many series with your eyes closed.

By the way, you can still have a great time. You can actually be doing things while you’re watching your show.

My wife does embroidery while she’s watching some of these shows.

Yeah, and you’re talking once in a while. That’s their value.

Another thing is: I’d never done anything overtly narrative, and I was very intrigued by the challenge. I’d always favored a more cinematic language to convey ideas, rather than just strong narrative impulse.

Can you say a little more about what you mean by “overtly narrative”?

When you have a narrative, you can go: A, then B, then C, then D, then E, then F, and so on. In films, you have to somehow convey everything you need—and this is what I mean about cinematic language—to go from A to D.

But there are two principles that are contradictory, and I learned these by working on this show. The principle of film is time—it’s how those images flow in time, and all the emotions that they convey in time. Television, on the other hand, is about killing time. It’s killing time to keep the narrative flowing.

Doing Disclaimer, there were cinematic moments that I loved. But I also knew that if I hold the shot here, people watching are going to check their messages.

You mentioned holding a shot. There’s that moment in Y Tu Mamá También when the camera inside the car turns around, looks out of the back window, and focuses on cops stopping some men on the road, then it turns back to the front seat, where the stars are talking about foreplay. Is that the kind of moment that wouldn’t fit in a series? Because, in a series, it’s just the lead characters and their actions, one after another, killing time?