Writer, executive producer and director Alfonso Cuarón with executive producer and cinematographer Emmanuel 'Chivo' Lubezki, on location in Forte dei Marmi, Italy.Maria Lax/Apple TV+
Across genres and budgets, languages and decades, Alfonso Cuarón has become cinema’s leading destroyer of worlds.
The outer-space terror of Gravity, the urban war zones of Children of Men, the heart-ripping devastation of Y tu mamá también, even the bitter dark magic of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban – each of Cuarón’s films imagines a singular kind of undoing. The director might employ stylistic signatures to build his varied paths – magnificently ambitious single-take sequences, crisp deep-focus shots – but all roads lead to the very brink of annihilation.
Yet Cuarón’s most ambitious unravelling might be delivered in his latest film. All seven of them, actually.
Next week, the two-time Oscar-winning filmmaker brings Disclaimer, his first project in six years after 2018′s Roma, to the Toronto International Film Festival. A seven-chapter (don’t call them “episodes”) Apple TV+ adaptation of Renée Knight’s hit page-turner, the psychological thriller traces the emotional and existential implosion of two London families. While Disclaimer is not Cuarón’s first foray into small-screen storytelling – he co-created the single-season 2014 NBC fantasy drama Believe, as well working on a few instalments of the late-eighties Mexican anthology series La hora marcada – it is easily his most ambitious.
Cuarón has assembled an all-star cast, including Cate Blanchett, Kevin Kline, Lesley Manville, Kodi Smit-McPhee and Sacha Baron Cohen, the latter appearing in a rare dramatic role. He filmed across Britain, Australia and Mexico. Shooting took the better part of a year. In both conception and execution, the production feels like either the last great gasp of the prestige-television era, or perhaps its brave new future.
But Disclaimer is not, strictly speaking, television. At least according to Cuarón, who, in an interview from the Venice Film Festival last week – where Disclaimer had its world premiere ahead of TIFF – exclusively referred to the production as a “film.” Seven hour-long movies, one after the other. He simply “doesn’t know how to direct TV. Probably at this stage in my life, it’s too late to learn.”
Cate Blanchett as Catherine Ravenscroft in Disclaimer, premiering Oct. 11 on Apple TV+.Apple TV+
Wait: Cuarón knows what you might be thinking. Every TV showrunner today likes to think of their work not as a series but rather a “10-hour movie.” (Last long enough, as the Game of Thrones creators managed, and you can try to pass off your entire series as a “73-hour movie.”) But in Cuarón’s case, the line feels honest.
Consider the first sequence of Disclaimer’s first instalment. Opening with an “iris-in” shot – a cutely antiquated technique of the silent-film era in which a slowly expanding on-screen circle reveals the eventual image – Cuarón introduces two young lovers, Jonathan (Louis Partridge) and Sasha (Liv Hill), having heated sex while aboard a speeding train. The extended single-take scene, backlit by a deeply saturated pink and purple skyline and whose action is given the narrative punchline of Jonathan reaching orgasm the moment the train enters a tunnel, offers enough red cinematic meat to stock a slaughterhouse.
It also takes on new, deeper meaning once Cuarón, who wrote and directed the entirety of Disclaimer, delivers his seventh chapter. At which point the audience is compelled to double back and revisit everything that came before – a shattering magic trick of serialized storytelling that feels, well, cinematic.
Naturally, nailing that first scene took just as much careful imagining and planning as any of Cuarón’s films.
“We had the whole dynamic of the light, but we were also figuring out how we’re going to contain everything in one shot, and create that dynamic inside the frame – it was not unlike anything else that I’ve approached with Chivo,” Cuarón says, nicknaming his frequent collaborator, cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki, who teamed up on Disclaimer with Coen Bros. regular Bruno Delbonnel. “We wanted to have two different cinematographers to provide different cinematic languages for each narrative.”
Those two stories are divided between Catherine Ravenscroft (Blanchett), a mid-career documentary filmmaker, and Stephen Brigstocke (Kline), a retired professor and father of Jonathan, the easily aroused lad glimpsed in that opening train scene. How Catherine and Stephen’s lives intersect – crash, really – is the great formative trick of Disclaimer, which further splits perspectives by using first-, third- and the rarely used second-person narration.
“Voiceover is mostly used in a lazy way, to fill in the blanks and give a sentimental tone – ‘I remember my childhood in blah blah,’ ” Cuarón says. “But there is another voiceover that can be more introspective. It’s unusual to hear, ‘You do this, you do that.’ My first exposure to second-person was as a teenager, watching The Man Who Sleeps. It forms a striking relationship with the viewer.”
Similarly, viewers cannot say that Cuarón doesn’t offer instructions – perhaps a disclaimer – to his approach from the start. Immediately after the train-sex sequence, the director iris-outs to a black-tie gala at which Catherine is receiving an award from real-life journalism icon Christiane Amanpour, who commands the room to “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.”
“The audience is being warned from the beginning – you’ll see when you watch the second time around. Listen to the music throughout, too,” Cuarón says. “There are a lot of clues over and over.”
Immediately, Cuarón pulls the audience in and makes them complicit in the emotional storm that soon engulfs Catherine after her personal history – what happened between her and Jonathan after he got off that train – is exposed to the world by Stephen.
Similar to Blanchett’s work in the 2022 drama Tár, Disclaimer sets up its audience to form, maybe even desire, a presumption of guilt.
“Filmmakers and artists throughout history have dealt with this theme – what comes to mind is The Crucible, or 12 Angry Men,” Cuarón says. “It starts as the judgment of the characters, but at the end it’s the judgment of the audience.”
If Disclaimer ultimately feels like the most complex and epic of Cuarón’s projects – and this is the filmmaker who once punted Sandra Bullock into the stars and filmed a Children of Men single-take shot so complex that it has spawned a cottage industry of YouTube explainers – then that’s because it is.
“None of my films are overtly as narrative as this, so that was daunting. But combining the kaleidoscope of narratives was important in terms of making the film as a whole,” says Cuarón. “I tend to try to do stuff that I’ve never done before. I don’t know if it’s about challenging myself, or more about learning.”
The first three episodes of Disclaimer screen at TIFF Sept. 9, Sept. 11 and Sept. 15 (tiff.net). Disclaimer’s first two episodes premiere Oct. 11 on Apple TV+, with new episodes added every Friday through Nov. 15.