Future Doc

Alfonso Cuarón on Children of Men's here-and-now sci-fi.

by Sam Adams

If I hadn't just seen him get out of a cab, I'd swear Alfonso Cuarón had just rolled out of bed: His eyes are bleary, his hair mussed and he promptly calls for both tea (for his throat) and coffee (for obvious reasons). But although he looks as if he's slept for a thousand years, Cuarón proves to be very much engaged in the present, even though the movie he's discussing, Children of Men, is set in the year 2027.

THE FIRST CUT IS THE DEEPEST: Alfonso Cuar&243;n lines up one of Children of Men's long takes.

Children of Men nominally adapts P.D. James' novel about a world ruled by human infertility and anti-immigrant paranoia, but Cuarón says the novel was only "a point of departure." "I didn't want to do a film about the future," he says. "I wanted to do a film about the state of things."

Read Sam Adams' review of Children of Men.

Seeing infertility as "a metaphor for the loss of hope," Cuarón handed his art department a stack of war-zone photographs, steering them away from futuristic sheen and towards contemporary disintegration. "They came in with their Blade Runner concept drawings, and I came up with my own file of references, from Iraq to Sri Lanka to Somalia, Northern Ireland, the Balkans. I said, 'This is the movie we're doing.'"

Although the movie necessarily takes a few leaps, postulating a world where Great Britain is the only industrialized nation left standing, Cuarón bristles ever-so-slightly at the notion that his vision of the future is at all conjectural. "It's not a worst-case scenario," he says. "It's the current scenario, just with everything put in the microcosm of London. So much of what you see on-screen are references from iconography that have already been shown in the news and the media. We kept saying, 'We're not creating. We're referencing.'"

To capture this palpably recognizable world on film, Cuarón and his cinematographer, Emmanuel Lubezki (whom Cuarón calls Chivo), settled on the mobile, long-take style of contemporary battlefield coverage. The results, particularly in the movie's elaborately choreographed action scenes, are astonishing. But difficult as the shots were to stage — one sequence, a lengthy ambush and chase shot from inside a moving car, required swiveling seats enabling the actors to move out of the camera's path — Cuarón says his greatest challenge was coming up with what the camera would capture as it moved through his imaginary world. "For me, more than the technical aspect, it was even more complicated to come up with the social environment. Chivo kept saying to me, 'We cannot afford to waste a single frame without commenting on the state of things.'"

Although some have criticized the shots for their purportedly distracting showmanship, Cuarón says he and Lubezki were acutely aware of the point at which gracefulness becomes grandstanding. In fact, the longest and most impressive sequence in the movie, a climactic battle scene that winds through a field of rubble and up a cluttered staircase, was originally significantly longer, but both collaborators felt its protracted coda made even ordinary spectators conscious of the shot's duration. "We didn't want to do an Olympics of one-shot deals," he says. "If we felt that the shot was drawing attention to itself, we'd say, 'You know what, we have to cut.'"

For Cuarón, rather than distracting, the long takes provide a sense of unbroken realism. "It's important to keep the sense of real time, and for you not to go into a fantasyland, a make-believe land of science fiction," he says. The explicitness with which the movie grafts present concerns onto speculative fiction may make the movie seem heavy-handed at times, but Cuarón makes no apologies for Children of Men's boldface approach. "Cautionary tales were fantastic in the 1970s," he says. "Now, we don't have time for cautionary tales. Now is the time for transformation."

(sam@citypaper.net)