In case you’re wondering what has taken Alfonso Cuarón so long to make another movie — his last one was 2018’s “Roma” — well, he’s been working on an Apple TV limited series titled “Disclaimer,” and starring Cate Blanchett.
We now have our first look images (via Vanity Fair). All seven episodes, written and directed by Cuaron, will premiere at the Venice Film Festival. This might be the one project, film or TV, that I’m most looking forward to this fall.
“Disclaimer” seems to touch upon the current zeitgeist, one filled with division and hate. It “delivers an ominous warning to viewers in its very title”. Blanchett stars as a powerful journalist who finds troubling details from her own secret past inside the pages of a lurid novel. Kevin Kline is the loner author who publishes it, eager to inflict not just pain, but also humiliation on the woman he believes caused his own loss and sorrows.
The VF piece delves into “Disclaimer” not necessarily being about contemporary cancel culture “any more than it’s about the zeal to punish in historic incidents like witch trials, inquisitions, or Red Scares”.
“I’m sure there’s an evolutionary trait there for why we fall into judgments of other people so easily,” Cuarón says. The problem, he adds, is “when those judgments don’t come from informed facts and just come from what other people are talking about, or saying, or claiming.”
“I think “Disclaimer” underscores how our very vociferous public judgments isolate us from each other and prevent common ground from being located,” Blanchett says.
Blanchett had originally said that “Disclaimer” was “really more like [shooting] SEVEN movies.” How intriguing. Cuaron parallels her thoughts by likening the series to a “seven-hour-long movie,” and adding that he doesn’t really know how to shoot a TV show anyway. “Disclaimer,” in his view, is cinema.
Based on the 2015 novel of the same name by Renée Knight, the project was this massive undertaking that, as I had previously reported, took around 280 days to shoot. Filming for the series had begun in June 2022 and wrapped in March 2023. Emmanuel Lubezki and Bruno Delbonnel are also sharing DP duties.
Apple trusted him. “They were very generous when I said I could only do it as a film,” Cuarón says. “In a TV show, you shoot five pages a day, and sometimes even more. I shoot one page a day. So the shoot was very, very long. We were shooting with pandemic restrictions and with actors getting COVID, meaning changes of schedule and domino effects happening.”
As mentioned, this is Cuarón’s first project since 2018’s Oscar-winning “Roma.” Cuarón’s reputation precedes him; he’s become one of the great filmmakers of the 21st Century with other films such as “Children of Men,” “Y Tu Mama Tambien” and “Gravity”.
