Alfonso Cuaron

Born on November 28, 1961 in Mexico City, Alfonso Cuarón’s family mansion was close to the Churubusco Studios, one of the oldest in Latin America, where Luis Buñuel , John Ford , and Mario Moreno have filmed on a recurring basis. cantinflas. Passionate about cinema, at the age of 12 they gave him his first camera, with which he took his first steps in what would be his future profession.

“My mother was very supportive of me becoming a director,” recalls Cuarón. “He was the one who brought me closer to the books on the history of cinema, to the film clubs that existed in Mexico City; to explore directors I didn’t know. I was a child and he talked to me about Francis Ford Coppola and Steven Spielberg , I was starting to make movies.

He received training at the Centro Universitario de Estudios Cinematográficos (CUEC), where he fell in love with Mariana Elizondo, whom he married in 1980. She later gave birth to Jonás Cuarón , destined to collaborate as a screenwriter with his father. At the CUEC he would also meet another fundamental figure in his life, the imaginative photographer Emmanuel Lubezki , who would collaborate on a recurring basis in his films.

Rumor has it that he was expelled from the CUEC for shooting a short film, Vengeance is Mine , in English, against the regulations of the center, but in reality he himself gave up further studying, frustrated that they would not let him commercialize this work.

Later he was a museum janitor, until he was hired to direct episodes of La hora marcada , a televisa thriller series. Along with his brother, the writer Carlos Cuarón , and the aforementioned Lubezki, he launched his first feature film, Sólo con tu pareja , a comedy about a womanizer publicist ( Daniel Giménez Cacho ). At first the project was on the verge of being in limbo, since it was not going to get government support, but they canceled the shooting of another selected film, and finally Cuarón received the help in his place. It was so successful that the debuting director was recruited by Sydney Pollack to participate in the United States in the Fallen Angels series., for which episodes were also filmed by Tom Hanks and Tom Cruise .

Once settled in Hollywood, Alfonso Cuarón signed a contract with Warner to direct Addicted to Love , a romantic comedy with Meg Ryan and Matthew Broderick. But when he was about to start shooting, he resigned from the assignment because he was dazzled by the script by Richard Lagravenese ( The Bridges of Madison ) and Elizabeth Chandler ( Always by Your Side ) for The Little Princess , an adaptation of the novel by Frances Hodgson Burnett, which it had already given rise to a Shirley Temple film.

“If I could only rescue one of my films, it would be The Little Princess ,” Cuarón said. His film, largely thanks to Lubezki’s impressive visual work, garnered impressive reviews and up to two Oscar nominations (photography and artistic direction), but unfortunately the box office did not match. The low-key Great Expectations (1998) , an adaptation of the Charles Dickens novel , starring Gwyneth Paltrow , Ethan Hawke , Anne Bancroft and Robert De Niro , also did not have much of an impact .

He decides to return to Mexico, where he sets up a company, Producciones Anhelo, with the millionaire Jorge Vergara; with it he launched Y tu mamá también , co-written by Alfonso Cuarón himself with his brother, Carlos. The story of two young men who travel to the beach with a Spanish woman won the award for best screenplay in Venice, where the hitherto unknown Diego Luna and Gael García Bernal were also recognized with the Marcelo Mastroianni award for revelation performance . The film, which also featured Maribel Verdú , also won an Oscar nomination for best screenplay.

Parallel to his facet as a director, Cuarón consolidated himself at the helm of Anhelo as a producer of such memorable titles as The Assassination of Richard Nixon , by Niels Mueller , and Pan’s Labyrinth , by his friend Del Toro.

JK Rowling herself , creator of Harry Potter, turned out to be a fan of The Little Princess , to such an extent that when Chris Columbus, director of the first two adaptations of the boy wizard’s adventures, announced his departure from the saga, the author suggested as Substitute for Mexican Although he had not read any of the books, he ended up working on the third film, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban , for many the best in the saga, at least for its visual power. “His work on him was so spot on it made me cringe because he had left clues as to where the story was going to go,” Rowling said. “And that he did not have privileged information.”

In her next film, she would also start from a novel by a British author, since Children of Men adapts the homonymous text by PD James, which was the first foray of this mystery specialist into the field of science fiction. The film talks about hopelessness through the story of a dystopian future where humanity has lost the possibility of having children. “I was not interested in the project at all until I understood that infertility could be a metaphor for the lack of hope and that it could be a great excuse to make a film that explored the state of things today, in a world where the notion of hope fits, despite the fact that sometimes things don’t look so good”, commented the filmmaker in an interview with José María Aresté for decine21.com.

Shot in the style of a documentary, Children of Men is lavished with impressive sequence shots resulting from a new collaboration with Lubezki, such as the car chase or the fighters who stop, moved when they see the baby. Once again, the director relies on the talent of great actors, as the cast is led by Clive Owen , Julianne Moore and the veteran Michael Caine . The same year as this film, 2006, the Mexican was in charge of a segment of the collective film Paris, je t’aime .

Cuarón takes his jobs in stride. It took him five years to bring Gravity to light , co-written with his son Jonás. Together with Lubezki, he set out to get all the possibilities out of the 3D format, with which an unprecedented spectacularity and tension is achieved. In the film, Sandra Bullock and George Clooney become two astronauts lost in space due to an accident. With oxygen about to run out, they will try to save themselves by reaching for a capsule.

Thanks to the film, he has received outstanding awards, including the Golden Globe for directing, and the Directors Guild Award. Of the ten Oscar nominations for the film, three of them – film, direction and editing – directly involve the Mexican. “If I told myself when I was 15 that this is happening, I would be very happy. But I want my life back. No matter how beautiful the award galas are, in the end what a 9-year-old boy wants is for his father to take him to school ”, Cuarón declared.

Divorced in 1993 from the aforementioned Elizondo, Alfonso Cuarón joined the Italian actress Annalisa Bugliani, with whom he had two other offspring, Tess Bu and Olmo Teodoro, before breaking up with her in 2008. The children appear recurrently in his filmography ( The Little Princess , Harry Potter ), as well as the impossibility of having children ( Children of Men ), or a mother (Bullock in Gravity ) who has lost her baby. But he is reluctant to find thematic similarities in his work. “I don’t know if my films have constants in common, because I also don’t revisit them. Actually, the only constant in my career that I am clear about is that I have to pay the rent,” Cuarón commented to the aforementioned José María Aresté.