Alfonso Cuarón Breaks Down Casting Cate Blanchett for TV and the Disclaimer Finale
The multiple Oscar winner talks about tricking his audience with contradicting narratives and why Disclaimer was crafted like a long film.
This week on the Awards Tour podcast, our host Jacqueline Coley chats with the four-time Academy Award-winning director, producer, and writer Alfonso Cuarón about his first-ever television series, Disclaimer, out now on Apple TV+. The seven-part psychological thriller premiered at the Venice Film Festival and has enjoyed rave reviews by critics and audiences since its debut. Oscar winner Cate Blanchett stars in it as a journalist who receives a novel in the mail and discovers the author may be revealing long-held secrets from her past that she has tried desperately to forget. The taut drama is the first series in several years from Oscar-winner Kevin Kline and also features Kodi Smit-McPhee, Lesley Manville, and Sacha Baron Cohen.
(Photo by Courtesy of AppleTV+)
In our chat with Cuarón, he details how he developed this show for Apple TV+, how Blanchett was fervently involved in the producing process, even going so far as to cast her co-stars, and how he loves to trick his audience with contradicting narratives. Be advised we do discuss spoilers for Disclaimer in this episode, so please watch the show prior, and we’ll see you on the next stop on the Awards Tour. Please enjoy this preview of our conversation with Alfonso Cuarón and watch the entire discussion in the above video.
Jacqueline Coley for Rotten Tomatoes: This was your first television adaptation, but you still shot it like a film, and you took it to film festivals. How did that work exactly?
Alfonso Cuarón: Well, the methodology that we followed was the one of doing a film with AppleTV+. They had been an incredible partner. I wrote the screenplay, and when I presented it to them, I said, “Look, I want to direct this, but I have to warn you that I don’t know how to do television. If I do this, and if you agree, I will do it as a long film, because that’s the way I would do it.”
In the same way as I wrote it, I didn’t write it thinking of cliffhangers and such. I believe in a Flow as a film, and then I would find the natural dramatic breaks or points or thematic breaks that I said, “OK, this is the end of a chapter; it’s the beginning of another chapter,” but it was not engineered. I admired television, don’t get me wrong. I admire it. It’s a very specific way of engineering things. So the whole methodology was that of a film. Emmanuel Lubezki and Bruno Delbonnell, the cinematographers, they’re Oscar winners. They’ve just done film as well, so we approached it as such.
So I think that experience is one that you can watch episodically week after week, but also you can watch it like a long film in festivals. It was screening two sessions, the first three hours and 20 minutes in one session, and then the other one, which is two hours and 15 minutes in a second session. I guess that experience is the same. The only thing is the flow is different when you watch more episodes together.
(Photo by Courtesy of Apple TV+)
RT: Did you have to adjust any of the adaptation from your “cinema brain”?
Ronan: I didn’t change anything because I don’t know what to change. I just did it the way I am used to working before, and but I have a great group of collaborators. At most, none of them have done anything but films before. So that’s what we know, how we do it.
Watch the video for the full interview with Alfonso Cuarón.
All episodes of Disclaimer: Limited Series (2024) are available on Apple TV+.
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