A few days from now, Alfonso Cuarón is all set to receive the Lifetime Achievement Award at the Locarno Film Festival for his stellar contribution to the industry, with a career spanning over 3 decades. Life really has come full circle for the Mexican filmmaker.
There was a time when everything wasn’t hunky dory for him. Things were going as wrong for him as they could at once. And then Gravity happened. But Cuarón reveals that at one moment, the Sandra Bullock-starrer almost didn’t happen.
Alfonso Cuarón always wanted to experiment with the horror genre
While speaking before a packed crowd at the stylish outdoor Spazio Cinema in Locarno, Alfonso Cuarón got candid about his present, and past. And his one desire – making a horror film. He said,
“My aspiration is to one day do a horror film.” (Deadline)
He continued,
“I love Rosemary’s Baby, and the other Polanski films, and films like The Babadook. They’re so grounded in reality and in character so I love those. As a spectator, I have a wider taste but anything I feel I could do would need to be more grounded. I’ve been trying to write something like that, but somehow, it doesn’t fully work.”
And he did get his wish, helming Gravity. But it wasn’t quite a straightforward road. He did come up with a plan. But the project was ambitious. And as he would find out, ambitions can be rather costly.
Alfonso Cuarón was forced to do something that would get him “a cheque”
Back when Children of Men hit the theatres, Alfonso Cuarón was at his worst point commercially. He revealed,
“After Children of Men, which was a complete commercial flop, the appetite to work with me plummeted.”
The only option? To work on something of his own. He began to work on a project featuring his own son. But even that project fell through.
His professional woes, coupled with turmoil in his personal life, marked the worst point of his life. And that is when Gravity happened. The 62-year-old, who was in dire need of money, was looking to make a screenplay “that would let a studio give me a cheque”. And he did find a lifeline with this project.
The path to fruition of the Sandra Bullock-starrer was a bumpy one
Alfonso Cuarón sat down with his son, Jonás Cuarón, once again. Soon after Warner Bros. bought into the project. He was more than happy to accept the offer. He would soon work on the screenplay with longtime collaborator, DoP Emmanuel Lubezki. But that is when they ran into quite a hiccup.
Everyone had reservations about the possibility of the project working out. He said,
“Fincher told us to forget about it, there’s no tech, wait 6 years. And he wasn’t wrong. James Cameron told us how we could do it but that was a 400 million dollar film. We told him only you can do that. And he said yeah you’re right.”
Yet letting go was not an option. The solution? Working their own way out. They came up with a novel method, creating a mix of animation work and live-action camera work, utilizing Industrial Light & Magic’s LED-based StageCraft technology known as The Volume. And as we know it, the Sandra Bullock-starrer materialized. There wouldn’t have been a Gravity if they hadn’t worked this solution out. And if the team was not as tech-savvy.
While the film seemingly did not come through initially, being slammed for its awful visuals, things changed eventually. Alien went on to become a cult classic and Cuarón must be very thankful for it.
