Alfonso Cuaron is making the rounds around the world premiering his upcoming Netflix drama “Roma.” While at Thierry Fremaux’s Lumiere Festival, the acclaimed director discussed his Golden Lion-winning film and how Fremaux (who is the director of the Cannes Film Festival) helped steer the direction of “Roma.” Also, Cuaron dropped an interesting nugget about what film could have come next, if “Roma” had not been developed.
The filmmaker says that before “Roma” was even a thought, he was speaking with Fremaux about his next project. The film, which he described (via THR) as a “family drama set either 50,000 or 100,000 years ago,” telling the story of a “Darwinian Adam and Eve,” was something Cuaron was excited to begin work on. However, Fremaux heard the pitch and told him to make something more personal, along the lines of the award-winning film “Y Tu Mama Tambien.”
Thus, “Roma” was born. Based on an idea that had been bouncing around in Cuaron’s mind, he began to formulate what his next personal project would look like, which we now know pulled extensively from his own time growing up in Mexico City. “It was the right moment for me to return to Mexico, and I wanted to use the skills I had acquired on Hollywood movies to make something more personal,” he said.
The director also described how he approached the making of “Roma” in a unique way. Instead of providing full scripts to his cast and crew, Cuaron was the only person on set to know the entire script and the direction of the film. Each day, before filming, the director would hand the lines to his cast, attempting to elicit real emotion and shock from his actors.
READ MORE: ‘Roma’ Is Mexico’s Foreign Language Film Entry But Who Else Is In the Mix?
“Each actor received contradictory directions and explanations, which meant that there was chaos on set every day,” the director also said. “But that’s exactly what life is like: it’s chaotic and you can’t really plan how you’ll react to a given situation.”
Cuaron also explained his frustration about how “Roma” wasn’t able to play in theaters in France. In a highly-publicized feud earlier this year, Netflix (the studio behind the film) clashed with the Cannes Film Festival regarding French law that prohibits a film from being seen on a streaming service within three years of the film being seen in theaters. Clearly, Netflix wasn’t about to wait 36 months to premiere the film on its service in France. So the streamer sent the film to Venice instead, and we know what happened there.
“I’m frustrated that in France it can’t be seen on the big screen, while most of the rest of the world will have that opportunity,” Cuaron admitted. “When we were looking for a distributor, Netflix very ambitiously imposed itself with its desire to try and get Roma out to all four corners of the world. And to have that ambition for an art-house film in black-and-white, and with all the dialogue in Spanish and [the indigenous dialect] Mixtec, is a rare thing nowadays.”
The filmmaker later admitted that he understands the way films are consumed nowadays, with short theatrical windows and most people discovering the film on a small screen, anyway.
Explaining the reason why his filmography seems to deviate from style and genre with each work, Cuaron said, “I’m not an auteur who does the same movie over and over again. I’m more like a cinephile interested in lots of different themes and genres. Each time I make it’s a movie, it’s a movie I don’t really know how to make.”
“Roma” will be released December 14.