Movies - TV
Alfonso Cuarón Had Little Interest In Children Of Men Until Tragedy Struck
By STEVEN WARD
It's a common lesson learned amongst directors that any judgment call on a script isn't always final. One minute they're tossing it aside out of indifference or disgust and the next they're engrossed in its possibilities and such was the tenuous relationship Alfonso Cuarón had with "Children of Men" when he was first pitched it.
Part of the reason Cuarón ended up disliking the initial script for "Children of Men" has at least a little to do with his fourth film, "Y Tu Mamá También." In the aftermath of its success, he was flooded with so many prospective projects and told Vulture that, "I was not interested in a science-fiction thing about upper classes in a fascist country."
Then — while he was at the Toronto Film Festival screening "Y Tu Mamá También" — the September 11, 2001 attacks occurred. Out of that confusing uncertainty over the future, he found his way back to "Children of Men," calling his writing partner Tim Sexton while still in Toronto to tell him they now had the "approach into that story" that previously eluded them.
Cuarón might've felt disconnected from the world of the original novel, but the one he currently found himself living in was now reeling. Absorbing the tragedy of such a massive loss of human life, Cuarón set out to create a far more globalized perspective of strife than the novel "The Children of Men" offered.