WITH ALFONSO CUARON, YOU NEVER know what's next-and sometimes neither does he. The director leaps from genre to genre: from a Dickens adaptation, to a sensual road movie about two teenage boys, to a blockbuster Harry Potter sequel, to a dystopia about infertility, to a thriller set in low Earth orbit, to a meditative drama about the housekeeper in a wealthy Mexican household, filmed in black and white. What unites these stories is Cuarón's particular sensibility, or what he calls his "cinematic language." His camera rarely stops moving. His films regularly deliver tiny, unexpected moments-a woman shyly revealing herself to be pregnant in Children of Men; a stranded astronaut making radio contact with an Inuit man and his dogs down on Earth in Gravity-that feel intimate and grand at the same time.
For each of his past two films, Cuarón won the Best Director Oscar. His first big project since 2018's Roma is not a movie but a television show: Disclaimer, which stars Cate Blanchett and Kevin Kline and streams on Apple TV+. Its seven episodes are marvels of engineered tension: Mysteries turn inside out, narrators grow unreliable, facts evaporate, and the sand never stops shifting. This summer, in London, I spoke with Cuarón about what it takes to make TV feel like cinema. We also talked about science fiction. Two of Cuarón's films, Children of Men and Gravity, routinely make lists of the best movies ever made in the genre, but he doesn't really see them that way. His films about "the future" are, he says, studies of what life is already like for some people-and the precarious realities we don't like to confront here in the present day.
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