It took writer-director Alfonso Cuaron a year to shoot the rousing series Disclaimer like a movie. “Some of the filmmakers I deeply admire have ventured into the series format, the point wasn’t to do something familiar, but to try something new. I was challenged because I have never done anything that is overtly narrative. My films tend to be narratively very sparse. And I said, ‘Well, maybe that’s something I don’t know how to do.’” Why not try? Which, as he knows, is the best way to learn.”
REVIEW
The Academy Award-winning director’s latest project is a star-studded Apple TV+ series that makes you think about everything differently. For more than 30 years into a wide-ranging career that spans pictures like the Frances Hodgson Burnett adaptation A Little Princess, the space reverie Gravity, and the memoir-as-film drama Roma, Cuarón was more interested in subtle emotional textures, now he brings his big-screen, big-story gifts to a limited series, an adaptation of Renée Knight’s 2015 psychological thriller Disclaimer.
“Renée Knight and I have acquaintances in common. She sent me the manuscript, and I really liked it. I just didn’t know how to make it happen as a conventional film. And so time passed, I went to do Roma, and toward the end of that Knight got in touch, saying, Hey, in case you’re interested, the rights are available. And that was a moment when I was very intrigued about exploring episodic TV. I enjoy many series, and they have amazing writing and amazing acting. But only very few have a cinematic approach. So I was intrigued. How can you hijack the conventional, writer-oriented show into something that is closer to cinema?”
Knight’s novel is lots of things at once: a thriller, a riff on the idea of the unreliable narrator, a meditation on how easy it is, with all the digital means at our disposal, to cancel a career or, worse, ruin a life, simply because we think we know all the facts. Yet in some ways, Cuarón—who also adapted the script—has taken the themes of Knight’s book and intensified them. His take is elegant and suspenseful, but it’s also compassionate. Disclaimer is about, he says, the stories that we build out of our own lives, which we then present to others—to the people closest to us but also to society. “As humans, we’re trying to cope with many different things,” he says, “but mainly, probably, with an immense sense of loneliness.”
In Disclaimer Catherine Ravenscroft (Blanchett) is an acclaimed journalist and documentary filmmaker living a seemingly perfect life with her adoring husband, Robert (Sacha Baron Cohen) and their surly son Nicholas (Kodi Smit-McPhee). But when a mysterious novel finds its way into her life, she realizes the story tells a long-harbored secret of hers that no one else has ever known—and now she must deal with the consequences of people potentially learning of something she thought was buried away in her past.
EPISODES& IMAGES
Multiple Characters
Multiple characters in Disclaimer believe what they want to believe, easier than reckoning with reality. When Cuarón was young, he’d seen Bernard Queysanne’s 1974 The Man Who Sleeps, written, in the second person, by the experimental novelist Georges Perec. In structuring Disclaimer, Cuarón wanted to try telling the story in first-person, second-person, and third-person voices: Kline’s Stephen is the “I.” The people around Catherine—anyone who might be tempted to judge her—are the third-person observers. And Catherine’s story is told in the second person: she narrates her own arc, as if rendering judgment on her own behavior—accusing rather than defending herself, perhaps.
The use of the second person, Cuarón notes, is rare in film, and maybe not the sort of approach you could pull off with just any actor. But Blanchett, he says, was more than just the star of the series. Though he usually doesn’t write a script with an actor in mind, this time was different: “I’m writing, and I’m thinking of Cate.” He knew how fortunate he was when she said yes, and he considers her a creative partner on the project. She’d marked up her script à la Dostoyevsky’s manuscripts. “Have you seen those? How he wrote arrows moving up and down, and scratching parts out, and little things that only he understood? That was Cate’s script.” She asked questions that helped him shape the story. And she was the first person, he says, to see the initial cut. Cuarón says her feedback was invaluable. “That was Cate. Incredible! I’m so blessed and lucky.”
Collaboration between director and Cinematographer
But then, luck comes to those who are open to it. And Cuarón’s MO is to welcome the collaborative gifts of people he trusts, like his longtime friend and creative partner Emmanuel Lubezki, who has shot most of his movies. It was Lubezki’s idea to bring on a second cinematographer, Bruno Delbonnel, whose credits include films as varied in style as Amélie and Inside Llewyn Davis. Lubezki—Cuarón, along with just about everyone else, calls him Chivo—was the one who’d suggested changing the look of the film according to the shifting points of view: there are flashback scenes requiring a softer look, while sequences set in the present might demand higher contrast or slightly crisper images. “It was beautiful,” Cuarón says, “to see the conversations between the two of them collaborating.” Shooting with two cinematographers took a great deal of planning and coordination. But Cuarón is most aware of the demands he made on his actors—and how ably they met them. He had initially planned to write and direct just the pilot for Disclaimer. But once he started writing, he didn’t want to stop, and he agreed to direct the whole series. He decided to treat the project as one long film—which meant shooting more script pages each day, resulting in a much longer schedule.
Themes
Disclaimer is a powerhouse vehicle for both its director—allowing him to both play with different points of view and build an expansive, visually-stunning world filled with fleshed-out characters—and its stars, with indelible performances coming from stars Cate Blanchett, Kevin Kline, and Louis Partridge.
The show explores themes Cuarón has long explored in his previous work: family relationships, untold narratives, and, above all else, the idea of how masculinity can wind up harming both men themselves, and the women around them.
Discussions of masculinity come up frequently in the Mexican filmmaker’s work—first in his 2001 coming-of-age film Y T Mamá También starring Diego Luna and Gael Garcia Bernal. That modern classic finds the pair as class disparate best friends Tenoch and Julio, who take a road trip with Luisa (Maribel Verdu), a woman who agrees to join when she discovers that her husband has cheated on her. The trio bond while talking about relationships and sexual experiences, and the overzealous sexuality of both Tenoch and Julio seems to be hiding an attraction they can’t speak about.
Cuarón’s 2006 dystopian film Children of Men, starring Clive Owen, finds a world where humans have been infertile for two decades and have brought society to the brink of collapse. Owen’s Theo, a former activist turned cynical government worker, is tasked to help stowaway the first pregnant woman in the world Kee (Clare-Hope Ashitey) via a money offer from his ex-wife Julian (Julianne Moore). Theo taps into his caretaking of Kee, and what he could contribute to a new society, in the wake of the loss of his son with Julian.
And 2018’s Roma, which won Cuarón his second Best Director Oscar (he first won for the space thriller Gravity), is a semi-autobiographical film that follows a Mixteco housekeeper, Cleo (Yalitza Aparicio) for an upper middle class Mexican family in the early ’70s. Cleo bonds with Sofia (Marina de Tavira) the mother of the family, about the indiscretions the men in their lives have caused them. Both of the men in question refuse to take responsibility for their actions that have irrevocably damaged the women’s lives.
Cuarón takes another look into the ways toxic masculinity can harm both men and the women around them in Disclaimer—a topic he was more than ready to discuss with Men’s Health over Zoom. The 62-year-old director got into it, bespectacled, talking passionately with his hands, about exploring masculinity in his previous work, the men of Disclaimer, and the harm of toxic masculinity.
“It’s a story where the main character is a woman, and at the end, the audience is confronted not only with a big reveal, but their own judgment. All the other characters around Catherine are silencing her; she’s constantly trying to speak and explain herself. Now, the truth she’s sitting on is difficult to articulate, so she needed time. She needed help; the help of an affectionate relationship that would be supportive. The audience is in a way silencing Catherine with their own judgment [about her secret].”
Novelist Renee Knight
Renee Knight worked for the BBC directing arts documentaries before turning to writing. She has had television and film scripts commissioned by the BBC, Channel Four, and Capital Films In April 2013, she graduated from Faber Academy, a school sponsored by the eponymous British publisher, and known for nurturing breakthrough talent. Its alumni include S.J. Watson. Disclaimer is Renee’s first novel.
Disclaimer has a unique premise. Catherine, a successful documentary film-maker, receives a book entitled The Perfect Stranger. Turning the pages, she’s horrified to read about a day in her own life that occurred 20 years earlier, one she’s tried to forget. Intertwined with Catherine’s narrative is that of Stephen Brigstocke, an older, grieving widower who discovered among his late wife’s possessions, a manuscript that horrifies him. He has it bound into a book, and sends it to Catherine. The book contains details of her most closely guarded, terrible secret, one she’s kept hidden from her husband and son all these years. The only other person who knows what really happened, is dead; but The Perfect Stranger suggests Catherine’s secret is not buried with him.
Disclaimer has a unique concept. Can you articulate how it came to you?
I’d written an unpublished novel before this one. There was an event in my adolescence involving an old friend with whom I’ve maintained a friendship over the years. In that first book, I touched on that event, and when the manuscript was completed, it struck me my friend would recognize herself. So, I sent it to her before sending it off to my agent. While waiting to hear back from my friend, I was anxious about it, not wanting to hurt her. I kept thinking about it and the premise stayed with me: Wouldn’t it be shocking if you came across yourself in a book without any warning? One of my favorite things is going to bed at night with a good book–a time when you feel secure yet are at your most vulnerable. When I was waiting to hear back from my friend, the idea for this novel became embedded in my mind. My friend felt fine about my writing of her minor incident. As it turned out, the book wasn’t published, but the situation gave me the idea for this one.
What made you decide to use the present tense throughout major portions of the novel?
One character’s story takes place two years before the present time and I thought the present tense would provide immediacy for the reader. I kept thinking how I would feel if I were sitting in bed and came across a book about me. I tried writing in the past tense, but using the present tense seemed to fit better.
Disclaimer contains portions of The Perfect Stranger within it. In a sense, the novel-within-the novel becomes a character as well. Was that your intention?
Yes, in a way, it was. The book-within-a-book was the “missing” character. It’s the witness to an event. I found that element–the prose of The Perfect Stranger–the most straightforward to write.
In Disclaimer, you capture so very well the day-to-day life and feelings of people, both in the past and present times. Are there any novelists who’ve influenced you?
I think every book I’ve read has left its mark in some way. You can’t help but be influenced by what you read. There are writers who’ve had a direct impact on me. I particularly love the work of Lionel Shriver. I love reading Philip Roth, but I wouldn’t say he influenced my writing. I appreciate the honesty in other writers; actually, a fearlessness that’s apparent when people write.
What was the transition like going from documentary film-making to penning a novel?
The film-making was some time ago. My children are teenagers and I stopped working in television when they were quite young. When they were older, I didn’t think I could go back to television. I’d been away from it for a long time and lost the appetite for it. That’s when I started writing. So there was a bridge between the television and novel writing. In between, I tried script writing. It felt closer to what I’d been doing, namely documentaries. I then wrote some short stories, and eventually got into that first novel. The novelistic form seems to come more naturally for me than screenwriting.
What are the differences for you between script-writing and novels?
What I love about novel-writing is the interiority of it. I love really being able to get into a character’s head. I think skilled directors can do that in film, but I have much more freedom saying what I want to in prose than I would in film.
