Alfonso Cuarón hails from Mexico City and is the acclaimed director of many major motion pictures, including A Little Princess, Y tu mamá también, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, and most recently Children of Men. I sat down with Mr. Cuarón as part of a brief round table of interviews earlier today — here are the two measly questions yours truly got to ask. I was going to transcribe the whole round table, but my typing fingers got tired. Note: Children of Men opens Christmas Day, Monday, Dec. 25th.

Supergenius: Thanks for the most depressing film of the year!
Alfonso Cuarón: oh.

SG: But also the most hopeful film of the year!
AC: Ah. Well, that’s better.

SG: One of the themes that came out of the movie, from what I could see, comes though the character of Jasper who says that life is about the conflict between despair and hope, amongst other things. Which one was supposed to win out?

AC. It’s up to you — it’s up to the different members of the audience. The whole purpose of the movie was to go through the state of things, what I consider to be the state of things today — it’s not about the future — and at the end, what you’ve witnessed, can you find that there is room for hope at the end of all of that. That’s my personal view, but my experience is that hope will depend upon the disposition of each member of the audience. If you have a despairing disposition then for you it will be a depressing, bleak film; if you have a hopeful disposition, then the film will leave you with hope. And then if you have hope, my intent is that after you view the film, a day later, a week later, if that member of the audience sees hope, they will ask what to do with their hope.

In other words, I don’t believe in cautionary tales anymore. Those were really cool in the seventies, but there’s no time any more for caution; there is only time now for transformation. And I would try to give the kind of hope that comes from a very realistic position, not of evading stuff. Hope can be a very important springboard for transformation, but it has to come from a very realistic standpoint — in the sense of first accepting the realities of the world we live in, and really accepting it, not being in a constant state of denial.

SG: Can you talk about the filmmaking for a second? I saw some things in Children of Men that I’d never seen before. In particular I’m thinking of a chase sequence that’s done all of one long shot (I think 12 minutes long) that goes 360 degrees and never stops. I haven’t seen technique like that in this action context — where did the thought process begin for this kind of filmmaking?

AC: It was just, even if the canvas is way bigger, with Emmanuel Lubezki (The New World; Ali; Things You Can Tell Just By Looking At Her), the cinematographer who won in Venice this year for the film, he and I decided that the approach in this film would be identical to Y tu mamá también, in the sense that in Y tu mama we were trying not to favor characters vs. their social environment. So that means that there are no close-ups — everything is kind of loose. Your hope is not only that your character will blend with the social environment, but it will have tension with the social environment. In other words, as important as the three characters in Y tu mamá también was the social environment which was the country and the background. In Children of Men, Clive Owen’s character is as important as the social environment that he goes through and that you witness in the background.

Another thing was not to use editing and montage seeking for effect. Rather than that, you try to create the moment of truthfulness, and the camera happens to be there just to register that moment. Now the complication is that in Y tu mamá también, the social environment was the country of Mexico that is right next door; here we have to construct the social environment. And in Y tu mamá también it was pretty much two or three people talking, and the biggest problem was some sex, but here [in Children of Men] there is a bunch of people on battlefields and stuff, which got us into a little trouble in trying to adapt.

But Lubezki is fearless — he was coming from Terence Malick and The New World, where he did one scene with electric lights! And he was fearless to say, “OK, tell me what you want, and we’ll achieve it.” When you do that, the truth of the matter is that you depend on everyone around you. You depend on the cinematographer, the stunts and the special effects to get the timing and all that stuff, but the biggest thing you depend on is your lead — and I’m talking about Clive [Owen]. Take the last battlefield sequence, for example — we choreographed by inch the whole thing, nevertheless, every time that you roll camera, no matter how much you choreograph everything, everything scares.

And then you have to trust in the choices of your lead. With Clive, he was very aware that we were doing everything in long shots — very long shots — and that he did not have the safety net of editing to create rhythm. One of our biggest concerns was rhythm — where are these scenes fitting in the context of the whole film. And that’s why I believe that Clive was not only the co-writer of our film, but its co-maker. He was engaged in every single bit of the process of how the scenes were constructed. At one point, for example, he has to go and shelter himself behind a wall, and his cue was an explosion and the explosion didn’t happen. And it’s about how he [Clive] then makes his choices to make the moment truthful, in which he has to improvise those moments. So you depend upon your collaborators for this.

But the principle was, as Lubezki would say, “it’s not an olympic games of long shots.” For example, the battle scene used to be even longer, but then what happened was that you would become aware of the shot technique. You’re getting distracted from the moment. He would then say, “Let’s cut here – I know it’s a beautiful shot, but we’re getting showy and it’s starting to take away from the moment.” And that was the principle behind it.

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There you have it, folks! The whole interview lasted for about 40 minutes, but that’s all I have the time to type for now. Suffice it to say that Cuarón is a great guy, an engaging fellow, and Children of Men is one of the best films of 2006.