Alfonso Cuarón: Observe the Moments | Little White Lies

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Alfon­so Cuarón: Observe the Moments

02 Dec 2018

Words by Adam Woodward

Cubist portrait of a man with a beard, featuring geometric shapes and patterns in black, white, and grey.
Cubist portrait of a man with a beard, featuring geometric shapes and patterns in black, white, and grey.
The Mex­i­can writer/​director describes com­ing home to make Roma, his most pro­found­ly per­son­al film to date.

Pic­ture your child­hood home. How well do you remem­ber it? The colour of the front door. The pic­tures on the walls. The shape of the kitchen; the way it used to smell in the morn­ing. The view from your bed­room win­dow. The peo­ple inside. From an ear­ly age, we instinc­tive­ly take men­tal snap­shots of our sur­round­ings, yet it is a sim­ple fact of life that even the most famil­iar and seem­ing­ly indeli­ble mem­o­ries fade. How­ev­er hard we may try and fight it, the mind’s eye los­es focus over time.

Roma, the eighth fea­ture from Alfon­so Cuarón, is an attempt to recall the past with per­fect fideli­ty. Set in Mex­i­co City in the ear­ly 1970s, it is a liv­ing scrap­book of the writer/director’s own youth – a metic­u­lous recre­ation of the epony­mous neigh­bour­hood as it once looked. Asked whether he regards the film as his most per­son­al, Cuarón paus­es before break­ing into a broad smile. This is as per­son­al as I can go, in the sense that 90 per cent of the scenes came from my mem­o­ry. The idea of cap­tur­ing mem­o­ry is what dic­tat­ed the whole process.”

Act­ing as his own cin­e­matog­ra­ph­er for the first time in near­ly 20 years (Cuarón’s go-to DoP Emmanuel Lubez­ki was com­mit­ted to anoth­er project when pro­duc­tion began in late 2016), Cuarón chose to shoot Roma in black-and-white on crisp dig­i­tal 65mm for­mat, giv­ing the film a peri­od-spe­cif­ic yet time­less qual­i­ty. Fur­ther to this, Cuarón opt­ed for a more pure, stripped-back aes­thet­ic. I didn’t want to inter­fere too much,” he explains. When you are try­ing to cap­ture mem­o­ry, your own sense of style has to be hid­den. It has to be almost absent. I realised that [the film] could not be sub­jec­tive in the sense of it being told from someone’s indi­vid­ual point of view.”

So, no sig­na­ture dol­ly shots mov­ing in and out of the frame (“I love them, but they are very sub­jec­tive cam­era moves”), but lots of flu­id long takes and slow, incon­spic­u­ous pans to enhance the nat­u­ral­is­tic tone. The over­all effect is a sin­gu­lar­ly immer­sive view­ing expe­ri­ence, some­thing akin to step­ping into an old pho­to­graph of some­one you nev­er knew but some­how feel a deep con­nec­tion to. As Cuarón describes it, it’s as if you’re trans­port­ed in time into that moment of your mem­o­ry. In order to achieve that, I had to keep every­thing dis­tant, to sim­ply observe the moments.”

The idea for Roma first came to Cuarón in 2006 – read inter­views with him from around that time and you’ll find him open­ly dis­cussing it as his next film – yet he believes he could not have made it back then, even if he had had the means to do so. Although the atmos­phere-shat­ter­ing suc­cess of Grav­i­ty meant that Cuarón could secure the resources to make Roma exact­ly how he want­ed, he says this extend­ed ges­ta­tion peri­od was the most impor­tant fac­tor in help­ing him to realise his vision because it allowed him to devel­op the emo­tion­al tools” he lacked previously.

Cuarón is 56 at the time of writ­ing, and you sense he need­ed to give him­self that bit longer to process every­thing he want­ed to say with Roma, to map out all of his the­mat­ic con­cerns in more pre­cise detail. Yes, mem­o­ries fade, but with age comes per­spec­tive, a greater appre­ci­a­tion for and under­stand­ing of life in all its strange beau­ty and com­plex­i­ty. The tru­ly aston­ish­ing thing about this film is not the sheer amount of auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal infor­ma­tion it con­tains, but how Cuarón makes it seem as though we are watch­ing mem­o­ries being formed spon­ta­neous­ly in real-time.

This is no hap­py acci­dent, of course, but the result of a rig­or­ous, method­i­cal approach. Cuarón exert­ed com­plete con­trol over every stage of the pro­duc­tion, even going so far as to keep the cast and crew in the dark over the script. Nobody had it,” he reveals. I would stage the scene, but I wouldn’t say much more to the actors. Some would use the lines they were giv­en, oth­ers would just impro­vise around the lines that I would deliv­er. It was about giv­ing them spoon­fuls of infor­ma­tion and let­ting the whole scene unfold, but then intro­duc­ing new ele­ments that would catch some of them off guard and see­ing how they would react to the uncer­tain­ty of each moment. It was about try­ing to be as ran­dom as pos­si­ble. The way that life is, you know?”

Cuarón embellishes each scene with incidental background sounds and images; everyday reminders of another reality that existed outside of my own.

On a prac­ti­cal lev­el, Roma rep­re­sents the most ambi­tious under­tak­ing of Cuarón’s career. The main inte­ri­or set­ting, for exam­ple, is an exact repli­ca of his child­hood home, painstak­ing­ly decked out by pro­duc­tion design­er Euge­nio Caballero. I want­ed to shoot in the real house,” says Cuarón, but it’s now so sub­di­vid­ed and trans­formed that it would have been impos­si­ble. It didn’t make any sense. So we took mea­sure­ments from the orig­i­nal house, and pho­to­graph­ic ref­er­ences, then looked for a house that had exact­ly the same mea­sure­ments and trans­formed it to match the archi­tec­ture and the aes­thet­ic. It was a house that was going to be demol­ished, so we had free reign to do what­ev­er we wanted.”

When it came to the exte­ri­ors, Caballero and his team went one fur­ther, build­ing an entire shop­ping precinct from mem­o­ry and a few dozen ref­er­ence images. It is the largest set ever con­struct­ed for a Cuarón film. We repro­duced every sin­gle detail as accu­rate­ly as we could,” the direc­tor recalls, like the wed­ding dress shop and the pho­tog­ra­phy shop and the vet­eri­nar­i­an, all with the orig­i­nal names. It was some­thing we had to do because that street today is so trans­formed you would nev­er recog­nise it.” The street Cuarón grew up on has changed a lot over the years too, so to bring it back to the way it was a num­ber of the build­ings had to re-clad.

To add yet anoth­er lay­er of real­ism, Cuarón sub­tly embell­ish­es each scene with inci­den­tal back­ground sounds and images: music pours from record play­ers and radio sets; light dances off of reflec­tive sur­faces (store win­dows, pools of water, row upon row of immac­u­late­ly pol­ished Amer­i­can cars); a march­ing band shuf­fles down an oth­er­wise qui­et res­i­den­tial road, play­ing a slight­ly off- key tune; planes drift over­head. Every­day reminders, Cuarón says, of anoth­er real­i­ty that exist­ed out­side of my own.”

Men in a confrontation on a street, one man in a plaid shirt speaking to a man in a dark uniform.

Cru­cial­ly, Roma is based not only on Cuarón’s rem­i­nis­cences. If it is his most per­son­al film to date, this is part­ly because it cen­tres around one of the peo­ple I love most in my life”. That per­son is Libo, the house­maid who helped to raise Cuarón along with his sis­ter and two broth­ers. Roma is ded­i­cat­ed to her. Renamed Cleo in the film, and won­der­ful­ly brought to life by first-time actor Yal­itza Apari­cio, she is the heart and soul of this inti­mate, humane por­trait of a mid­dle-class fam­i­ly under­go­ing a mini domes­tic cri­sis amid wider social turmoil.

This is Cleo’s sto­ry as much as it is Cuarón’s, and as such he spent a lot of time dig­ging into her mem­o­ries to the point of being very foren­sic about her rou­tine.” He want­ed to know every­thing there was to know: How she would sit on the bed when she woke up; how she washed the clothes; whether she wore an apron or not; what music she lis­tened to; how she dressed; if she wore her hair up or down. It was like try­ing to hon­our a sense of real­i­ty based upon our memories.”

Did Cuarón’s sib­lings have any input? That was an inter­est­ing one because I would do all this research with the real-life Cleo and then I would speak with my sib­lings, and what hap­pened some­times was a con­tra­dic­tion of mem­o­ries. But it was clear that my younger broth­er was a bit too young at that time to have clear mem­o­ries. My old­er broth­er had already blocked out a lot of the mem­o­ries. The most amaz­ing per­son was my sis­ter. She was the one that I would dou­ble check things with, or ask her, Do you remem­ber when this happened?’”

By virtue of the fact that the real-life Cleo was an employ­ee and not a rel­a­tive, Cuarón con­fess­es that he still feels con­flict­ed about the nature of their rela­tion­ship. It’s very, very nasty, actu­al­ly, because on one hand you want to be nur­tured by this woman – in many ways she assumes the role that a moth­er would take, only more present – but by the same token you ask things of her in the same way that you would ask a ser­vant. As a kid you don’t divorce one thing from the oth­er.” Mak­ing this film was a cathar­tic expe­ri­ence, Cuarón says, because it enabled him to see Cleo, in a way I prob­a­bly nev­er con­sid­ered grow­ing up: that this per­son is a woman, and not only a woman but an indige­nous woman from a dif­fer­ent social class.”

I think of Y Tu Mamá También, Children of Men and Roma as being very closely related. We are talking about, ultimately, three road movies.

For Cuarón, then, Roma is not only a self-reflex­ive cri­tique but an inter­ro­ga­tion of his country’s che­quered past. It forced him to rec­on­cile his rel­a­tive­ly priv­i­leged and shel­tered exis­tence with that of peo­ple like Cleo. He recalls, for instance, how a pub­lic mas­sacre – one of the most infa­mous in Mexico’s his­to­ry, in which scores of stu­dent demon­stra­tors were slaugh­tered by the para­mil­i­tary group known as Los Hal­cones (The Hawks) – had a pro­found impact on him. It was the first time I saw the world out­side of the com­fort­able mid­dle-class bub­ble I was liv­ing in. I sud­den­ly became aware of the com­plex­i­ties in my country.”

Cuarón con­tin­ues, I had an uncle who was a crim­i­nol­o­gist and a com­mu­nist, and I remem­ber talk­ing with him about stu­dents, because they had a very bad rep in the main­stream media; they were always demon­is­ing them and talk­ing bad about them. At some point I repeat­ed some­thing I had heard and my uncle said, Why are you say­ing that of stu­dents when you are a stu­dent?’ I said, I’m not stu­dent…’ and he said, Yes you are, you go to school.’ For some rea­son for me a stu­dent’ was this oth­er thing. I became more aware in that moment and then when the mas­sacre hap­pened I thought, Wow, that could have hap­pened to me if I was old­er’. That mas­sacre left a big scar on the col­lec­tive con­scious­ness of the Mex­i­can people.”

Cuarón cur­rent­ly lives in Lon­don, but returns to Mex­i­co at least twice a year with his kids so that they can form their own mem­o­ries of their ances­tral home. They love it. They have a strong Mex­i­can iden­ti­ty, which I think is very impor­tant. This thing of aware­ness of mem­o­ry only comes when we start los­ing it lat­er on, when we get busy with our lives. But kids love to ref­er­ence things that hap­pened in the past. My kids, who are now 13 and 15, will say to me, Do you remem­ber when I was sev­en and this hap­pened?’ I love that, I love the con­ver­sa­tion. There is a cer­tain plea­sure and a cer­tain learn­ing process that comes out of that.”

Fam­i­ly mat­ters in Roma. In one scene, Cleo takes the kids to a local cin­e­ma to see Marooned, the 1969 Gre­go­ry Peck space adven­ture which pro­vid­ed the inspi­ra­tion for Grav­i­ty. At first glance it appears that Cuarón is mere­ly feed­ing his own sense of nos­tal­gia, but the under­ly­ing mes­sage is that even the most per­son­al mem­o­ries are shaped by social cir­cum­stances and col­lec­tive expe­ri­ences, just as indi­vid­ual nar­ra­tives are always embed­ded in col­lec­tive his­to­ry. Look care­ful­ly and you’ll notice a bread­crumb trail of ref­er­ences and recur­ring motifs link­ing Roma to some of Cuarón’s oth­er films too – the afore­men­tioned mas­sacre calls to mind 2006’s Chil­dren of Men, while a trip to the beach evokes 2001’s Y Tu Mamá También.

I didn’t notice that at the time,” Cuarón admits, but I think those three films are all very sim­i­lar. We are talk­ing about, ulti­mate­ly, three road movies. I think of Y Tu Mamá También, Chil­dren of Men and Roma as being very close­ly relat­ed. I would like to do more per­son­al films like this, but I’m not a very pro­lif­ic film­mak­er. I don’t have a clear idea of what I would like to do now. The byprod­uct of grow­ing up in the 70s and 80s is that I may lose my mem­o­ry soon­er than every­body else. But I don’t know. It was nev­er a case of try­ing to pre­serve my mem­o­ry. It was more like an exis­ten­tial need to bring all of that stuff out. It was like clean­ing up your house.”

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