Alfonso Cuarón

The Expulsion That Saved a Career

Alfonso Cuarón was expelled from the UNAM film school in 1985 for shooting a short film in English without permission. That clash with Mexican academia forced him to make a living in local television as a technician and commissioned director. Yet that supposed stain on his record turned out to be the launching pad for a move into an industry that paid no attention to language barriers.

His first feature film, Sólo con tu pareja, arrived in 1991 and worked as a vibrant calling card. The movie blended farce-style comedy with a subject as raw as AIDS, all wrapped in a colorful aesthetic that caught the attention of Sydney Pollack. So the move to Hollywood wasn't a carefully planned choice but a direct result of his ability to tell stories with agility.

And the gamble paid off.

In 1995, he directed La princesita and showed he could handle mid-sized budgets with an unusually fine visual sensibility. The path was not always upward, however, because in 1998 he shot Great Expectations, and the result was a critical disaster that nearly derailed his career. Cuarón later admitted that he had neglected the story to focus solely on aesthetics.

Back to the Mud and an Obsession with Technique

After the setback in New York, he decided to return to his roots with a tiny budget and complete creative freedom. In 2001, he released Y Tu Mamá También, and its impact was immediate thanks to its raw honesty in portraying adolescence and the social fractures of Mexico. The film took in 2.2 million dollars in its opening weekend in the country and restored the credibility he had lost in the Los Angeles studio offices.

That success put him in charge of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban in 2004. Many doubted he would fit into a commercial franchise, but Cuarón imposed a dark atmosphere and a use of the long take that changed the look of the series. It was the first time the wizards wore street clothes, and the camera began to move with a freedom that had not existed before.

Technique became his absolute obsession.

For the shoot of Children of Men in 2006, he designed a camera system that allowed action scenes lasting several minutes to be filmed without cuts. The choreography required for the attack on the car and the final battle demanded months of technical rehearsals. Rather than relying on fast editing, he wanted viewers to be unable to look away from the horror unfolding within the frame.

The Silence of Space and the Return to Origins

In 2013, the industry witnessed an unprecedented logistical challenge with the release of Gravity. Cuarón and his regular cinematographer spent years developing a light box with 4,096 LED bulbs to realistically simulate the lighting of space. The project came close to being canceled several times due to the complexity of the visual effects, but it ended up winning seven Academy Awards.

But widespread recognition did not pull him away from his personal interests. In 2018, he went back to his childhood with Roma and decided to handle the cinematography himself after his regular collaborator dropped out. The film was shot in black and white with Dolby Atmos sound and was distributed by a streaming platform at a time when the industry still viewed that business model with suspicion.

The production of Roma needed 108 shooting days to capture every detail of the Colonia Roma neighborhood in the 1970s.

In 2024, he made his big-screen television debut with the series Disclaimer for Apple TV+. For this production, he worked with 65mm and 35mm film to distinguish the different timelines of the plot. Filming stretched over nearly a year and involved a crew of more than two hundred people in London locations.

The series premiered at the Venice Film Festival with a total running time of 330 minutes divided into seven episodes.