Five-time Oscar-winner Alfonso Cuarón has finally unfurled his big-budget streaming series debut, Disclaimer.
The psychological thriller, starring fellow Oscar-winners Cate Blanchett and Kevin Kline, received its first press screenings Wednesday in Italy at the Venice Film Festival. The director and his acclaimed cast then met the media Thursday on the Lido to discuss the show’s creation and themes.
Told in seven chapters, the Apple Studios series is based on the best-selling novel of the same name by Renée Knight. The ensemble cast is filled out by Sacha Baron Cohen, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Lesley Manville, Louis Partridge, Leila George, Hoyeon and Indira Varma as the narrator.
“I read the book and it immediately triggered a film in my mind, but at that time I didn’t know how to make that film,” said Cuarón, explaining why he chose to adapt Knight’s book as a series. “Because the film I was seeing was way too long. It was years later that I had the idea that maybe this could work in a longer form. It’s a format that I admire because I mean incredible artists, they have played with the form — from [Rainer Werner] Fassbender to David Lynch to Kieślowski. So that was the point of departure.”
Disclaimer‘s official summary reads: “Acclaimed journalist Catherine Ravenscroft (Blanchett) built her reputation revealing the misdeeds and transgressions of others. When she receives a novel from an unknown author, she is horrified to realize she is now the main character in a story that exposes her darkest secrets. As Catherine races to uncover the writer’s true identity, she is forced to confront her past before it destroys both her own life and her relationships with her husband Robert (Baron Cohen) and their son Nicholas (Smit-McPhee).”
Cuarón said he had Blanchett in mind from the start for Disclaimer. “When I was writing the script, Cate was already there. I was terrified that [she] would say no, because she was so much in my mind and the way I was seeing the whole thing,” he said.
“I play a woman who has things that she has buried, traumatic things that she has buried,” said Blanchett, “And so I did think about what happens to repressed memories and things that we have avoided rather than dealt with. And I found it fascinating and quite painful.”
The idea to cast Kevin Kline, who plays a British character in the series, came from Blanchett.
“She was talking about A Fish Called Wanda [the 1988 hit which won Kline the Best Supporting Actor Oscar] and she said, ‘Kevin!’ And it was immediately, yes, why don’t we think about Kevin?” said Cuarón.
Kline said he felt “in incredibly good hands” with Cuarón as a director, noting the Roma helmer “was very generous in explaining how he was looking at each moment” making it easier when you are “performing your heart out.”
Cuarón said he took a cinematic approach to making the series. “I don’t know how to direct TV. Probably at this stage of my life, it’s too late for me to learn how to do TV,” he admitted. “So throughout the whole thing, there was never a conversation that we’re doing something different — with the cinematographer or whatever. We’re doing it all as a film. We made it like a film.”
That didn’t make it easy on the cast and crew, the director admitted, noting his approach made for long, grueling hours and a shoot that lasted almost a full year. Cuarón said it was like making “seven films. [I] really feel for the actors because they were stuck in the characters for way too long.”
The series will get its red carpet premiere in Venice pn Thursday evening — Blanchett joked that she planned to attend the gala screening “naked” — and it releases worldwide on Apple TV+ on Oct. 11 with the first two episodes, followed by new episodes every Friday. Disclaimer marks Cuarón’s first show under his overall deal with Apple Studios.