The first four episodes of Alfonso Cuarón’s limited series, Disclaimer, are world premiering today at the Venice Film Festival. Oscar winners Cuarón, Cate Blanchett and Kevin Kline convened with the press ahead of the screening.
The show marks Cuarón’s first directorial credit since his 2019 Best Picture Oscar winner Roma and a rare foray into TV.
He wrote and directed the seven-part show from the best-selling novel of the same name by Renée Knight. The final three episodes screen in Venice tomorrow.
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The Oscar-winner said he had approached the production as if he were making a film: “I don’t know how to direct TV. Probably at this stage of my life, it’s too late to learn how to do TV… we approached this whole thing as a film.”
That had its downside in that it made for a lengthy shoot, he added.
“To shoot a film takes longer, and these were like seven films, so it was a very long process… I really felt for the actors… they were stuck with those characters for way too long.”
Blanchett stars as journalist Catherine Ravenscroft, who 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.
Kline plays Stephen Brigstocke, a retired professor who harbors a grudge against Catherine.
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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 (Cohen) and their son Nicholas (Smit-McPhee).
Cuarón said he had Blanchett in mind for the role of Catherine Ravenscroft from early on in his writing process.
“I was terrified that she would say no,” he said.
He revealed it was Blanchett who had suggested Kline for the professor role after a conservation about A Fish Called Wanda (starring the actor in one of his best known roles) at a dinner party in New York.
“It was in a very early conversation with Kate. We were talking how extraordinary this character, Stephen, was, and how we needed to be so specific and not necessarily venture into known territories… for some reason you were talking about, probably Fish Called Wanda, and you called me and said, ‘Kevin’. And it was immediately, ‘yeah’.”
The ensemble cast also includes Lesley Manville, Louis Partridge, Leila George and Hoyeon. Indira Varma is narrator.
Blanchett said it had been an interesting process playing a character whose initial onscreen persona, is based on the viewpoints of others.
“She’s a documentarian who has steeped her life in dealing with traumas and exposing injustices in other people’s lives. The challenge and the agony of playing a character like this is that the crisis happens almost as soon as we meet her, so we know nothing about her, only what other people say about her,” she explained.
Blanchett said she had dealt with this aspect by playing Catherine Ravenscroft like “a glass of water” on which other characters and the audience transposed their viewpoints
“From the very first read of the script, I was shocked at the layers of judgment – thinking I was a fairly non-judgmental person – that I transposed onto the character really knowing nothing about her at all. It’s that’s power of judgment that Alfonso as a director was able to harness.”
Kline described Cuarón as the ‘”most exacting director” he had ever worked with.
“Other directors, you’re feeling like, ‘I think we got it’, and you think that they’re thinking, ‘Yeah, I think we sort of have it’. Alfonso doesn’t want to sort of have it. He wants to be the best it can be, and so there’s much more precision to it. And that was inspiring,” he said.
Disclaimer debuts October 11 on Apple TV+ with the first two episodes, followed by new episodes every Friday through November 15.
The ensemble cast also includes Lesley Manville, Louis Partridge, Leila George and Hoyeon. Indira Varma is narrator.
From Apple Studios, Disclaimer is co-produced by Esperanto Filmoj and Anonymous Content. Cuarón executive produces for Esperanto Filmoj alongside Gabriela Rodriguez. In addition to starring, Blanchett serves as executive producer. David Levine and the late Steve Golin executive produce for Anonymous Content.
Emmanuel Lubezki, Donald Sabourin and Carlos Morales also executive produce. Renée Knight serves as co-executive producer. Lubezki and Academy Award nominee Bruno Delbonnel serve as directors of photography. The score is composed by Finneas O’Connell.