This thriller, starring Cate Blanchett, is the greatest TV show of the year
It has a climactic twist so powerful, that is such an audacious rug-pull, you’ll need to return to the start and rewatch completely (I did) before fully comprehending the totality of this tale.
Alfonso Cuaron does not do television. The five-time Oscar winner and director of the modern movie masterpieces Gravity and Roma does not even know, by his own admission, “how” to make television. And he says he’s certainly never found himself thinking, “Oh, I really want to do a TV show”.
This is interesting. Because Cuaron has just made the greatest TV show of the year. It’s called Disclaimer, it stars Cate Blanchett, Kevin Kline and Sacha Baron Cohen, and it’s coming this week to Apple TV+ in seven extraordinary episodes of gobsmacking ache and despair. Just don’t call it telly.
“I told Apple from the get-go, I don’t know how to do TV,” the 62-year-old Mexican filmmaker says today, in the west London home where he has lived since 2000. He explains that he read Disclaimer in novel form, prepublication (its author, Renee Knight, sent it to him), and had the idea of doing something epic and intensely cinematic, like Ingmar Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage, David Lynch’s Twin Peaks or Lars Von Trier’s The Kingdom.
“You can call them TV shows if you want,” he says. “But in reality they’re long-length films.”
Disclaimer is even more movie-like than Cuaron’s touchstones. It’s the story of an award-winning documentary filmmaker called Catherine Ravenscroft (Blanchett, sublime) whose affluent London life is thrown into turmoil by the sudden appearance of a tawdry anonymous novel describing a crime of passion from her past.
The narrative runs through seven stages of Catherine’s subsequent marital disintegration (her brittle husband is played by Baron Cohen) while working backwards to her alleged indiscretion (Leila George is the young Catherine). There are complex supporting plots featuring Catherine’s disaffected teenage son, Nicholas (Kodi Smit-McPhee), and her ageing tormentor, impeccably played by Kline.
There’s also a central sex scene round which the entire drama pivots. It is so explicit it needs its own trigger warning and required the services of an intimacy co-ordinator. Cuaron speaks effusively of the practice, and how it removes all ambiguity from the film set. “You now can’t have someone saying, ‘He was staring at me for too long’,” he says, imitating a flustered performer pointing at a male crew member. “‘Well, maybe that’s because he’s the focus puller, and he has to look.’ Everything becomes very clear now.”
And then, of course, there’s the twist. Disclaimer has a climactic twist so powerful, that is such an audacious rug-pull, you’ll need to return to the start and rewatch completely (I did) before fully comprehending the totality of this tale.
“Cate and I keep saying that this should be seen twice,” Cuaron agrees. “Once from the standpoint of your judgment, and the second time from a clearer standpoint where you know the ending, and you can really start to go a little deeper and understand the emotional and narrative mirrors inside.”
He immediately delves into those narrative mirrors in a very spoiler-ish way, but it’s enough to know that this “definitely not a TV show” is initially “about the stories we tell to ourselves, and what happens emotionally inside each one of us when we do”. After repeat viewings, it moves outwards and becomes about the stories that governments, corporations and nations tell us, until it collapses back inward and is about the emptiness of the self.
The project began in February 2022, with filming in London, Italy and South Africa, and principal photography was completed in March 2023. Cuaron has claimed that his cast could have made at least three “regular” movies during his schedule, and still cringes about how long he kept Blanchett and co trapped on the Disclaimer set. “They were like poor survivors in a shipwreck,” he says. “Just drifting around in the Pacific with no wind, waiting to be rescued. It was a long process and I felt for them.”
Cuaron studied philosophy in the early 1980s at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, and drops the theories of Michel Foucault and Slavoj Zizek into the chat and the work alike. It’s why his projects always feel huge, yearning and impossibly ambitious.
They share a quiet grandeur and integrity with the work of other great philosophy graduates turned filmmakers — Bergman, Ethan Coen, Michael Haneke and Greta Gerwig. When I mention this he says that no, actually, he never graduated. He was a young father then, bringing up the first of his three children, and couldn’t find time for essays, so dropped out.
“But even in those few years what I learnt became my way of thinking,” he says. “All my theoretical forms have come from those years.”
His father was a doctor and his mother a biochemist, and he studied philosophy as a “fallback” profession, on his mother’s advice, in the event that his true passion, filmmaking, didn’t work out. “My mother didn’t realise that the odds of me becoming poor as a philosopher were far greater than as a filmmaker,” he says.
He struggled in the early days, working his way slowly through local television, before making a splash with a successful Mexican rom-com called Love in the Time of Hysteria. That film caught the eye of Sydney Pollack, who invited the wildly untested Cuaron to Hollywood in 1993 to direct a single episode of Pollack’s anthology crime series Fallen Angels.
It was, at first, “an absolute disaster”. The cast included Alan Rickman and Laura Dern, and Cuaron was so terrified that he fell to pieces on the first day, mostly unable to direct and frequently making “crappy” decisions.
“I wanted to cry at the end of that day,” he says. “The second day came and the assistant director told me, ‘Alan and Laura want to speak with you.’ And I thought, ‘OK, this is where they fire you. This is how it happens.’ So I walk into this room and there’s Laura and Alan, both intimidating, especially Alan with his deep voice. And they said, ‘Alfonso, we’re here for you, we believe in you. Please don’t be afraid to talk to us, give us instructions or orders’.”
He says that the meeting was career-changing, if not life-changing, and gave him the confidence to become the feted filmmaker who, aside from Gravity and Roma, would eventually make Y tu mama tambien, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban and Children of Men. “It’s about contact with amazing people who cross your life, and how they embrace you,” he says. “I became very good friends with both Alan and Laura. And I miss Alan a lot.” There’s a pause. “And I tell you that story because it speaks more than anything else about Alan.”
Back to Disclaimer and what it means for Cuaron to know that this project, for which he created spectacular images, will inevitably be consumed by someone on the tube, on their phone.
“It’s not that my soul just shrinks when I think about that,” he says, groaning, “it completely dissipates. And yes, I hope audiences can watch it on a decent-sized display. But the sad truth is that even the movies, like Gravity and Roma, that enjoy three months of a beautiful theatrical life, in the years to come 98 per cent of the people that revisit or discover them are going to watch them on some digital display at home. And some of them are going to watch them on their phones.”
For now, though, there’s rest ahead for Cuaron, who divorced his second wife, the Italian actor and artist Annalisa Bugliani, in 2008 and shares his London home with his two younger children, Tess, 21, and Olmo, 19. He says that, after the exhausting experience of making Disclaimer, “I’ve learnt my lesson, and I suspect the next thing I do is going to be a more conventional light film’’.
And for the immediate future? He chuckles. “I’m hoping that it will involve something like a hammock, on some beach somewhere. For now, that’s all I can dream of.”
Disclaimer is streaming on AppleTV+
