Alfonso Cuaron

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The mexican film director Alfonso Cuaron is first on our tour. Get to know him!

Life and movies

Alfonso Cuarón (November 28, 1961), is a Mexican film director, screenwriter, producer and editor.

In his teen years, films were his hobby. He used to tell his mother he was going to a friend's home, when in fact he was heading to the cinema theater. His family didn't didn't like his cinema related activites, so he studied Philosophy at the (UNAM) and in the afternoon he studied filmmaking at a Faculty of Cinema, within the same University. During that time he met many people who would later become collaborators and friends, one of them was Emmanuel Lubezki.

Cuarón has been nominated in several Awards, including six Academy Awards;  Best Original Screenplay for ‘Y Tu Mamá También’, Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Film Editing for ‘Children of Men’, and Best Picture for ‘Gravity’, winning Best Director and Best Film Editing for Gravity. For the same film, he also won the Golden Globe Award for Best Director and the BAFTA Awards for best British Film and Best Direction. 

Alfonso Cuarón’s Style

Alfonso mentioned several times, that he loved making movies as if he was telling a story; in a way he aims to show the movie as a documentary, with a roller coaster of emotions. In order to do that, he shoots long cuts without any interruption.

Producers as David Heyman (Harry Potter, Gravity) have mentioned that these techniques were very difficult to make, because a lot of technical work was required to make this long scenes look natural.

Alfonso Cuarón has made a perfect partnership with Emmanuel Lubezki, a Photography Director who has been his friend and collaborator for years. Both enjoy this style. When Alfonso is working on the script of a movie, he always consults Lubezki, to know about his opinions and the possibilities of making the movie look as real as possible.

Relationship with coworkers

Alfonso is more concerned about his cinematographic crew, rather than the cast of his movies. Cuarón likes to work with people he knows; one of his closest collaborators is Emmanuel Lubezki, they were already friends before film school and have worked together on almost every of his films.

He is also concerned in choosing wisely the people acting in his movies, but is not limited to a restricted number of actors. He is open to receive recommendations from his collaborators and film directors’ friends.

Cuarón is also friend with his fellow Mexican directors Guillermo del Toro and Alejandro González Iñárritu. He mentioned that he consulted them a lot to know their opinions, and that he accepted any harsh criticism from them because he knows that they’re not trying to hurt him, they’re trying to actually help him.

Alfonso Cuarón as a leader

Alfonso’s great work is helping him to work with different people, even if they don’t agree with him in every decision, he has a great influence power over others, David Heyman, a movie producer, has worked with Cuarón in two of his most successful movies, and he describes Cuarón as a pain: "he is impossible, he is rigorous, but everything is not random is for making something great, I want to be around that, Alfonso makes me better."

Cuarón knows how to make effective teams; by choosing his collaborators according to their skills. He communicates the tasks and responsibilities of each member of the team, and also he gives them some freedom in choosing who they want to work with. He often says that he enjoys working with people he knows and understands.