Let me make this perfectly clear. I loved Children of Men. Loved. While I haven’t seen all the films of 2006, Children of Men is so far in my top five.

I walked into the screening not knowing much about the story, and I hadn’t seen a trailer. I knew something about it taking place in the future, and people could no longer have children.

So due to my ignorance, the movie hit me like a ton of bricks. Unlike a lot of films that you can predict points a, b and c while you are watching, Children of Men moves around in its own way, and all the credit needs to be give to Alfonso Cuaron, the director.

Most of you will have probably seen Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, which was the third chapter in the series and easily the best one. Alfonso directed it. Some of you may know Y tu mama tambien, that was the Mexican road trip film that came out in 2001. Again, Alfonso directed it.

Over the last few years Alfonso has jumped from genre to genre and each time raising his game to a new level. With Children of Men, I think he has made his best film yet.

Now here is an unusual opening to an interview that I want you all to read.

Don’t.

At least not yet.

I’m telling you to not read this until you’ve seen the film. Not only due to the spoilers, but due to the respect the film deserves. I think Children of Men will be infinitely more powerful if you don’t know what to expect and if you read this, there is no way to avoid knowing too much. Imagine if you read a pretty big interview with Ridley Scott and then saw Blade Runner, wouldn’t it take away some of the enjoyment?

When you decide to read the interview you can do it two ways. First is to just read it. The second way is to listen, which you can do by clicking here.

The junket was held in the middle of November and just like most Universal press events, it was a press conference. But unlike most, all the questions were good and Alfonso gave a lot of great answers.

Children of Men has just opened in select cities and it will be expanding in the coming weeks. I cannot say enough how good this movie is. See it, you won’t regret it.

And if you want to read Brian’s review of the film you can do it here.

Question - Hi Alfonso. Can you talk a little bit about how this movie is not a futuristic movie but how you see the parallels to things that are going on today such as the whole immigration thing and Homeland Security and that kind of stuff?

Alfonso Cuaron: It’s obviously a futuristic movie because it takes place in the near future but the reason it takes place in the near future is only because of a convention of story in which we’re talking about infertility and 18 years of infertility. That infertility we use just as a metaphor. We didn’t want to go…in a science fiction movie you would have gone into the whys and the mystery of infertility. We decided to not even care about it and just take it as a point of departure. So based upon that, taking that as a point of departure, to try to make an observation about the state of things. You mentioned Homeland Security and stuff but the movie is not about that. That is part of the observation of the reality that we are living. The whole idea with that is to try to bring the state of things, what is happening outside the green zones that we happily live in and what happens if we bring the world into the green zones. We experience for an hour and a half the state of things and then try to make our own conclusions about the possibility of hope.

I have two questions for you. One is which scene was harder to pull off: the car attack or the birth, and do you have an extended version with even longer takes for the DVD?

You’re talking about…there was another scene that is the battle at the end that comes together with the birth and the car attack. The complication of the car attack, even if the production value is not as bombastic as the battle scene, the problem with the car attack is that you’re in a vehicle in motion. So that becomes a real nightmare in terms of timings, and cues and stuff. More difficult than the timing of the birth scene because in one shot you see how this girl enters the room and delivers the baby. And so we have to plan that like 10 months beforehand, you know, for the girl to get pregnant, to follow her through the whole thing, for Clive Owen to learn how to deliver a baby, and for the baby to come right at the perfect moment in which the camera comes around the legs. So that was the toughest one. We never knew who the father was. We heard that he was yesterday at the premiere. The only thing we asked Clare is to try to make it like a mixed race kind of thing so that’s the only clue that we have. (Lots of laughter)

Alfonso, do you have an extended version?

Oh yeah, about the DVD? We have… The thing is that the movie… When you do films with this approach, in a way there’s a certain amount of precision that is required. It’s not that you do coverage and you have a lot of other material that you might or might not use. You know, it’s just a very precise choreography. The exciting part of it is that as a director I try to create the perfect choreography but then it’s about the accidents that make the scene happen. You know, whatever you choreographed but didn’t happen or there was an accident. You rely on people like Clive Owen who would take the accidents and elevate the accidents into something better. So we have some in the DVD, definitely we have. The DVD is very interesting because we have a couple of scenes that didn’t make it into the film. Not longer versions of the scenes that you saw because that was the length of those scenes. But the most interesting thing is that we are doing in the DVD a documentary about the things that put together the film. We’re doing interviews with people like Seasick Todoroff and Naomi Klein, and pretty much they’re not talking to us about the film but they are commenting about the state of things. In other words, it’s like a documentary approach to what the film is about.

Alfonso, how involved were you in the design of the future and were there some things that you decided on in the future that were going to be or not be like, for example, that you have cars in the future but you don’t have the traffic in London that you see today?

Well, the balance here was and that was the most difficult thing in terms of the design. On the one hand, how to create a reality that if you are watching and you know that the convention is that the film takes place in the future, how you accept that that is the future without alienating the sense of today. And that was the biggest challenge. How not to create supersonic cars that will transport you emotionally and in terms of your imagination, but to make cars that if you look closely that they feel like today. But if you look closely, you say, ‘Oh, I’ve never seen that car.’ And that was the toughest balance, but it’s not only about the cars, it’s about how far you push the billboards. You know, I wanted the billboards to look like today but at the same time they have to honor the fact that the story is taking place 20 years from now. So that was the toughest balance to deal with and because … and the other thing was the constant referential thing. When I started working on the film, the first meeting with the art department, they came up with the most amazing… I think that they heard that it was a movie of the future and they undusted all these concept designs – beautiful supersonic cars, buildings, the whole thing. And they were really beautiful but I said, ‘This is not the movie we’re doing. The movie we’re doing is this.’ And inside I had my own file of photographs from Iraq, from Sri Lanka, Northern Ireland, the Balkans, Somalia, Chernobyl, and I mean this is the movie we’re doing. And the rule #1 in this film is that whatever we see has to have a visual reference of stuff that now has become part of human consciousness and it’s an iconography that mostly came out of the media. So that was the balance, how to make it the future but feel today and that every single thing as Emmanuel Lubezki, my cinematographer, kept saying we cannot afford to have one single film frame -- meaning 24 frames per second -- so one single photogram that is not commenting about the state of things. So that was the big challenge.

When you were writing, did you have any one cast member in mind? And then after you finished, how did you find the cast that you were looking for?

There were people that Tim Sexton and I used to mention. We used to refer to Jasper as the Michael Caine character. And Clive from the beginning, when we were writing, I remember that we had just seen Croupier. Because I wrote this script with Tim right after Y Tu Mama Tambien. And we kept on saying, ‘Yeah, it’s like the guy in Croupier’ knowing that at that point maybe that wouldn’t have been like the biggest choice for the studio. What is so great is that I didn’t do the film right away. I did Harry Potter. When I finished Harry Potter, suddenly the studio wanted Clive and that was such a fantastic coincidence in the whole thing. Suddenly it was like I had the dream cast and I had a cast that protected me. I consider my cast as other co-writers. They really took care of their characters but they took care of the truthfulness of what their characters were going to do in the context of the story. I have nothing but thankfulness for these guys. They were absolutely amazing. And actually like Michael Caine, you’ve never seen Michael Caine farting before, and he is still Michael Caine but only he is farting and smoking joints and stuff. That is so alien to what he is. It’s just that he is such an amazing actor. We did make-up tests and costume tests. We were in his place and he mentioned from the get go, he says ‘I want to play this like John Lennon’ because he was friends with Lennon. And then he started to tell me how Lennon used to talk like very nasal. And if you see the way he performed the whole thing, he speaks in a very nasal kind of way. And so we’re doing all these make-up and fittings and he looks at himself and that’s the beauty of witnessing the process of actors. You have Sir Michael Caine who is doing his fittings, he goes and looks at himself in the mirror, and his whole body language changed. He stopped being Michael Caine. He was this other character. In that moment, his wife walks into the room and goes next to him and says, ‘Have you seen my husband.’ The wife didn’t recognize Michael so there was a sweet story with Michael. But I think the reason this film works is because of Clive Owen because Clive is the vessel for our emotional journey in this film, otherwise it would almost be like a documentary.

What about Clare?

We looked for… To get to who was going to play Kee, the thing is the options were so open in the sense that we knew that she needs to speak enough English so we can go any nationality. So we did casting in, I don’t know, like 20 different countries. Clare was…and actually because I wanted to, even though in the script she was described as an African girl, we said we don’t want just because of some conceptual thing to maybe miss the great actress who could be playing this role, so we opened up our scope and (claps hands) we end up with Clare. I think that she represented the vulnerability and something that I admire about Clare, she stripped the whole thing of sentimentality. You know, she made it a very rough character. She didn’t do the precious… It was… There was always the temptation to do the cute relationship between Theo and Kee, you know, almost like the central father-daughter relationship. Part of our premise is they cannot have that amazing chemistry because you don’t choose who you survive with. You know, we need to keep a certain tension there, not a comfortable thing of, you know, the father-daughter relationship or even the suggestion of maybe a sensual relationship between the two of them. We wanted to keep it dry, very dry. And that’s another thing of Clare and with Clive is that they keep that dryness but they play those things with a lot of compassion so more than chemistry they had empathy. That is different.

Alfonso, what was your reaction when you first read the book and how did that affect you emotionally. Did you have the same experience with another book?

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