Alfonso Cuaron: The truth of the matter is I didn’t respond to the material. I was not interested in doing a science fiction film and also the book takes place in a very posh universe. I respect, I love P.D. James. I enjoy the book but I couldn’t see myself making that movie. And nevertheless, the premise of infertility kept on haunting me for weeks and weeks and weeks. Maybe three weeks I was in Santa Barbara, in one beach in Santa Barbara, when I questioned myself, ‘Why this premise haunts me so much?’ And it’s when I realized that the premise could serve as a metaphor for the fading sense of hope that humanity has today. And that’s when I said, ‘Okay, this can be the point of departure for talking about the state of things today.’ So the next stage was to try to explore what the state of things are and you don’t have to go very far to learn that environment and immigration are two of the main factors that are shaping this world and that are actually very connected. If the environment keeps on going the way that we’re going, it’s actually going to make the immigration phenomenally even more acute. So that was the point of departure, that was… I’m very thankful with P.D. James because she inspired me so much with her premise. Now from the moment in which we started exploring this then we have to craft a parallel story, not necessarily the story that was in the book because we need to honor the story that had to do with the immigration phenomena so we created the whole thing of the refugees and we created the whole thing of Kee as a refugee, the whole thing of the refugee camp. And let me put it this way, in the book, Kee doesn’t exist. In the book who’s pregnant is Julianne Moore. So we just took a big departure there.

Question: In the final movie, do you think the fact that the last baby is Latino and the new one is black has a message or is just a coincidence?

Well I don’t know about that. I didn’t want to make a movie about messages per se. The same as it’s not like Homeland Security. It’s not that it is a movie about trying to send messages about those things, [it’s] about trying to make an observation but then people have to come with their own conclusions. For me there were a lot of metaphorical aspects that worked. We were trying to work with archetypes but also with certain metaphors. The fact of having an African child or the son of an African girl -- the child is actually the daughter of an African girl -- has to do with the fact that humanity started in Africa. But also to put the future in the hands of the dispossessed and the lower caste of humanity and to create a new humanity to spring out of that. And baby Diego was an homage to the Argentinians in the room. [laughs]

I wanted to know if you would every return to the Harry Potter franchise and what was your reaction to Guillermo Del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth?

I would love to have the opportunity of revisiting the Harry Potter universe. It’s an amazing experience to do those films because while you’re doing those films, you’re surrounded by this amazing beneficial energy. Everything that surrounds the J.K. Rowling creation – I’m not talking about the film franchise but the creation of J.K. Rowling -- is impregnated with this amazing beneficial energy. So for me it was two amazing years of my life. I wouldn’t mind at all revisiting that. With Pan’s Labyrinth, I find that there are three films that are sister films, that I consider sister films this year. It’s Pan’s Labyrinth, Children of Men, and Babel. And I think that has to do with [the fact] that we collaborate all the time. We love to stick our forks in each other’s salads. I consult Alejandro (Inarritu) and Guillermo (del Toro) all the time. I love Pan’s Labyrinth. Probably one of the most gratifying moments in my life making films is to be in the premiere of Pan’s Labyrinth in Cannes in which they had the longest standing ovation since 1968. And it was so beautiful to see Guillermo during the first two minutes really touched by the applause, by minute 5 he was crying, minute 7 he was dancing, and by minute 12 he was stripping. [laughs] He was taking his clothes off because suddenly he didn’t know what else to do. And it was so beautiful to witness that, but the power of that applause, it was not only about the hypnotic thing of the applause, it was that I find that the ending of Pan’s Labyrinth has an amazing profundity. It is this ending which the liberation by death of one of the characters is the grief of the character that stays behind. I think it’s an amazing…it has a lot of different connotations. I find that it is a very brave and a very beautiful film. I love it. I love it.

In your film, one of the things that struck me was history. If you don’t try to change it, it will repeat itself and I know a lot of people were talking about immigration and so forth but when they were in the city in that prison, I thought of World War II, about the ghetto, about the Jews and what happened to them. I always wondered how that would play out in the future because I don’t think we’ve really learned the lesson and when I saw your film, I thought, ‘That’s it.’

And the amazing thing is that the direct reference… You see those things and the direct reference was Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib. Nevertheless, that is the same reference as concentration camps in the second World War. It is so interesting that you say that because in this documentary that we’re doing for the DVD, Slavoj Zizek who is a Slovenian philosopher, he talks about infertility in the film and he says that the real infertility is the lack of historical perspective and that that’s where the real infertility resides and how we cannot expect a renewal because we are so rooted in our past, without having an awareness of that past because we are so rooted to it. He says that the real renewal is ruthlessness and that has to do with the lack of historical perspective that humanity has. Some people, the pessimistics, they think that that is just the way it is. I want to believe… I have a very grim view, not of the future. I have a very grim view of the present. I have a very hopeful view of the future. And I think that that has to do with I believe an evolution is happening. Together with all this greenness an evolution is happening, an evolution of the human understanding that is happening in the youngest generation. I believe that the youngest generation, the generation to come, is the one that is going to come with new schemes and new perspectives of things. It’s as if we haven’t seen the reality from the standpoint that the earth is flat and the new generation is going to show us that actually that is fear, that it’s going around the sun, it’s not the sun that is going around the earth. It’s just that I think that it’s a matter of understanding.

I just wanted to ask you because Clare had mentioned that everyone had a different theory on the father of the baby and you were saying it was…she said that you said that it was divine intervention or immaculate conception. I was just wondering.

Yeah, right. [laughs] Yeah, right.

Did you ever think about…

No, for me? I think she is not very sure of who was it. Actually there was a moment -- we cut that out just because of length -- but there was a moment in the script, in the movie where she’s talking and she doesn’t really know who ‘since I did so many guys’ –some for money, some for drugs, some just because she was horny, she says. So she doesn’t really know who the father is.

Welll, this comes out on Christmas Day so aren’t there some parallels to the whole…

This is an archetype of the… but at the same time that archetype… You see the Clive Owen character more than Joseph is Moses. He’s the guy who dies before seeing the Promised Land. The difference is that in the Bible Moses dies before he sees the Promised Land because he doubted. In Clive’s character, he dies before seeing the Promised Land because he doesn’t need to see the Promised Land. He recovered what he was looking for which was his sense of hope. And as long as you have that sense of hope, then you do not need confirmation of things.

Well, it’s also about redemption.

It is. It is.

Has she seen the movie?

P.D. James?

Yes.

Yes, she’s a big endorser of the movie. She made a statement in which she says, ‘It’s obvious that this film departed from the book, but I’m so proud to be associated with this film.’ She really understood that in a way we took an elaboration of her own premise. So the core of everything is her book.

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