Alfonso Cuarón, the Academy Award-winning director of films such as Children of Men and Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, was at the Locarno Film Festival to accept their Lifetime Achievement Award, headline their signature filmmaking masterclass, and introduce a new screening of the 1976 film, Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000. While there, he discussed his career and surprised many when he explained he’d been thinking about making a horror film for years. “My aspiration is to one day do a horror film,” said Cuarón (via Deadline), who added:
I love
Rosemary’s Baby
, and the other Polanski films, and films like
The Babadook
. They’re so grounded in reality and in character, so I love those. As a spectator, I have a wider taste but anything I feel I could do would need to be more grounded. I’ve been trying to write something like that, but somehow, it doesn’t fully work.
If the director of films like Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, the darkest movie of the entire Harry Potter series, wants to make a horror film and wants to wait until writing something right (that, of course, isn’t a remake), then all we can say is we’ll proudly wait.
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Cuarón is the Mexican director whose unique filmography can grab anyone’s attention. His films are visual masterpieces that usually take an excruciating production process with them, so it’s no wonder he has only made eight films since he debuted with the hilarious Sólo con tu pareja in 1991. Hopefully his ninth is the scary one he’s been wanting to make. The director is certainly a master of suspense, and brilliantly knows how to stretch a dollar when it comes to special effects. Unless you count his obscure participation in the Mexican anthology TV series La Hora Marcada, Cuarón has never made a scary film, but judging from his words and our interest, it’s time for him to try one.
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Cuarón’s latest directorial effort is actually a miniseries for Apple TV+, Disclaimer, adapted from a novel by Renée Knight. It will screen at the Venice Film Festival and then premiere in October 2024. Apart from Cuarón’s usual team of collaborators like Emmanuel Lubezki (who will team up with Amelie‘s Bruno Delbonnel for cinematography), the series has a very exciting cast: Cate Blanchett, Kevin Kline, Sacha Baron Cohen, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Lesley Manville, Louis Partridge, and more. The psychological thriller will tell the story of a sketchy journalist who receives a novel from an unknown author. Upon reading, she realizes she’s the main character, and, somehow, the book narrates some things nobody should ever know about her.