When will Alfonso Cuarón return with a new film?

The 62-year-old filmmaker took his time, 7 years, to refine his new post-Roma project. So when will he come back after this?

There was Romethe Oscar for Best Director, and then nothing. It’s been 7 years sinceAlfonso Cuarón had disappeared from the radar, but here he is again with Disclaimer. Not a film, but a series, which he entirely directed and wrote.

But why did it take so long?

First, because right after Romethe pandemic has put the world on hold. “I guess like everyone else, I’ve been cooped up at home. At first I was trying to see if I could do anything to help. I sorted thousands of masks to send to Mexico for hospital nurses . Then I started working on Disclaimer…“, he tells Wired.

The project had been in his head for a long time. Even before Rome. Cuarón admits to having read the novel Revealed by American author Renée Knight in 2015 and immediately thought of making a film about it. Without knowing which way to take it: “I could visualize every scene in my head. But I didn’t see how to make the film I wanted in 1 hour 45 minutes…” So head to the small screen. This was good news since the Mexican director had signed a deal with Apple in 2019, to develop projects for the emerging platform.

Moreover, it should be noted that the filmmaker had already made a foray into the television genre with the series Believe on NBC, in 2014.”Some of the filmmakers I deeply admire have ventured into this series format. Whether it’s Ingmar Bergman with Scenes from Married Life, David Lynch with Twin Peaks, or Lars von Trier with The Hospital and its Ghosts.”

Alfonso Cuaron therefore adapted his writing for the serial format and was able to launch the filming of Disclaimer. A Dantesque shoot, which lasted almost 1 year until the summer of 2023. “I made it like a movie. Apple TV+ was very generous and said OK. My miscalculation was that, in television, we generally shoot several pages a day, several minutes a day ” he confides to EW. “I only turned maybe one page a day. So it was a very, very, very long process which I’m sure was also very difficult for the actors.” Overall, the director worked on this project for four years, thus explaining his long absence from the cinema.

Two new films in sight

And now ? Are we going to have to wait another 7 years before seeing the next film ofAlfonso Cuarón ? A priori no. The director was even ready to launch, in the fall of 2023, the filming of Janewith Charlize Theron, an original biopic, supposed to tell the life of the writer Philip K. Dick (Blade Runner, Ubik, Total Recall…) through the fictional point of view of his twin sister. Fictional, because in reality, the sister in question died when they were only six weeks old. Except that the Jane project was put on hold at the last minute by the screenwriters’ and actors’ strike in Hollywood. And it does not seem ready to be revived in the short term.

It is said that Cuarón has even moved on to another project: he has the idea of ​​filming, before the end of the year, another film entitled Billy Please Call Home. We don’t know what it would be about, but it would be based on a screenplay that the 62-year-old filmmaker wrote 20 years ago.

The fact remains that officially, nothing has been launched yet. Alfonso Cuarón could well make us wait a little longer.