It's 2027 and the world is on the verge of collapse. The last child born on the planet has just died at the age of 18. The future's bleak and mankind's reign on earth is near an end. That's the set-up for Children of Men, an action-packed thriller starring Clive Owen and Claire-Hope Ashitey, and directed by Alfonso Cuaron (Y Tu Mama Tambien, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban).
The Premise of Children of Men: “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," said writer/director Alfonso Cuaron. "That infertility we use just as a metaphor. 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. [Someone mentioned the story in terms of its connection to] 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.”
Casting Children of Men: “There were people that [screenwriter] 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. 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. 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.
You’ve never seen Michael Caine farting before. 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. Then he started to tell me how Lennon used to talk like very nasal. If you see the way he performed the whole thing, he speaks in a very nasal kind of way. So we’re doing all these make-up and fittings… 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.”
Finding the Right Actress to Play the World’s Only Pregnant Woman: “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. We did casting in, I don’t know, like 20 different countries. Actually, because I wanted to, even though in the script she was described as an African girl, we said we don’t just because of some conceptual thing to maybe miss the great actress who could be playing this role. We opened up our scope and [claps hands] we end up with Claire.
I think that she represented the vulnerability. And something that I admire about Claire, she stripped the whole thing of sentimentality. She made it a very rough character. She didn’t do the precious [bit]. 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. We need to keep a certain tension there, not a comfortable thing of 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 Claire 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.”
Page 2: On the Novel and His Vision of the Future
