Alfonso Cuarón, Cate Blanchett bring series ‘Disclaimer’ to Venice

Alfonso Cuarón is the first to admit that he does not know how to make a television series. He might even be too old to learn how, he said. The Oscar-winning filmmaker has technically now made a series, the seven-part AppleTV+ show “Disclaimer,” four episodes of which premiered on Thursday at the Venice Film Festival. But he did it his way: Like a film. Based on Renée Knight’s 2015 book of the same name, “Disclaimer” is a psychological thriller about a documentarian and journalist, Catherine Ravenscroft (Cate Blanchett), who discovers she’s a character in a novel that reveals her darkest secret. Cuarón, Blanchett and Kevin Kline all made the journey to the Italian film festival to debut and speak about the show before it begins streaming on Oct. 11.

“I read the book and immediately in my mind I saw a film, but I didn’t know how to make that film,” Cuarón, the director of films including “Gravity” and “Roma,” said in a news conference on Thursday. “It was way too long. I could not shape it as such.” It was only later, he said, that he thought it might work in longer form, inspired by predecessors like Rainer Werner Fassbinder, David Lynch and Krzysztof Kieślowski. “I was intrigued and that was the point of departure,” Cuarón said. He started writing with one name in mind for Catherine: Blanchett, terrified that she might say no. Not only did she not say no, she also was the one who suggested Kline for a British character. Sacha Baron Cohen plays her husband in the show and Kodi Smit-McPhee plays her son.

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All soon realized that approaching it as a film, and shooting it as a film, would take much longer than a normal series. He even enlisted two cinematographers, Emmanuel Lubezki and Bruno Delbonnel, to add a distinct visual language to the different perspectives in the story. All told, it took about a year. “It was a really long process,” Cuarón said. “And I really feel for the actors because they were stuck with the characters for way too long.”

Blanchett laughed that they were “still recovering.” The final three episodes was screened on Friday at the festival. Though the festival is most known for its feature film premieres, it does play host to select series as well. This year those also include Joe Wright’s Mussolini biopic “M: Son of the Century,” Rodrigo Sorogoyen’s “The New Years” and Thomas Vinterberg’s “Families Like Ours.”

Meanwhile, Angelina Jolie confessed she was afraid of not being able to “live up” to Maria Callas’s legend in her new biopic about the great diva’s extraordinary yet tragic life that premiered on Thursday at the Venice Film Festival. In “Maria”, the American movie star tackles the tormented final years of the 20th century’s most celebrated opera singer who mesmerised audiences around the world.

“The bar in this... are the Maria Callas fans and those who love opera,” Jolie told a press conference ahead of the premiere of the movie by Chilean director Pablo Larrain. “And my fear would be to disappoint them.” “I really came to care for her so I felt I didn’t want to do a disservice to this woman,” she added. Jolie said she hoped to honour the “legacy” of the diva, who died nearly alone in 1977 aged 53, after a whirlwind life and career that was nevertheless marked by great sadness. The much-anticipated highlight of the festival’s second day was the last in Larrain’s trilogy of movies about iconic women — after 2021’s “Spencer” about Princess Diana and 2016’s “Jackie” on Jacqueline Kennedy.

The director has said only a larger-than-life star in her own right could play the role of the American-born Greek singer, whose successes at La Scala, La Fenice, Covent Garden and New York are the stuff of opera legend 100 years after her birth. “This movie would not have existed without Angelina,” said Larrain. Absent from the screen since 2021, the 49-year-old American actress and director has kept a relatively low profile even as her lengthy, acrimonious divorce from Brad Pitt continues to make headlines.

Agencies