Editor: Li Xiaotian
At the Oscars just this past, Alfonso Cuarón, a director from Mexico, won the second best director award in his career for "Roma". It is also the fifth Best Director Award in six years for Mexico's Three Masters.
As one of the most talkative Mexican masters active in Hollywood at the time, Alfonso Cuarón deserves a good look at his career as a director.
Born on November 28, 1961 in Mexico City, Mexico, Alfonso Cuarón wanted to be a director and astronaut from an early age, but gave up his dream of being an astronaut because he did not want to join the army. Fortunately, through "Gravity", he still had a good experience of a different space journey.
As a young boy, he didn't like to play and always wanted to make movies, but on his 12th birthday, Cuarón finally got a camera and began to shoot everything he saw and show it to everyone. This may also set the stage for him to get the Oscar for best cinematography this year since he was a child. In "Roma", Cuarón catches ducks on the shelves, because he is not afraid of people who do not know Spanish to make his films, so he has to fight in person as a cinematographer. As a result, inadvertently planted willows, accidentally won the Best Cinematography Award, setting a new Oscar record.
Fast forward to 2014, when Alfonso Cuarón's first highlight moment won his first Oscar for Gravity. It also opened the prelude to mexico's three masters winning the Oscar for best director consecutively.
Cuarón is by no means a Hollywood-style prolific director. Since more than thirty years of filming, he has directed less than ten films. However, Cuarón, who jokingly calls "making a movie in five years", rarely loses his hand once he directs. This has been the case since his 1991 directorial debut, Love In Hysteria.
At the time, Cuarón worked with his brother Carlos to create the script for Love in Hysteria, and for a while he couldn't find investment. Coincidentally, at that time, the film that the Mexican Film Association (imcine) planned to invest in was abandoned for directing reasons, and Cuarón's film took its place, which was a huge success, winning consecutive awards at the Toronto Film Festival and attracting the attention of Hollywood producers. However, the film eventually lost to Mexico's Okio foreign language film that year, which caused controversy. In this AIDS-themed film funded by the Mexican government, Cuarón bluntly attacked the government's incompetence, jokingly saying, "I cut off the back road back to Mexico to make a movie."
Cuarón then went on to Hollywood to develop his career. Sidney Pollack was the first filmmaker to invite Cuarón to Hollywood, but the two failed in their filming plans, and Cuarón, after coming to Rocky, finally directed an episode of the TV series Fallen Angels at Pollack's suggestion. Frustrated, his college classmate and old partner, Emmanuel Lubezki, became the landlord of his spending time in Los Angeles, introducing the first American film, The Little Princess, to the stalled Cuarón, which, despite modest box office, eventually received two Oscar nominations and a number of other awards.
Subsequently, Cuarón wanted to work with Richard Kiir, but eventually gave up. At this time, 20th Century Fox threw an olive branch and asked him to shoot a modern version of Charles Dickens's "Lone Star Blood Tears", but Cuarón had no intention of shooting, Fox insisted, and finally in helplessness and pain, Cuarón finally completed the "modern version of "Great Prospects" starring Ethan Hawke and Gwennis Paltrow starring Ethan Hawke and Gwennis Paltrow. It was also Cuarón's second film for Hollywood. The production process of this film is very tortuous, and the functional breakdown of Hollywood blockbuster production makes Cuarón, who is accustomed to multi-tasking and original scripts for his own films, very uncomfortable, so that after filming, he began to think about life.
"In Hollywood, I've always been insecure, a lot of managers and producers will be involved in the project, I always want to write the script for my director's work, but the producers and producers always like to hire other screenwriters to write. So for a year or two, I felt like I was a script reader, not a creative person."
Stimulated by "Love", Cuarón temporarily returned to the Mexican film circle he was familiar with, and together with his brother Carlos, he created "Your Mother Too", and as a director, screenwriter, editor, and producer, he regained control of the work. Interestingly, the prototype libo of the Roma maid Cleo also made a cameo appearance in Your Mom Too, playing Diego Runa's nanny. When the film was released in Mexico, it was classified as "Eighteen Forbidden", which triggered the anger of many young audiences, and although it was nominated for the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay, it once again lost the list of best foreign language films in Mexico.
"Your Mother Too" (also translated as "Lost Paradise of the Fading Boy") was Cuarón's most successful film at that time, receiving 26 nominations for the Oscars, bafta, Golden Globe Awards, European Film Awards, and 31 awards such as the Chicago Film Critics Association Award for Best Foreign Language Film, the Independent Spirit Award for Best Foreign Language Film, and the Venice Film Festival Best Screenplay Award. While attending the Venice Film Festival, Cuarón met film critic Anna Lisa, who later became his second wife.
Even Cuarón himself did not expect that his next directorial work would be one of the most successful commercial series in hollywood film history: Harry Potter. "Warner asked me to make Harry Potter, and I would have refused. I thought that such a commercial film was not for me. Gilmour (del Toro) heard about this calling me in the middle of the night and scolded me, and I remember yelling on the phone ' You conceited bastard!' Have you read a novel? I didn't see it! Then I obediently read the original book and was circled as a fan. ”
As a result, "Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban", directed by Cuarón, is by far the most artistically accomplished film in the Harry Potter series, and also set the highest box office record for The Film Cuarón at that time.
The success of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban in the fan community has given Cuarón more control over big productions. He went on to shoot the underrated doomsday sci-fi "Son of Man" and the space film "Gravity," the latter of which won seven Oscars five years ago, including Best Director and Best Cinematography.
In addition, he has completed more than 10 films as a producer, including "Assassination of Nixon" and "Pan's Labyrinth", and in 2006, he directed the short film collection "Paris, I Love You" with 11 other directors. In the same year, he also directed the critically acclaimed "Son of Mankind" and was nominated for three awards at the 79th Academy Awards.
After the success of Gravity, he did not take advantage of the chase, "Roma" is Cuarón's first work in five years, and the result is that he once again won the Oscars. This is equivalent to sitting consecutively, not only winning the grand prize himself, but also winning the first Oscar for best foreign language film in history for Mexico.
For Alfonso Caron, Roma is the most personal work of his film career to date. Cuarón himself recreates his childhood in the Roman neighborhood of Corona, Mexico City, using his childhood nanny Libo as a model for the turbulent years of the 70s in Mexico.
In addition to directing and producing, Cuarón has written scripts, co-edited and directed the cameras on his own. Roma is Cuarón's second film that did not work with his old partner, Lubieski. "Although chivo (Lubieski) wanted to help shoot, I always extended the preparation cycle and shooting schedule, and half a month before the start of the shooting, he suggested that I 'it is better to drag it out like this than to shoot it yourself', so I did it."
Cuarón regards "Roma" as his passion project, a film that he must make in his life, "even if no one watches me"! The film unveils the old scars of the Cuarón family, the father of a physicist abandons his wife to find another family, and revisiting the places where he was injured in the past is also a process of re-understanding himself for Cuarón. He once confessed in an interview that "I don't want to make a movie for nostalgia, I want to make a film that appears in the past as I understand it." How the scars of the individual are intertwined with the scars of society."
This semi-memoir-style work is not simply a record of the past, and the use of black and white film form is not for "nostalgia". Cuarón insisted on modernizing Roma's black-and-white color palette rather than deliberately making the retro grain of film.
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