Cate Blanchett and Kevin Kline, right, star in Disclaimer, a rare TV series from Alfonso Cuarón, centre. “To be invited into a formal departure for him, moving as a filmmaker into serialized storytelling, was really super exciting,” Blanchett said. Photo / Markian Lozowchuk, The New York Times
Cate Blanchett and Kevin Kline, right, star in Disclaimer, a rare TV series from Alfonso Cuarón, centre. “To be invited into a formal departure for him, moving as a filmmaker into serialized storytelling, was really super exciting,” Blanchett said. Photo / Markian Lozowchuk, The New York Times
Cate Blanchett stars in the acclaimed director’s new TV series, a thriller about a woman whose life is upended by a mysterious novel.
About a decade ago, writer-director Alfonso Cuarón was sent an advance copy of Renée Knight’s book Disclaimer, a thriller about a woman whose life isupended when she receives a novel by an unknown author that seems to lay bare her secrets. That novel begins with a disclaimer: “Any resemblance to persons living or dead is not a coincidence.”
As Cuarón (Children of Men, Y Tu Mamá También) read, he could picture each scene in his head. This book, he thought, should be a film. There was just one problem.
“I didn’t see how the film that I wanted to do could fit into an hour and 45 minutes,” he said.
So Cuarón immersed himself in other projects, like Roma (2018), which won him a second Oscar for directing. But a few years later, he began to think about Disclaimer again, in the context of more expansive films like Ingmar Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander or Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in America, works that clocked in at four or five hours.
The market for marathon films is small. But Cuarón knew of an alternative: television. And he was mindful that other auteurs, like David Lynch with Twin Peaks and Lars Von Trier with The Kingdom, had explored that medium before him.
Which is how, after a three-decade film career and five Oscars, Cuarón came to make Disclaimer, a seven-episode limited series on Apple TV+ starring Cate Blanchett, Sacha Baron Cohen and Kevin Kline.
In Disclaimer, Blanchett plays an acclaimed journalist and documentarian, and Sacha Baron Cohen plays her husband.
When Cuarón, 62, sat for a video call in September, Disclaimer had just received a rousing reception at the Venice Film Festival, an unusually glamorous place to debut a limited series. Cuarón seemed pleased by the reaction, maybe even surprised. Despite having written and directed TV before, most recently as a creator of the NBC drama Believe (2014), he insisted that he had not known how to make a series. He is not certain he knows even now, and he thinks it might be too late to learn.
Disclaimer trains its lens on Catherine Ravenscroft (Blanchett), an acclaimed journalist and documentarian. In the first episode, she is honoured by Christiane Amanpour, playing herself, who celebrates Catherine for cutting through “narratives and forms that distract us from hidden truths” and revealing “our own complicity in some of today’s more toxic social sins”.
Amanpour’s introduction neatly outlines the show’s thematic concerns: narrative, truth, complicity. As Kline put it, wary of spoilers, “So much of the story is about prejudices and false narratives and fake news and real news”.
That story is sufficiently gripping, with at least one major twist, and the characters – Catherine; Robert (Baron Cohen), her husband; Stephen (Kline), a former schoolteacher who arranges for the novel’s publication – are all appropriately layered. But Cuarón was wary of reducing the show to an unfolding of plot and character, which was what a normal-length film would have required.
Instead, he wanted to confront the formal challenge of the book’s competing narratives. He also wanted to experiment with narration as something other than a storytelling crutch. The series ultimately includes three different voice-overs: one presented in first-person point of view, one in second and one in third.
“The point is to challenge the narrative,” Cuarón said. “To challenge the viewer with their own narrative.”
Casting was a relatively simple affair. Most of the actors had been eager to work with Cuarón.
In Disclaimer, Kevin Kline stars as a former schoolteacher who arranges for the publication of the novel at the heart of the story.
“Who wouldn’t be?” Blanchett said during a recent video call. “And to be invited into a formal departure for him, moving as a filmmaker into serialised storytelling, was really super exciting.”
Even as Cuarón recognised that Disclaimer was now a series, he was determined to make it in the same way that he would make a film. He enjoys television, he said, and believes that it offers the best writing in mainstream entertainment. But he wanted more than that.
“The writing can be excellent; it can be astounding,” he said. “But rarely are you confronted with a cinematic experience.” In his hands, Disclaimer would not be a show that could be watched while also scrolling through your phone. The framing, the lighting, the gestures – all would offer clues to the story and would demand attention.
Cuarón now acknowledges that shooting a series like a film was in some ways a miscalculation. He did not consider how long that might actually take. By the end, Cuarón said, “we were all exhausted”.
Disclaimer began filming in London in the spring of 2022. A typical television show might grind through seven or eight pages of script each day; Cuarón would shoot just one. “Because it’s so much about the choices and the decisions in the blocking, in the specificity of the movement,” he said.
The actors had to make peace with this. Baron Cohen told a story about production halting for two weeks while a set was rebuilt.
“That’s tough as an actor,” he said. “But it’s with the aim of creating something that is magnificent. So however frustrating it can be, you have to remind yourself, I’m in the hands of a maestro and this is worth it.” (He told another story about spending a half day shooting a difficult scene only to have Cuarón tell him it was just rehearsal.)
Covid infections caused other delays. Shooting ultimately ran about a year, with the actors having to spend all of that time in some unusually dark psychological spaces.
“I didn’t sleep very much, and it wasn’t pleasant,” Blanchett said. “But it was very creatively fulfilling.”
“So much of the story is about prejudices and false narratives and fake news and real news,” Kline said. Photo / Markian Lozowchuk, The New York Times
Viewers will be tempted to judge the characters and their actions, Catherine’s particularly. The early episodes, especially, invite and even encourage viewers to indulge their own biases. But at seven hours, the series sits with the characters long enough that many viewers may be forced to contradict and second-guess those initial judgments. They too may eventually find themselves complicit, even when there are plenty of clues along the way, visual and otherwise, that complicate the story.
“We believe what we want to hear,” Kline said succinctly.
Baron Cohen, in a separate interview, confirmed this. (As the star of the Borat movies, he knows something about prejudice and persuasion.) “It’s very easy to convince somebody of something if they want to believe that it’s true,” he said.
Even Blanchett was susceptible. After reading the first scripts, she was hesitant to play the character. Cuarón told her to read to the end.
Though the series is not expressly didactic, it ultimately argues against rushing to judgment. But Cuarón resists the notion of the show as crusade.
“You don’t want filmmakers to fix the world,” he said. “I don’t think cinema changes anything. Cinema can inspire, that’s it.”
Of course, this is television, not cinema. But Cuarón and the cast hope that its themes and its cinematic qualities will make Disclaimer worth watching with the same attention one might give to a theatrical release. Maybe they will even rewatch it – Blanchett thinks Disclaimer will reward repeat viewings.
“The interesting thing about the series is we think we know our friends, we think we know our partners, our children, our relatives,” Blanchett said. “But how well do we know them?”
