Written By • February March 2019 • When In Roma

Alfonso Cuarón should be accustomed to the awards circuit. The writer-director first made the rounds in 2002 for Y Tu Mamá También (co-written with his brother Carlos Cuarón). His last dance was in 2013 with Gravity (co-written with his son Jonás Cuarón). But he insists that the warm reception for his latest film, Roma, came as a complete surprise.

“I was making a very specific film, about a very specific character, in the framework of a very specific family, in a very specific society, in a very specific country, in a very specific timeframe of history,” he explains. “Also, it’s in Spanish and Mixtec, it’s a drama in black and white, and it’s Mexican. It’s not like there’s a huge market for that kind of film.”

Yet here he is, pacing through another marathon of interviews, festivals, and Q&As. Speaking by phone the morning of the Golden Globes ceremony, he’s exhausted, hungry, thirsty, and thrilled. “It’s been so gratifying to see the response the film is having with audiences from around the world, and the very strong emotional response it’s had. That only gives me hope, not only in terms of cinema and the many different ways in which audiences are really willing and even hungry to get access to a more diverse kind of cinema, but also more importantly in terms of human diversity and the fact that the human experience is one and the same.”

Roma is an intensely personal recreation of his middle-class upbringing in Mexico City in the early 1970s, down to the original furniture. But Cuarón’s alter ego, young Paco (Carlos Peralta), is only a minor presence. The dissolution of his parents’ marriage comes in and out of focus, as do events in the larger world, as seen through the eyes of the family’s domestic worker, Cleo (played by Yalitza Aparicio). The character is based on Liboria (“Libo”) Rodriguez, the woman who played that role in Cuarón’s life, but whose own world he knew almost nothing about as a child. Roma is an atmospheric wonder, unfolding at a deceptively languid pace while building enormous resonance socially and politically.

Kept to a strict schedule, Cuarón only had a half hour for the interview with Written By, but he was so happy to talk about writing that when he was told the time was up, he allowed the questions to continue. A few hours later he accepted Golden Globes for best director and foreign-language film, in addition to being nominated for best screenplay. The next morning, Roma earned him his first Writers Guild Award nomination, for Original Screenplay. (That’s also one of his four Oscar nods.)

Alfonso Cuarón: Consciously it was after Children of Men in 2006 [written by Cuarón & Timothy J. Sexton and David Arata and Mark Fergus & Hawk Ostby, based on the novel by P.D. James] that I had decided this was going to be my next film, and I did some sketches of it. But at that time, I didn’t dare to do it. I didn’t feel I had the tools. I blamed at the time practical tools, but it was more like emotional tools. It was maybe three years ago or so that I decided the time had come, and I had to do it. It had become a vital need.

Part of the process was first to immerse myself in my memories of the period, and then countless conversations with Libo. I was aided by her own memories, some of them very familiar because they were part of the same realm of my sheltered bubble, and then other ones that were way more unfamiliar, when she was talking about her social life outside my bubble, and when she was talking about her more internal life. I had conversations, just to confirm information, with my sister, who happened to be the one who had a greater recollection than all of my family members.

And then I just sat down and started writing the script. I wrote it in three weeks, without any consideration of structure, narrative, character arcs, or anything. Just letting it flow, coming from almost like a subconscious experience, because that was the way I explored my memory, just allowing myself to get lost in its labyrinth, and trusting that if a new memory arises it is relevant. That’s the way I wrote the script, without stopping for a second.

Usually my process is that I go through many, many rewrites. I show my screenplays to my collaborators, like Alejandro González Iñárritu, Guillermo del Toro, Pawel Pawlikowski, Carlos Cuarón, so many people—and they trash and destroy my script and I start from scratch. This is the first script I didn’t share with them. I didn’t even want to read it again. I just went back to do precise breakdowns for the crew, because I decided not to show it to anyone.

Yes, because I didn’t want to be sidetracked or second-guessed in the process. All of this not stopping for narrative considerations was with the trust, arrogance, or irresponsibility that I had developed a narrative muscle that would take care of it. There are some narrative instincts that are going to flow without me having to be rational about that.

The funny thing is that when Carlos finally read the screenplay, when I was in post-production, he said, ‘You were saying it was something very abstract. What are you talking about? This is very narrative.’ I was unsure because in my other films I always had narrative safety nets. Genre is one, that’s an amazing safety net, it’s a form that I love, but I didn’t want to use it here. The other is certain plot twists, character arcs, stuff like that. This film is more about moments that are building onto the next moment and slowly building onto the next moment. It’s about the elements, sometimes symbolic elements or leitmotifs, that develop throughout the film.

I think visually the film is very layered, in terms of information and symbols, but all of those were in the script. It is very densely written. The sounds were already described in the screenplay. Eighty to ninety percent of everything you see in the film is on the page.

Even the car entering the driveway is described almost shot by shot. I discovered that recently, because in a BAFTA conference of writers, the guy who was doing the Q&A played that scene while superimposing the screenplay, and it’s shot by shot. I was not even aware of that.

[About that car: We first meet the father, Señor Antonio (Fernando Grediaga), after he parks his gleaming Galaxie 500 in a garage that has maybe an inch of space on either side. It is a long, laborious process. After he leaves his family, his wife, Señora Sofía (Marina de Tavira), wreaks havoc on the car. First, she dents both sides while blithely squeezing between two other vehicles on the road. Later, drunk, she scrapes the newly-repaired car against the garage walls with just as little concern.]

The script never spells out motivations, but for me it’s very clear two things. One is that when you establish that car you’re establishing that he’s not only parking a car, it’s the whole thing of the patriarchy arriving to the house. He’s a character that you don’t reveal until the very end, and the whole introduction of the character is about the care in which he takes, with all this coldness and precision, parking in that narrow garage, a garage that’s too small for the car. That’s already a social comment. Frankly it’s almost like it’s a testosterone car. It’s not eight cylinders, it’s eight testosterones, driving into this very narrow corridor, almost like a penetration. And then you see the aloofness of this character with the family.

I didn’t write to spell it out, but my interpretation is that Sofía obviously is not doing it purposely, but unconsciously she wants to crush that car and everything that the car means. In between the two trucks—that happened. I was there with my siblings in the car. I remember my brother going, ‘Mama Mama Mama Mama!’ And it was as if she was absorbed in her thoughts, moving her finger, and just crushing between the two trucks. It’s obvious she was thinking about my father, she just wanted to smack that car, but in an unconscious way. And when she’s drunk, that’s definitely when she wants to completely whack the car.

That’s the reason the first time you see Sofía fully smiling is when she arrives with the new Renault. She parks immediately, and comes out beaming.

Do you remember the first idea for Roma that came to you all those years ago?

It was the image of Cleo just going up the metal stairs, going to the rooftop to wash, pretty much the ending of the film. For me, that says a lot, in the sense of a home with a very beautiful, almost majestic stairwell, in an upstairs in which you see the conditions of the interior of the house. Even if it’s middle-class going down, and it’s a bit rundown, it’s very comfortable. And then you see, in the same house, the servants’ quarters, and it’s a completely different thing; they have to go outside and down this very fragile staircase to go to the bathroom, or then go all the way up to a completely different universe that is that rooftop, that is more shared with other rooftops with all the domestic workers all around.

So that was part of it. But the DNA of everything was that I wanted to talk about that period of my life, but my focus was always Cleo. I was never interested in doing a film about myself. And the other thing was that it was going to be in black and white, from the beginning. And the tool was going to be memories. So 15 years ago or so I started to dig into memory, but I stopped the process because maybe I chickened out. I remember at that point, I was trying to reconstruct every day from the morning to the evening, but it was not until years later I started talking with Libo, in which my conversations with her were almost forensic, about a second-by-second [account] of her routine every day.

Everything was about details. Every time we talked she was bringing more and more detail to the table. And then that was complemented with the details I had explored before. It was all like, ‘OK and then I took a shower. Then I would go directly to the kitchen to prepare everything for the breakfast.’ ‘Who would you wake up first?’ ‘I would wake up your sister.’ ‘How would you wake her up?’ There are a lot of things that, by the mere actions, are already suggested. For instance, the reason she would wake first my sister was to allow the boys to sleep a little longer.

I love that she calls your sister beautiful when everyone else is calling her fat.

All of us, the siblings, we were completely—but you know who was the first one who was enabling all of that? My mother! It’s so funny that only women notice that element.

Yes, we’re family. Her daughter Adriana [López Rodríguez] used to share a room with my sister’s daughter. Actually Adriana is the title designer of the film. She’s a great designer.

Yes, because I was dealing with my memories, and a specific area of my life, so the organicity of that mother tongue was fundamental in how I was describing things and the words that I would use. Spanish is less flexible than English. If you open a thesaurus and look up a word in English, you have 200 words that mean the same word. Spanish is more precise, where you have four or five max, if you’re lucky. I hadn’t written a script in Spanish in a long time, so at the beginning I felt a bit claustrophobic because of that, and then it started to be very liberating, because again I was connecting with my essence, that essence in which a description has a very peculiar or specific way of being said.

Also in English, in two words you can create a huge description, while in Spanish, and some Latin American literature, there are more metaphorical and longer descriptions. I know the rules of screenplay are that you should not be too metaphorical or poetic, that you have to be concrete, but I didn’t shy away from that in writing the screenplay. I am writing something in English now, and it just changed the way in which I write it. I don’t know if for good or for bad, but I’m bringing a bit more of that metaphorical description into my English. Particularly what it is affecting is the prose and the descriptions of elements.

This is the first feature film you wrote solo. Did that change the writing process for you as well?

It did in a sense, because it’s been a while since I had taken the full responsibility of the actual writing. Sitting down and sometimes working with great writers like Carlos, we’re back and forth, I would telegraph more, trusting that their prose is way richer than mine. And here I had to force myself into that at the beginning, but as I was going through it, I found it absolutely enjoyable.

You didn’t even show the script to the actors. Did you come to that idea while you were writing it, or when it was time to direct?

Yeah, pretty much when I was writing, I was already deciding that nobody was going to see it.

The script is full of very detailed dialogue, and yet you were willing to let that all go.

This was my process: Every morning I would give some of the characters their dialogue, but individually, not as a group, and then to other characters I would give specific information—all of this contradictory. So when Sofía was going to tell the kids about writing a letter to the father [in the hopes that he would return], I said to Marina, the actress, ‘The most important thing here, your focus has to be on Toño, your oldest child [Diego Cortina Autrey], because he’s the guy who has the greatest bond of affection with the father, so you have to make sure that he writes a very good letter. He’s also the most similar to the father, so I want you to think of him a little bit like a little Antonio. But just make sure that he writes the letter.’ And I would go with Diego and say, ‘As soon as your mother starts talking to you, just leave the room.’

There’s the moment Cleo was going to talk to Sofía, saying, ‘I’m pregnant.’ Sofía knew that Cleo wants to talk to her, but in the dialogue I delivered to Marina that I rewrote that morning, it said that the reason Cleo wants to talk to her and why she’s crying is because she broke some dishes. I was writing a scene to trick the actor. So, when we’re rolling camera, as a director I enjoyed what the writer delivered, because she’s ready to say, ‘Don’t worry, it’s only dishes.’ Then when she realizes that Cleo’s pregnant, she’s like, ‘Uh, uh, uh’—she’s caught completely off guard. Is it directorial? Yes, there is a big amount of directorial choices there, but it’s the writing providing the tricks.

There’s one thing you didn’t put in the script I saw, but it’s in the beginning and end scenes, which is the image of the plane flying overhead.

Can I tell you something? You know what’s the stupid thing? I was certain that was in the screenplay. And it wasn’t until later that I realized, Oh, it’s not in the script. I didn’t touch the script anymore, I didn’t go back to do rewrites. The only rewrites I would do were the dialogue rewrites for the actors every morning to create. Some I have done while in the writing process—in a side document I would write ideas of how to trick, or ideas I would think of, and I would put on the side, ‘Sofía obviously loves the children, but the older one pisses her off because he reminds her most of her husband, and has the same arrogance and attitude of the husband.’ And then I would do in a side note, ‘he should leave out of the blue.’ I would be doing side notes of all of that stuff, but it was again in the writing process.

The surprise is [the plane] was not in the screenplay. I discovered that because I was involved in this mentorship program, and there was this amazing filmmaker from India who came to the set for a month or two months. He was the only person I ever shared the screenplay with. I said, ‘Look, if this process is going to be helpful to you, I’m going to expose all my cards to you.’ So he read it and mentioned the whole thing of the planes, and I said, ‘Check it again, I’m sure it’s there.’ ‘No it’s not there.’ I said, ‘Maybe they didn’t translate it in the English version.’ I went back to the Spanish version, and I didn’t see the plane. That is the process of your subconscious.

The rhythm of this film is very different from your others. It’s almost hypnotic.

I was trying to convey a sense of passing of time. My other scripts are very tight. There was always an impulse to control time, and I’ve always prided myself that they were way under two hours. In this one, even from the descriptions, I wanted to let it play, because an element of the film is about honoring time and space. And I wanted to convey that, even from the page.