WRITTEN BY LISA ROSEN When in ROMA For Alfonso Cuarón, home is where the art is. A lfonso 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 spe-cific 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 exhaust-ed, 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 ac-cess to a more diverse kind of cinema, but also more • WGA W WRITTEN BY FEBRUARY 42 42 • WGA W WRITTEN BY FEBRUARY | | MARCH 2019 MARCH 2019 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 mi-nor presence. The dissolution of his parents’ mar-riage 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.)
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