The Innovative Reason Emmanuel Lubezki and Bruno Delbonnel Share the ‘Disclaimer’ Cinematographer Credit
It’s right there at the beginning of Episode 1 of the Apple TV+ limited series, “Disclaimer” writer/director Alfonso Cuarón all but announces his intentions in a scene in which real-life journalist Christiane Amanpour presents an award to series’ fictional documentarian Catherine Ravenscroft (Cate Blanchett).
“Beware of narrative and form,” says Amanpour. “Their power can bring us closer to the truth, but they can also be a weapon with a great power to manipulate.”
More from IndieWire
While a guest on an upcoming episode of the Filmmaker Toolkit podcast, Cuarón discussed the pronouncement, “We decided to be bold and to begin with a warning. In other words audiences are warned.” But as Cuarón explained, he’s not worried about proclaiming his storytelling intentions — there’s no reason to hide the ball when the real game, the real discovery is how each viewer will react.
“What Christiane Amanpour says is that the only reason why you can be manipulated is because the one that is manipulating is just hitting into your deeply held beliefs,” said Cuarón. “So you’re not changing the mind of anyone. You’re just allowing those beliefs to come up to the surface.”
“Disclaimer,” based on Renee Knight’s novel, is about many things, but one is the power of form and narrative to shape our perception. For a formal master like Cuarón (“Roma,” “Gravity,” “Children of Men”), whose incredible body of work is defined by the singular lens through which we emotionally enter his cinematic worlds, this seems like a rather mundane insight, except that “Disclaimer” is more an intricate exercise in weaving multiple perspectives — Cuarón told IndieWire what attracted him most to adapting Knight’s book was “this choir of voices that are presenting facts.”
In each episode, the audience not only pieces together the different timelines and storylines, Cuarón uses different modes of voice-over and cinematic language to delineate the series’ different perspectives. And just in case you missed it, each shift in time and perspective is marked with a playful Chaplin-esque iris-in and iris-out.
“We’re following four main narrative lines, and we have voiceovers over most of these narrative lines. One narrative line is in first-person, that is Kevin Kline’s narrative line of Stephen, in which his experience is as the me, the I,” explained Cuarón. “Then there’s the third-person narrative that is what happens around Catherine’s environment, meaning the family and the co-workers at the office, and that’s third-person, a more detached, observant objective narrative. Then the most interesting thing is Catherine’s narrative because that is told in a second-person voice-over. That is a very rare voice in cinema. Rarely do you see voice-over in second-person.”
An example of Blanchett’s second-person voice-over happens in a scene between Catherine and her son Nicholas (Kodi Smit-McPhee) cleaning out his old room. As they discuss his new apartment and roommates, the Blanchett-read voice-over tells the audience, “Nicholas works in the electrical section in a department store. This is not quite what you and Robert had imagined for your son, but you are relieved that he’s working.”
That second-person “you” narration is rare in movies and novels. Cuarón first encountered it many years ago when he saw the 1974 French film The Man Who Sleeps, directed by Bernard Queysanne and written by the novelist Georges Perec.
“I remember watching it and it was striking right away. And I thought, ‘Okay, I would love to try to utilize that,” said Cuarón.
Cuarón is a filmmaker who speaks clearly and poetically about how he applies his toolbox in interviews, but he struggles to find the exact words of what that “you” does to the experience of watching, but his instinctive emotional response of how it colors on-screen events was something he kept it in his back pocket for years, waiting for the right opportunity to play with it.
“I never had the opportunity until this project, but then the part of the appeal was, ‘Okay, what if we mix all these different voices,’” said Cuarón. “It’s interesting how the way that you speak, the way that you refer to things also influences the way in which we approach our beliefs and our trust and our confidence according to how you’re involved in any of these voices.”
The fourth narrative line in “Disclaimer” is that of the book “The Perfect Stranger,” written by Nancy (Lesley Manville) and published by her widow Stephen (Kevin Kline) as part of his plot to seek revenge on Catherine. It’s the one narrative line presented without voice-over, but like the other three sections is given its own cinematic language and point of view.
“That’s the reason Christiane Amanpour doesn’t say only beware of narrative, she says ‘narrative and form’,” said Cuarón. “Form in many instances has an even deeper power because it’s doing things in a more subtle way than the explicit narrative events.”
Using different cinematic language to delineate the four narrative lines was not simply a matter of applying different color grades, switching lenses, or employing different types of camera movement. Cuarón not only carefully broke the story through constant rewrites, he and long-time collaborator and friend cinematographer Emmanuel “Chivo” Lubezki, who came aboard early as a producer on “Disclaimer,” took the matter of creating different points of view to a more fundamental level. This was about creating visual perspectives on the action as different as the characters and the modes of narration. It was about how we see and experience the action.
“It was Chivo’s idea, [in order] to have a more striking language and difference between these narrative perspectives, [to] bring a second cinematographer on to carry some of those voices,” explained Cuarón. “It was so the approach of one voice doesn’t influence the approach of the other voice.”
While it is common for a limited series to have two cinematographers, the work is normally divided by episodes. In the case of “Disclaimer,” Lubezki and six-time Oscar-nominated cinematographer Bruno Delbonnel’s duties were divided by narrative line, keeping each point of view across all seven episodes in the hands of a single cinematographer.
“I think that was a great idea of Chivo, and also we had the opportunity to collaborate with Bruno Delbonnel, who we deeply admire and we love as a person,” said Cuarón.
Episodes 1 and 2 of “Disclaimer” are available now on Apple TV+.
Look for IndieWire’s upcoming Toolkit episode with Alfonso Cuarón on Spotify or Apple Podcasts
Best of IndieWire
Sign up for Indiewire's Newsletter. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
Solve the daily Crossword
