Alfonso Cuarón names “the first great film” he ever saw: “I thought I was going to see boobs”
Despite being one of modern cinema’s most innovative, ambitious, and acclaimed auteurs, Alfonso Cuarón hasn’t made many movies, and none since Roma was released in 2018.
Since he made his feature-length debut with 1991’s Love in the Time of Hysteria, he’s only helmed another seven, which makes him less prolific than Quentin Tarantino over roughly the same period of time. Of course, what he lacks in quantity, he more than makes up for in quality.
Y tu mamá también is one of the finest films of the early 21st century, Children of Men is one of the greatest dystopian thrillers ever made, watching Gravity for the first time on the biggest screen possible was a jaw-dropping experience, and he comfortably made the best Harry Potter flick by far.
Alongside close friends Guillermo del Toro and Alejandro G Iñárritu, the ‘Three Amigos’ have been responsible for a string of classics and eye-popping visual feasts dating back over three decades, with Cuarón the recipient of four Academy Awards in three different categories from 12 nominations.
It would be nice to see him back behind the camera on a movie, with Apple TV’s Disclaimer his only other directorial effort in the last seven years, but since he’s proven himself as one of the best in the business, whatever his next picture ends up being will almost certainly be worth the wait and then some.
Even though he perfectly fits the bill, Cuarón doesn’t see himself as an auteur. Instead, he views himself as a cinephile who happens to make his living as a filmmaker, and that passion for the moving image was instilled in him at an early age. He grew up in a family obsessed with the medium, which meant he was exposed to the classics at an early age.
As you’d expect, it didn’t take him long to meet his first masterpiece. “My mom and my grandmother were cinephiles,” Cuarón explained to Variety. “We loved to go to the movies. The first great film I was exposed to was The Bicycle Thief. I was probably eight. I was at a sleepover with my cousin, and they announced on TV that they were about to show a film only for adults.”
At such an impressionable age, the promise of an adults-only movie gave him the wrong idea: “I thought I was going to see boobs or something,” he admitted. “I didn’t see any boobs, but by the end, I was weeping. I thought, ‘This is so different from the other stuff I’ve seen.’ But I was intrigued.”
He may not have seen any boobs, but what he did see was Vittorio De Sica’s seminal exercise in neorealism, one of the most important and influential films in history. It was the first time Cuarón had seen something so personal, intimate, and powerful, and while it doesn’t immediately come across as a movie that would leave an eight-year-old kid in raptures, it was a life-changing moment for the youngster as his love of cinema was well and truly cemented.
