Emmanuel Lubezki discusses the iconic ‘Children of Men’ car scene
In contemporary cinema, it takes more than being simply ‘great’ to attract an audience and gain historic supremacy. When modern TV is on a par with the substance of the silver screen, filmmakers are forced to do more to get audiences through the doors of the cinema, with the likes of Christopher Nolan, Denis Villeneuve, George Miller and Alfonso Cuarón well aware of this fact.
Each aforementioned filmmaker has added to the ever-more revolutionary world of modern cinema, with Nolan changing the industry’s approach to practical effects with 2010s Inception, Villeneuve establishing a new scope with Dune and Miller setting a new tone for action cinema with 2015s Mad Max: Fury Road. As for Cuarón, the Mexican filmmaker flexed his cinematic muscles with the 2006 effort Children of Men.
Whilst the film is spectacularly captured by the cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki, one iconic scene is often referenced as a significant high-point. The scene involves Clive Owen, Julianne Moore and the fellow passengers of a small car which is suddenly ambushed on a country road. Panic instantly takes hold and Lubezki reflects the scope of such stress with flowing, claustrophobic cinematography.
Recognised as one of the most seminal scenes of modern movie history, Lubezki sat down with Vanity Fair to discuss how he managed to achieve the celebrated shot.
“Obviously, everybody thought we should do [it] in C.G. And for a couple of months, we were all satisfied with the main idea,” the Mexican cinematographer stated, adding: “But every time I thought about it, something felt really weird and wrong. Something told me that shooting that scene in green scene was going against everything else that we’d done”.
Indeed, for Lubezki, Cuarón and the rest of the Children of Men crew, practical effects were the way forward, with much of the film using real explosions to bring the eerie dystopian sci-fi to life. Continuing, the cinematographer adds, “By doing tests, I realised that if I was able to hang the camera from the roof of the car, maybe I could do the entire shot in one shot. That was important, because it’s a way of immersing the audience—and also not glamorising violence”.
The result is one of the most extraordinary shots in modern cinema, with the scene being one of the most memorable moments in a truly intense sci-fi classic. Analysed by countless movie lovers across the globe, Children of Men changed the way that action scenes were captured, inspiring the one-shot set-pieces of Alejandro González Iñárritu’s The Revenant as well as HBO’s True Detective.
Concluding his thoughts on the scene, Lubezki adds: “By doing everything in real time, I think you feel the desperation and the claustrophobia of the characters. It’s a very long story, but I found all these pieces that were made for other things…in only one week, we put together this thing that nobody has ever done before.”
