Alfonso Cuarón

Alfonso Cuarón Orozco was born on November 28th in Mexico City, Mexico. From an early age, he yearned to be either a film director or an astronaut. However, he did not want to enter the army, so he settled for directing. He didn’t receive his first camera until his twelfth birthday, and then immediately started to film everything he saw, showing it afterwards to everyone. In his teen years, films were his hobby.

He was second unit director in Gaby: A True Story (1987), and co-wrote and directed some episodes in the series A Hora Marcada (1967). One New Year’s Eve, he decided he would not continue to be an assistant director, and with his brother Carlos started writing what would be his first feature film: Sólo con tu pareja (1991) (Love in the time of Hysteria). Soon after that, Pollack called him again to direct an episode called Fallen Angels: Murder, Obliquely (1993) of the series Fallen Angels (1993), that was the first job he had in U.S., and also the first time he worked with Alan Rickman. He finally signed a contract with Warner Brothers to direct the film Addicted to Love (1995).

However, one night, he read the screenplay for another film, A Little Princess (1995) and fell in love with it. He talked to Warner Brothers and after some meetings he gave up directing Addicted to Love in order to do A Little Princess. Warner Brothers invited Alfonso to direct the third Harry Potter film, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004), an offer which he accepted after some consideration. The film would prove to be the greatest box office success of his career. He directed one five-minute segment of the anthology film Paris, je t’aime (2006) with Nick Nolte and Ludivine Sagnier. His next project, the futuristic film Children of Men (2006) with Clive Owen, Julianne Moore and Michael Caine premiered at the Venice Film Festival in 2006 having been nominated for three Academy Awards. In 2013, Alfonso directed the space thriller Gravity (2013), which would go win 7 academy awards.

Brussels International Film Festival