Thanks to Jeffrey Overstreet at the Looking Closer Journal for catching Steve Greydanus catching this interview with Children of Men director Alfonso Cuarón in Filmmaker magazine:
Filmmaker: Your adaptation of the novel is quite loose. How did you approach your source material?
Cuarón: Once we decided to do this exploration on the state of things – and you don’t have to go very far to realize that the environment and immigration are pretty much on the top of the list – then we had to craft a story. I had the story I wanted to tell so clear in my head that I was very afraid of reading the book and getting completely confused. I read an abridged version of the book, and Timothy J. Sexton, my writing partner, read the [entire] book. But our whole idea was lets find out what elements are relevant to what we’re doing and lets disregard what we think is irrelevant.
Filmmaker: Was there a script already written when you came on?
Cuarón: There was a script and I read the beginning of it and didn’t like it. I wasn’t interested in making a science fiction film and secondly I wasn’t interested in the environment that the book takes place, all this upper class drama. For me it was more important to explore the thematics that are shaping our contemporary world. The P.D. James book is almost like a look at Christianity, and that wasn’t my interest. I didn’t want to shy away from the spiritual archetypes but I wasn’t interested in dealing with Dogma.
Well, then. Any allowance I might have made — to the effect that Cuarón had not read the book and therefore might have been unaware of how the earlier writers had rejected, even overturned, the book’s Christian themes — has just gone out the window.
And now, of course, I cannot help but wonder how different Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004) would have been, if J.K. Rowling had not been there to hold Cuarón’s leash.
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