A seasoned documentarian who has devoted her career to unearthing the darkest secrets of respected institutions, Catherine Ravenscroft (Cate Blanchett) gets the shock of her life when she discovers she is one of the main characters in a self-published novel. Worse still, she thought she was the only one who knew the secret exposed and that makes her a horrible human being.
“We all have a dark side, don’t we?” Cate Blanchett remarked at a press conference on Thursday afternoon, the day after the presentation of the first four episodes of the miniseries. Disclaimer. We all have secrets, big and small, no matter how serious, that we don’t want to reveal to others; I call it having a private life. We all hide secrets from those around us, often because we are dealing with them and are not ready to share them. Catherine thinks she buried a trauma; so I thought a lot about repressed memory.
A retired professor living alone since the deaths of his son (Louis Partridge) and his wife (Lesley Manville), Stephen Brigstock (Kevin Kline) is not the author of the novel, but its sender. Worse still, he also sent a copy to Catherine’s son (Kodi Smit-McPhee, who we find again in Mariaby Pablo Larraín) and her husband (Sacha Baron Cohen). Why does this man want to destroy this woman he has never met?
“It’s a very different character than I’ve played before,” Kline revealed. “My character changes with every discovery he makes; it’s really all about change for him. Working with Alfonso was an intense experience that taught me a lot.”
PHOTO PROVIDED BY VENICE MOSTOR
Cate Blanchett in Disclaimerby Alfonso Cuarón
Immediately after reading Disclaimera novel by British documentary filmmaker Renée Knight, published in French in 2016 under the title RevealedAlfonso Cuarón had a film in mind. Soon, he understood that he had to make a series out of it. “It was too long a film that I couldn’t structure,” the director confided.
“All three of us are trained in cinema – and also in theatre, and I don’t know how to do TV,” the filmmaker continued. “So we approached the series like a film. So it was like shooting seven films one after the other. The hardest part was for the actors, who had to keep their characters alive for longer than they would have in a single film.”
“We’re still recovering,” joked Cate Blanchett, who Alfonso Cuarón had in mind when writing the script. Kevin Kline, for his part, came to the project thanks to a conversation between the actress and the director during which the former had spoken about Charles Chrichton’s film, A Fish Called Wanda. Remembering that the American actor had already worked on the British accent, Cuarón then offered him the role. “I’m Australian, by the way,” Cate Blanchett recalled.
The lies we tell ourselves
What makes it special Disclaimerwhere Blanchett and Kline masterfully compose complex characters of which we discover new aspects from one episode to the next, from one flashback on the other hand, it is told by Catherine and Stephen in the second person singular.
“I love films narrated in voiceover and I had long dreamed of making one,” confided Alfonso Cuarón. “When I was young, I was fascinated by a film narrated in the second person, an adaptation of a novel by Perec [Un homme qui dort, de Georges Perec et Bernard Queysanne]. I then wondered what effect a second voice could create.
“I was fascinated by the characters’ narrative, their interiority,” Kevin Kline said. “Where is the truth? Who to believe? We are faced with a family drama that speaks to several major subjects and the more the plot advances, the more the whole thing expands.”
In order for each point of view to have its own aesthetic, cinematographic language and universe, the filmmaker called upon two directors of photography, Emmanuel Lubezki and Bruno Delbonnel: “However, both had to ensure temporal continuity from one point of view to the other.”
“I knew I was in good hands and that I was working with a great filmmaker,” Cate Blanchett said. “When you talk to someone and you realize that they’re not looking at you the same way anymore, you change your way of being. It’s the same with the camera. The relationship with the camera is three-quarters of the character. It’s like a dance with the camera. The points of view change and make the characters change.”
“What is important in Disclaimer“It’s how we perceive ourselves and what others perceive of us, as well as the lies we tell ourselves,” concludes Alfonso Cuarón.
Disclaimer will be on Apple TV starting October 11.