It has been six long years since the brilliant Alfonso Cuaron delivered a follow-up to his masterful, Oscar-winning drama Roma, which was a deeply personal love letter to his home country, and his childhood. And if you wanted to see what Cuaron had in store, you needed an AppleTV+ subscription. That’s where Cuaron streamed the seven-part drama Disclaimer, which starred the magnificent Cate Blanchett as an award-winning journalist forced to confront a harsh memory when two people whose lives were impacted target her for revenge.
Please stop reading now if you somehow made it this far into the story without watching Disclaimer… and if you are bothered by plot details and spoilers.
The original series Disclaimer tells two versions of the same story, where Catherine (played by both Cate Blanchett and Leila George) encounters a young traveler named Jonathan (Louis Partridge) while vacationing in Italy. The duo has sex, even though Catherine is in charge of your adolescent son, Nicholas (George and Bertie Haarer). But the truth of the encounter keeps the audience guessing.
The narrative in Disclaimer builds to a harrowing water rescue. Young Nicholas, unattended, takes a boat out into the ocean. As many on the beach try to save him, Jonathan swims out to the boy. He manages to rescue him… but drowns in the process. It’s a heart-wrenching scene, filmed masterfully by Alfonso Cuaron, who uses all of his tricks to submerge us in the ocean alongside a very tired Jonathan.
When the master came on CinemaBlend’s official ReelBlend podcast to discuss his new work Disclaimer in full, we asked him about staging the ocean rescue. And we discovered that it was a LOT more complicated than one might imagine. As Cuaron told ReelBlend:
First of all, all of that section comes out of a book. A book written by Jonathan’s mother, Nancy. She was not present there. So everything that you see (is) springing out of her imagination, in which she is romanticizing her son, and she's turning her son into someone (else). Because maybe she knows very well who her son really is. But she's turning her son into a romantic, and heroic, figure. So, it was important to experience the loss of that hero.
That is very much in line with the entire way that Disclaimer played with our conceptions of narratives, and reliable narrators. The show routinely shifted back and forth between the Italian incident and present day, when the impact of the affair landed on Catherine (Blanchett), as well as Jonathan’s parents (Kevin Kline, Lesley Manville). And it’s important to note that some of the recollections of the Italian incident are seen through rose-colored glasses.
But on top of all that, there are was the technical aspects of the ocean rescue, as Cuaron went on to tell us:
All the beach scenes, we shot in Italy. But then, to do the open sea, you cannot have a five year old in that little dinghy floating in the midst of big waves. So we had to create that in a safe environment. So we have to shoot that in South Africa, in a tank, and then incorporate Italy into that environment of this tank. It was a combination of different things. … (Lighting) was the biggest problem. And why it was one of the decisions of shooting in South Africa. Because Chivo – and I’m glad you are mentioning that. There is a very strict light continuity, because we're going between the beach and what is happening up in the sea. And it needed to match exactly the same light. So first of all, because of the season, our light had already changed in the northern hemisphere, we had to go to the southern hemisphere.
That’s why I love having filmmakers like Alfonso Cuaron on the ReelBlend podcast. You might have watched the boat rescue in Disclaimer and realized that it was intense. But would you ever think that the director had to move his production from Italy to South Africa so that they could shoot in a tank, protect their child actor, but still match the intensity of the natural light that already had been captured? SO crazy. And also, so awesome.
In my own opinion, Disclaimer is one of the best shows available on AppleTV+ at the moment, because of all of the talent involved. And now that you have seen it, keep talking advantage of that subscription by circling some of the upcoming AppleTV+ projects, to see what’s waiting for us in 2025 and beyond.
