Road To Roma

Watch it on Netflix

I love that making of films exist. They are a genre in themselves, and a rich learning resource.

This is a film about the making of Roma (2018), directed by Andres Clariond and Gabriel Nuncio. My notes, in case you don't want to watch it! There might be a few spoilers, if that's even a concept in a film like Roma.

• Cuarón only told the actors what their character knew at that point. Actors weren't given a script, and perfromance and action varied from take to take. If you're doing the exact same thing in every take, there's nothing different. 

• He believes in being very close to the cinematography, really understanding the technical details

• The detailing to get a period right... the tiles and the fittings and the furniture (all sourced from his family) 

• For extras, there was a huge board with all their pictures. He would pick from that, decide on a costume and a hairstyle for each scene that required them. It was a mix of different ethnicities and genders.

• Tip: take a quick break and walk it out when you're in a foul mood on set.

• Playing, really playing with kids. 

• In a long take, a wide angle shot, you are neither prioritising the surroundings or the character. The context is as important, if not more, than the character. The character is sort of flowing through the context, so you have to get everything very right. 

• "I love close ups, but I don't like using them to make the narrative easier. When a character speaks you have a close-up, and when the other replies you cut to a close up. You can watch those with your eyes closed. There's no language in them."

• On deciding the format: "this image couldn't have existed in the 70s. I first wanted a square format. But then Lubezki suggested a wider format. I embraced the digital. This does not loook like a film from the 70s or 80s. It looks like it was made in 2018, 65mm, 4k. No grain. The elements should traverse the format. The choice to pan so much was a result of the format"

• "I had to remain objective, and there's nothing more objective than a tracking shot from afar. Dolly shots moving bakcward and forward are too subjective. You don't ever see it from one person's view. Cleo exists as one character in this wider univerrs. The story is about that universe. The characters only traverse it."

• For the birth scene, all the doctors and nurses were actual doctors and nurses, in those actual specialities. And they did many trial runs to get the technical action perfect. For that scene, Cleo didn't wasn't told that the baby was going to be still born. She thought that there was a live baby under the gurney, and so the anguish in the scene is real. 

• When you do narrative cinema, you always have narration to fall back on. This was more risky. there was no safety net. The narrative was minimal, and the rest was... everything else. "That's what I love about films. The mystery"