Making of ‘Roma’: How Alfonso Cuaron Painstakingly Re-created His Youth in Mexico City

The Oscar-winning ‘Gravity’ auteur details why he cast nonprofessionals (with one major exception) and became his own cinematographer, along with his obsessive attention to detail and a script so secret nobody was allowed to read it. Alfonso Cuaron was nearly halfway through shooting Roma, the black-and-white Spanish-language film based on his Mexico City childhood, when he walked off the set. “I was in a really lousy mood,” recalls the 56-year-old director. “I had been in a lousy mood for a while. And the scene was not working, so I said, ‘Let me take a little walk.'” He strolled down a tree-lined street in Mexico City’s Roma neighborhood, a street his production designer had transformed to look exactly as it did when Cuaron was growing up in the 1970s. Parked along the sidewalk were replicas of old cars — in the exact colors he remembered from those days — while the extras on set were dressed just as his childhood neighbors used to be. Even the leaves scattered on the ground were copied from the deep recesses of Cuaron’s memory. “I turned and said, ‘Look at you, why are you in this foul mood? Just relax. How many people have the… Read full this story

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