In the beginning of the story, the youngest person on the planet has died,
which is a pretty startling idea.
You think, "Wow, how would they know, and how could that be?"
But if such a world existed, people would know.
And so, for 20 years, when we're not sure of the reason children haven't been born.
It could be environmental. It could be genetic.
It could be a lot of things that have come.
It's not that hard to imagine that world, given what's going on these days.
The world in which Children of Men takes place
is a fascinating world.
It's a futuristic world, but it's a very hopeless futuristic world,
where mankind has discovered that they've lost the ability to reproduce.
And the youngest people on the planet are 20 years old,
and we're dying out as a species.
Alfonso's version of the book really explores what would happen
to a society that had lost all hope.
It's a very strange idea, just as a concept,
that if no one's had a kid in 18 years,
there's no sound of children. There's nobody investing in the future,
because there's no future.
You know, the bleakest outlooks of where we're heading now
is what people are most concerned about.
Environmental issues, you know, fertility issues.
All the things that people are worrying about,
the way the world's going,
is very appropriate to that as an idea.
Pretty much, the approach was a fascination for this concept
of infertility for the last 20, 25 years.
The effect that has on humanity.
And that excuse of talking about the present day.
Jasper is a rebel against the system.
He's a reminder of the past and how it was.
And how it could have been.
He was described as the coolest 75-year-old hippie on the planet.
So then, you take that back 75 years and what sort of, you know... Who was he?
And we have a marvelous political cartoonist
who we based his character on.
I live in the woods, far away from everybody,
growing my marijuana
and living in the '60s and playing '60s music.
The thing with Michael is that his character is, in a way,
he's the moral center of the film.
In the sense of how, in the midst of all this grimness,
it's only whenever you go into Michael Caine's scenes,
are these little scenes of warmth.
You can see that this is a character who, as opposed to Clive Owen's character,
as opposed to Theo, Jasper hasn't given up.
He keeps on struggling to keep the spark of life alive.
The Fishes are sort of political activists of the time.
They're the ones railing against what's going on.
Some might call them a terrorist group. Others would call them revolutionaries.
They are looking to change the immigration policies in the country.
The character I play is part of a revolutionary group called The Fishes.
He's gone through all the principles he believes in,
and, somehow, come up with the only solution he can find.
And it's sort of the wrong solution, but he won't allow himself to admit that.
The movie is set in England. It's set in London.
The book was set in London.
So, in a world where you often double Toronto for London,
it's nice to actually be making the movie in the real place.
We want it to look recognizable,
and I still don't understand how we got away with some of those shots.
Also, because the bombings in London were very recent.
They happened through our preproduction.
That complicated a lot of things with locations
because obviously become very difficult to stage stuff in the streets,
to close the streets.
Right at the bombings, all the locations fell apart.
And happily, as we start shooting the film,
suddenly, those locations started to come back into place.
It was more important, the entrance to Admiral Arch,
that we create there, like, a gate
between the world of the wealthy and the world of the commons.
We shot in Trafalgar Square, and things like that as well.
They're very limited when you shoot those things.
What people don't realize is how small a window of opportunity you have to shoot.
If you're gonna shoot at Trafalgar Square and slow down traffic...
We had to start at first daybreak and shoot.
You only have, like, a couple of hours.
If you're gonna shoot on the Mall, then you have only a limited amount of time.
I am collecting art.
He's the Minister of Culture, so he's able to
go to various countries and save these pieces before they're destroyed.
Vandalized.
Unfortunately, there are no children in the future,
so it may be a waste of time,
but there's a sort of romantic aspect, in a way, to his character.
How he wants to see these great pieces before nobody will ever see them again.
And he's got this statue of David stashed in his back room.
Most of the art is in the Battersea Power Station.
And he's also got an incredible collection of Rembrandts,
and just exquisite pieces that,
unfortunately, there's no generation following that will ever see them.
So, in a sense it's a waste of time, but he has a particular connection.
So it's sad, but he's living in this world of art,
and as far as he's concerned, he's enjoying it.
He wants Clive's character, Theo, to enjoy them as well,
but Theo finds it rather perverse and sort of a slight waste of time.
The Ministry of Arts, or the Ark of Arts, was great fun to do.
We decided that he would have a collection of Rembrandts and self-portraits.
And we had about 23, I think, of them.
Getting them cleared for usage
was probably one of the most difficult things that we had to do.
And at the end, literally the night before,
we had to take two of them off the wall because we still couldn't get them cleared.
So that was a difficult thing.
We found the statue of David.
We shipped that from the Italian studios in Rome
'cause they had this wonderful copy.
And this enormous thing turned up, and we stuck it in the set.
And then, that day, there had been in the newspapers,
in the Italian newspapers, there had been an article
about Italy losing its heritage.
And the image that they chose was the statue of David
with its leg cut off.
And that was one of the things that we were able to achieve in post.
We didn't actually chop up the statue.
Only that I really wanted to at the time,
but Italy said no.
Alfonso likes to refer to the lead character as a character who's fighting to stay dead.
A character who's given up and who's struggling to stay given up.
And his journey, as Alfonso presents it, is a very interesting one.
Well, it was very clear to me, when I first read the script,
that he was trying to create a different kind of hero.
You know, this isn't your, sort of, big, Hollywood, obvious hero.
He's a flawed, very flawed, human character
that is sort of dragged into this extraordinary situation.
I admire Clive, you know,
because he knew that his character was a character
that is pretty much a drunk, is completely passive.
He's against the Hollywood rules that would...
He's the most clumsy action hero you could've ever seen.
He never aggravates anybody.
He doesn't commit any acts of violence.
He's just trying to survive.
Alfonso was committed to a very specific style, making this movie.
It's not conventional coverage,
where you shoot a master shot and then you move in
and eventually you end up in a close-up,
and then you cut the scene together.
What he's done is he's really using the whole film
and shooting it with a little bit of distance,
and also shooting it with what will be, in the end,
a very limited amount of cuts.
The whole style of the movie which Alfonso wants to make
is very documentary in its style.
It's very real.
So Alfonso's trying to shoot the whole movie
as if it's one shot. As if it's real time.
It was almost as if there's a video camera
documenting what is going on in 2027.
You know, and it's the video camera
that's just following and documenting the whole thing.
I think Alfonso has a tremendous imagination
and a real sense of how to tell a story visually,
which is exciting for me.
Alfonso and Chivo,
Emmanuel Lubezki, the cinematographer,
came up with this unbelievable piece of machinery
that allowed them to cover this 12 minutes of film
basically without a cut.
We're trying to sort this out with the assistant director,
the stunt coordinator and the special-effects coordinator,
to come up with a plan of how we could do this.
It was one of those that all the odds were against.
We're putting together a sophisticated little rig here
that, basically, in this configuration,
we can put the camera anywhere inside of this moving vehicle
and be able to look around 360 out the window
and never see any rigging or be bothered by any obstructions.
And then built on top of that is where we have our operation station,
and there we have the cameraman, the director,
focus puller and myself.
Between the four of us, we work together to incorporate and make the shot work.
This camera is basically moving all over the place,
so everything can be done in one shot
but taken at a 360, panoramic view of everything that's going on.
All the stuff that we did in the car took quite a while.
It was really, sort of, exciting to shoot
because the camera moves around the vehicle,
and you never really know where the camera is
because of the way it's placed in the middle of the car.
It's always, sort of, happening around
and it's all contained within this moment and these reactions,
which means that our movements have to be very fluid
in terms of what the camera's doing.
And so the chairs are all on hinges so we can get out of the way
and come back up when we need to be up and get to the side,
get out of the car, get out of the back, you know.
And my character, Julian, is the leader of a group called The Fishes,
whose goal it is to provide a safe haven for refugees everywhere.
Julian and Theo were married, I suppose, years and years ago,
or involved, anyway,
and had a small child that they lost in an accident.
So they haven't seen one another in probably 20 years.
They were involved when they were very young,
and both went in very, very different directions.
There's a big back story with them.
They used to be very, very close.
And they've, sort of, gone their separate ways.
They use to be very politically active when they were younger.
And they sort of drifted apart, and they haven't seen each other
for a very long time.
And she's still very active. And he's gone on a very different route
and sort of wallowing in alcohol and a boring job,
and thinking that nothing, you know, is worth anything.
There's a point in the story Julian comes back into his life,
and all of that stuff is sort of reawakened.
And she's really the catalyst for pulling Theo
into this extraordinary journey, really.
She trusts him, she knows him, and she's looking to him for help.
And he's sort of reluctantly reawakened, really, by her.
And she's pure belief.
Maybe at the expense of some emotion as well, you know.
And that's part of something that's confusing for Theo,
because he re-encounters this woman that was the love of his life.
And Theo's motivations are more emotional than Julian's motivations.
She has her own agenda
and she's just going to go for her agenda.
She doesn't have much time for emotion at that point.
There is a scene between me and Michael Caine...
He, being an ex-hippie,
has an entire greenhouse full of marijuana.
And some of this marijuana gets miraculously put into a joint
and consumed by us.
It's something that I've never done before. It's something which isn't me, you know.
I only smoked pot once.
And this guy smokes pot all day.
I smoked pot once and I laughed for five hours.
And I nearly got a hernia.
But it's very funny on the set, because we ask advice,
you know, and how we're supposed to do it. "What happened? How do you do it?"
And people rather shamefacedly go, "Well, I think you go..."
And, you know, "Give me a break. You know how to do this."
And they go, "I think I've seen them do it in films where they go...
"Take a big, and then hold it, you know." And you go, "You know all about it."
I know all the junkies on the set 'cause they come in with the information.
'Cause they get ticked off 'cause you're doing it wrong.
Research for that has been very interesting.
I've watched a lot of films of people who are stoned.
Do you got any biscuits?
My two favorites. There's Jasper's house,
which I thought was lovely, and was great fun to do
because he was sort of an aging hippie.
My house in the woods is extraordinary.
I'm quite an untidy person. Not in real life. In this movie. Boy.
There's stuff all over the place.
Jasper's house has been through a bit of an organic process.
Michael Caine is playing this old hippie
who now makes his living out of selling marijuana to the refugees.
It's a, kind of, handmade house that he's developed over the years,
and he's built a section in his younger days and then begun to add on to it.
And eventually, the greenhouse, the glasshouse, has taken over
because that is now his living.
He was originally a political cartoonist,
and so the studio was the heart of the house.
And then, gradually, as that world has ended for him,
and he's started selling the weed to the refugees,
the greenhouse has grown bigger and bigger and bigger.
So the hub of the house now is the glasshouse.
Having Michael Caine in the movie is really fantastic.
We were fortunate enough to get him 'cause he's truly... He's an icon.
We arrived at Michael Caine in the way that, I think, one always arrives at Michael Caine,
which is, "Do we think we can get him?"
"Yeah, maybe. Let's try."
And that was really... That was the extent of it.
I mean, he really... He plays an aging, hippie pot farmer.
And it's not campy. It's totally real and it's hilarious.
And it's a great bit of poignancy that comes into this role
because he plays Clive's best friend, his mentor,
someone he really looks up to.
So there's poignancy in it, but what Alfonso and I talk about all the time
is he brings humor.
And I think great dramas, all great dramas, have great moments of humor in them.
The best thing with Michael was when doing
hair, makeup and costume test.
All the crew was in his house doing all the stuff.
And very soon they found the look, you know.
Because he said, "I'm thinking about an older Lennon."
And then, you know, they were with the wigs, they put the costume,
and right at that moment, he looks at himself in the mirror. He smiles.
The door opens, his wife enters, comes next to him,
and asks everybody, "Have you seen my husband?"
And then Michael was, "Yes, okay, I love this.
"This is the way I'm going to play." Because his wife didn't recognize him.
You don't need schools because you don't have any children.
You're not gonna ultimately put money into them.
So, what are your schools gonna look like? They're actually gonna deteriorate.
They're not gonna get more advanced.
You're not gonna have the school of the future,
and phenomenal computer screens everywhere, and kids running...
You're gonna have empty, vacant, weed-grown places.
So you try to create... You create your world.
You try to be as logical about it as you possibly can.
I'm playing Miriam
who is an interesting character.
We don't know at first, but we find out about half way through
that she was a midwife.
Miriam has a profound faith, a profound spiritual faith,
which is not clearly defined by our modern standards.
It's an amalgam of a lot of different faiths,
that the problems of2028 can be solved by dedication and focus.
She would walk through fire to save the world, as she sees it.
But she is deeply, profoundly convinced that the world will not end at this point,
that more children will be born.
And I think that speech that she gives is so important
to explaining to our audiences what the heart of this movie is about.
That, in a second, it can all be gone.
And that we have to fight for our world.
We have to fight for our children and we have to fight for our fellow men.
And that's really what Miriam does.
She gives her life to save Kee and that baby
and sacrifices herself.
Well, I have to admit to having a bit of a crush on Alfonso Cuarón.
He's so gorgeous. And I would walk through fire for him.
However, I don't want you to tell him that because he will make me do it.
I've been a very big fan of Alfonso's for a long time,
since he did that kid's film, Little Princess.
And I love that film.
And I've, sort of, loved everything he's done, really.
And so, the big thing for me was, when the script was sent,
was that this is Alfonso Cuarón's next movie.
I play a character called Kee.
She's kind of a refugee, kind of a rebel.
But she's become pregnant, so she's kind of had to leave
that whole life behind to have her child.
Because it's the only child that's been born in 18, 19 years.
So there's kind of this really hard shell to her.
But underneath that, there's this naive and vulnerable girl
who really needs to be protected.
The Theo character who is dead...
Life finds a way with him, too, and there is a sort of a marriage of, you know,
this very convenient relationship within the movie
in which the Theo character, his life finds a way.
You know, what's inside of him, what little hope he has left,
finds a way and protects this little bit of hope for all of us.
Although when they first meet, it seems like she really doesn't like him.
But he's the person that she connects with the most.
And I think he helps her to make that change,
I think, and kind of come out of herself, because she starts to trust him.
They become dependent upon each other, and he realizes that he's got a job to do,
a job he didn't apply for.
And he doesn't need her to survive,
but he needs her to find his spirit.
And she... And I think why the film will work with the two of them
is that she doesn't overtly...
There is nothing sappy or mockish about the way she does it.
It's just by virtue of who she is.
She's tough and she's got her own thing.
...once he realizes the gravity of the situation.
So from both sides, there's, sort of, this coming together
and this willingness to open up to each other which kind of culminates in,
I guess, what we see towards the end of the movie,
with her having the baby with him,
really, really opening up to each other until it's just this really beautiful,
I guess, maybe father-daughter, maybe brother-sister relationship.
Something like that.
And by the end of the film, what you need to believe,
and not just by some, you know, wave of a magic wand, that you see it,
that these two people have actually forged a relationship
where they depend on each other.
All the sequences towards the end of the movie
take place in Bexhill refugee camp.
And that's been pieced together mostly around London in Woolwich,
in Bushy, near Oxford in Upper Heyford.
And all of those places we had to make feel as if they were an English seaside town.
None of them are. So that's been one of my greatest challenges,
is to pull all those pieces together and make all that join up
in a convincing way.
And then, of course, when we had the refugees coming in,
so they would start building shanty towns.
And then we determined that there was no light.
There was no heating. And England is cold in the winter.
Therefore, the shanty towns wouldn't be made of wood.
They would be made of metal orbed springs
or anything. Wood would be burned.
The city is a walled city,
so we're using a lot of Berlin-Wall-type elements,
and there is a lot of graffiti laid over all of the city
from all the different nationalities, with a very strong political voice.
Ultimately, if you go on the journey of this film, you understand
how we need to look to each side of ourselves
and look at the human beings that are inhabiting this world,
and realize that we're all the same.
And I think that's this world of this tiny little island of England
that Alfonso has created.
And there's all races, creeds, religions, colors,
and we all have opposite points of view of the same situation.
But if we don't take care of each other,
if we don't reach out our hands to each other,
we're not going to have anything.
And I think that's the story of Children of Men, that there is hope,
as long as we care for each other.
What scares me most about the world that's been created in Children Of Men,
I guess, is the response and reaction
of the English government to what's happening in the world.
Because it's such a dire time, and just such a time of need
for so many people. But instead of going towards togetherness
and helping other people, it's just gone completely the other way,
to shutting people out and isolating ourselves,
as opposed to working together as kind of humanity and mankind,
and it just really highlights the kind of selfishness
and just how harsh, you know, man can really be.
Life finds a way. Life will always find a way.
And it's something... The current state of the world,
looking at it and seeing where we're headed,
I think you have to believe that we will survive
because that's what life does.
And in this story, the idea that
despite the fact that we are on the edge of extinction,
we are now going to come back.
We worry about the environment, not for ourselves but for our children.
So this has the feeling of, you know,
of life heading in a pretty awful direction.
But within that, there is this little light of hope.
There's this chance that you don't have to go in that direction.
The thing about Theo in this movie is that he does change.
He does develop.
It's always, you know, more interesting to play characters
that go on some sort of developing journey.
And Theo, at the beginning of this film, has pretty much given up, you know.
He's very dry. He's very cynical.
And he sort of doesn't care. He's sort of lost touch with everything.
He's sort of, you know, just going about his life
in a bit of a daydream, really. Cynical, depressed. What's the point?
No one's had a kid in 18 years.
It's like there's no future. What's the point of caring?
And gradually, through the movie, he's woken up.
You know, he meets a series of characters and goes on an incredible journey,
and, by the end of the movie, he's got faith again
in people and in life and, you know, there is possibility.
Theo's character, archetypically, is not unlike Moses
in that he doesn't get to see the promised land.
He dies before seeing the promised land.
And that was something we wanted to do,
is Theo dying before he actually...
And making sure that this girl is safe.
Nevertheless, he knows that she's safe. Now he has faith.
You start with somebody who blinded himself from faith,
and at the end he has a belief.
By the way, I think it's a more redeeming and powerful ending
than the guy who just finish all of his goals and sees everything
resolve in a happy ending.
I didn't want to make a film that the end of the movie is when the credits roll.
I want to make a movie that when the credits roll at the end of the film,
is the beginning of the film.
And maybe at the end, audience are going to be a little unsettled.
But the part that's a little uncertain
is that I'm not giving the answer.
Everybody has to seek for their own answer about what hope means.
And I think that as troubling as it could be
right after the end of the movie,
days later, the movie will keep on lingering.
And ideally, questioning why we're doing what we're doing to ourselves
as human species.