Alfonso Cuaron

Alfonso Cuarón Orozco (born 28 November 1961) is a Mexican film director, screenwriter, producer and editor, best known for his films A Little Princess (1995), Y Tu Mamá También (2001), Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004) and Children of Men (2006). His next film, Gravity, is planned for a release in October 2013, while the fantasy adventure series Believe that he created is due to be broadcast in 2013–2014. Most of his work has been praised by both audience and critics. He has been nominated for three Academy Awards: Best Original Screenplay for Y Tu Mamá También, and Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Editing for Children of Men. Cuarón's brother Carlos, as well as his son Jonás, are both writers and directors as well. He is also friends with fellow Mexican directors Guillermo del Toro and Alejandro González Iñárritu, and are described as "The Three Amigos of Cinema". --- Alfonso Cuarón was born in Mexico City, and is the son of Alfredo Cuarón, a nuclear physicist who worked for the United Nations' International Atomic Energy Agency for many years. He has a brother, Carlos, also a filmmaker. Cuarón studied Philosophy at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) and filmmaking at CUEC (Centro Universitario de Estudios Cinematográficos), a faculty of the same University. There, he met director Carlos Marcovich and cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki, and they made what would be his first short film, Vengeance Is Mine. The controversy caused by the fact that the film was shot in English was not the reason he was expelled from the film school; the reason was that he did not get the authorization to commercialize his film. He decided to drop out. Cuarón began working in television in Mexico, first as a technician and then as a director. His television work led to assignments as an assistant director for several Latin American film productions including Gaby: A True Story and Romero, and in 1991, he landed his first big-screen directorial assignment. Sólo con tu pareja was a sex comedy about a womanizing businessman (played by Daniel Giménez Cacho) who, after spurning an attractive nurse, is fooled into believing he's contracted AIDS. In addition to writing, producing and directing, Cuarón co-edited the film with Luis Patlán. It is somewhat unusual for directors to be credited co-editors, although the Coen Brothers and Robert Rodriguez have both directed and edited nearly all of their films. Cuarón continued this close involvement in editing on several of his later films. The film, which also starred cabaret singer Astrid Hadad and model/actress Claudia Ramírez (with whom Cuarón was linked between 1989 and 1993), was a big hit in Mexico. After this success, director Sydney Pollack hired Cuarón to direct an episode of Fallen Angels, a series of neo-noir stories produced for the Showtime premium cable network in 1993; other directors who worked on the series included Steven Soderbergh, Jonathan Kaplan, Peter Bogdanovich and Tom Hanks. --- In 1995, Cuarón released his first feature film produced in the United States, A Little Princess, an adaptation of Frances Hodgson Burnett's classic novel. Cuarón's next feature was also a literary adaptation, a modernized version of Charles Dickens's Great Expectations starring Ethan Hawke, Gwyneth Paltrow and Robert De Niro. In 2003, Cuarón directed the third film in the successful Harry Potter series, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. Cuarón faced criticism from some of the more purist Harry Potter fans for his approach to the film. At the time of the movie's release, however, author J. K. Rowling said that it was her personal favorite from the series so far. Critically, the film was also better received than the first two installments, with some critics remarking that it was the first Harry Potter film to truly capture the essence of the novels. It remained as the most critically acclaimed film of the Harry Potter film franchise until the release of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 2.