In the impeccable filmography of Alfonso Cuarón, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban undoubtedly stands out a little. The film is beloved by fans as one of the strongest installments of the Harry Potter franchise, but it’s also one of the few projects that the multi-Oscar-winning director of Gravity and Roma didn’t develop and write himself.
Cuarón admits he was “a little reluctant to do it” when the opportunity to take on the world of Harry Potter first came his way, but he says making the film was nonetheless one of the most rewarding experiences of his career.
Speaking at the Busan International Film Festival in South Korea on Thursday, Cuarón said, “In many ways, Harry Potter gave me many things — one thing is two of the most beautiful years of my life.”
“I learned so much,” he continued. “I had no idea about visual effects before, but then after Harry Potter it was like second nature. And the whole collaborative work with people who were at the very top of their games — the best production designer, the best cinematographer, like amazing people working together.”
Cuarón also suggested that the industry cachet he gained from the franchise film’s success allowed him to pursue the passion project that has become one of his most acclaimed works among film buffs.
“I had written Children of Men before, and nobody wanted to do it,” he explained. “Then I did Harry Potter, and after, I was able to make Children of Men. So, I have nothing but gratitude towards Harry Potter,” he said.
Cuarón made his first trip to South Korea this week to attend the Busan festival, Asia’s leading cinema event, alongside his filmmaker son Jonás Cuarón, who is presenting his latest feature, Campeón Gabacho, at the event. After attending an Imax screening of his contemporary sci-fi classic Gravity, the elder Cuarón sat down for a master class discussion moderated by Korean director Yeon Sang-ho, best known internationally for his zombie movie sensation Train to Busan. The two directors became acquaintances after that film’s success, with Cuarón later executive producing Yeon’s 2025 mystery thriller Revelations.
The conversation caught Cuarón in a reflective mood, with his observations offering as much life wisdom as insight into filmmaking craft.
“Your films often feel extraordinarily precise and meticulously constructed, yet there is always a sense of life within the frame, as though something unexpected could happen at any moment,” Yeon told Cuarón, adding that he felt this quality particularly strongly in Children of Men. “For a director, do you think control and the unexpected are opposites to each other, or is it only through rigorous control that you can create the conditions to truly embrace the unexpected?” he asked.
“I tend to prepare a lot, and I tend to think and imagine the way that I want the film to be in my head — but then reality starts to shape it,” Cuarón replied. “But isn’t life like that? In many ways, in our lives, we have ideas and expectations. But something I have learned is that if we want to hold onto our expectations against the reality that is presented, we create unhappiness, and also we create a disconnection with the process of life.”
Cuarón said that age and experience have taught him “to prepare and to be ready for things, but at the same time to accept what life brings.”
“That’s when life takes you to incredible places that you would not have expected,” he said, adding, “In that sense, I think the filmmaking process is very connected to the process of life.”
Cuarón said his penchant for long takes — with Children of Men, again, boasting several of recent cinema’s most famous examples — derives from his interest in creating opportunities for instinct and “cinematic miracles” within a process of obsessive technical preparation.
“You prepare and you control in order for the unexpected to happen and to allow it to come to life,” he said.
“I like to shoot very long, continuous takes, because there’s only so much you can control,” he explained. “There’s one thing that you can never control inside those shots, and that is time. Time is flowing completely differently from take to take. The positions, the relationship between actors and camera, and how the light is changing. That’s also the reason I like to shoot natural light as much as possible, because of the accidents of light, the accidents of weather.”
He added: “You have a clarity of what you’re looking for, and then life is just going to not give you that — it’s going to give you something even better, something that you couldn’t have thought of.”
Cuarón said he’s also learned over the course of his career to recalibrate how he measures the success of his creative output, too.
“The rule is that every time I finish a film, I try to dissect what I learned on that film — because I really believe that the only reason to make a film is for what you learn for the next one. Success has nothing to do with the results at the box office, or with critics or awards. It’s about what you learned and how you grow as a filmmaker.”
In comments evocative of his recent social media posts in support of his friend Alejandro González Iñárritu’s frostily received new feature Digger, Cuarón argued that a film’s ultimate value takes time to be perceived.
“I have to say that the film on which I learned the most is probably the film that was least successful on every single front,” he explained. “Children of Men, when it was released, was a film that had very mediocre reviews. It was a box office flop. Nevertheless, nowadays it’s the one that probably people talk about the most. So in that sense, [on] success, only time will tell.”
Yeon later told Cuarón that when he began making films as a younger man, he did so “in an attempt to understand the world.”
“But at a certain point,” he added, “filmmaking made me realize just how little I understand about life. After making films for so many years, has your way of seeing the world become clearer, or has it become more ambiguous?”
“More ambiguous, thank god,” Cuarón replied. “When I was younger, film was everything, and life was only part of film. I guess, now, I embrace life more. Life is just incredible. Film, for me, remains a very important part, but it’s just a part. It doesn’t make the whole of life anymore.”