Alfonso Cuarón on Why He Turned Down Directing a Bond Movie After Having Dinner With Joel Coen

Alfonso Cuarón had the audience of the Marrakech Film Festival in stitches during a wide-ranging conversation in which he revealed that he had never read a Harry Potter book before shooting “Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.” He also recalled turning down an offer to shoot a James Bond movie after having dinner with filmmaker Joel Coen.

Asked by Moroccan directors Alaa Eddine Aljem and Talal Selhami how he managed to put his personal stamp on the third “Harry Potter” film which, the moderators noted, is considered by many fans the best installment in the franchise, Cuarón replied that he basically had to pay the bills.  

“I had written ‘Children of Men’ that nobody wanted to do. I was unemployed. I was going to have a child,” Cuarón explained. “This film was offered to me, and I didn’t want to do it because I didn’t know anything about Harry Potter.”

Then, once Cuarón read the books, he said to himself: “There is something good here! I will give it a try.”

Cuarón noted that “Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban” turned out to be “the best experience making a film I ever had. I learned like crazy. It was a crash course in visual effects. It was a really pleasant experience.” And another great consequence of that experience is that right after “Harry Potter,” Warner Bros. then wanted to do “Children of Men.” 

Cuarón added that “Harry Potter and Prisoner of Azkaban” also gave him the visual effects tools to solve problems that he had never been able to solve before.

But the thrill of making that blockbuster didn’t prevent him from turning down another similar opportunity.

“Ages ago I was offered a Bond film,” he revealed. “And I said, ‘Yeah, cool. Maybe Bond. I am going to do one.’ And then when the process started and I was going to shoot all the dialogue and stuff, there was a [separate] team doing all the action scenes. It kind of felt very weird.”

The reason he didn’t do it? “I was troubled about the idea of doing it,” Cuarón explained. “I had dinner with Joel Coen, and I said, ‘Joel, what do you think of Bond?’ And he said, ‘Oh cool, I enjoy Bond.’ I said, ‘Would you do a Bond film?’” According to Cuarón, Coen replied: “It probably falls into the category of a film I want to watch but not do.”

Cuarón continued, “There I learned the lesson that some films I prefer to watch and not do.”