Production History (Children of Men) Children of Men (2006)
Cuarón departed sharply from P.D. James's novel
P.D. James published The Children of Men in 1992 — a literary dystopia narrated in the diary of an Oxford don, with infertility presented as a slow biological mystery and a strain of Christian allegory running through the back half. Cuarón (in Children of Men), Timothy J. Sexton, and the other credited writers used James's premise and the names of three or four characters and threw out almost everything else. The Warden of England plot is gone. The doe-eyed lovers are gone. Theo is no longer an Oxford academic but a Ministry of Energy bureaucrat. Kee replaces Julian as the pregnant woman; Julian is repurposed as Theo's ex-wife and the leader of the militia.
"P.D. James's book is much more about a meditation on hope and so forth, but I needed to use this premise of infertility as a metaphor for the fading sense of hope humanity has at the beginning of the twenty-first century." — Alfonso Cuarón, The Guardian (2006)
P.D. James, who was 86 at the time of release, gave the adaptation her blessing despite the changes:
"I think the film is wonderful. The basic idea is mine, but Mr. Cuarón has used it in his own way." — P.D. James, The Guardian (2006) (paraphrased; original interview)
Universal greenlit the film off Cuarón's Harry Potter
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004) had been a creative triumph and a financial hit, and it gave Cuarón leverage to make a darker, smaller, much more political film at studio scale. Universal and Strike Entertainment financed Children of Men at roughly $76 million, with Hilary Shor, Marc Abraham, Eric Newman, Iain Smith, and Tony Smith producing. Production ran from late 2005 through spring 2006.
Lubezki's long takes were the central technical commitment
Cuarón had worked with cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki (in Children of Men) since film school in Mexico City and on every film since A Little Princess (1995). For Children of Men they decided early that the camera would behave like a witness rather than a narrator — natural light wherever possible, handheld, and structured around extended unbroken takes. The two most discussed sequences are the car ambush (running roughly four minutes inside a moving vehicle) and the Bexhill stairwell (running roughly six minutes through the bombed-out housing block). See The Long Take.
The car ambush required a custom rig built by Doggicam Systems, a Chevy people-mover whose roof and seats had been removed to allow the camera to swing through 360 degrees inside the cabin. Lubezki, Cuarón, the actors, and the rig operator rehearsed for two weeks before filming. The sequence was shot in five or six full takes; the version in the film is take six.
"We thought we were going to do it in three or four days. We ended up doing it in two weeks." — Emmanuel Lubezki, American Cinematographer (2007)
The Bexhill stairwell take was even more complex — it required squibs that wouldn't trigger until specific frames, a dummy baby for one shot and a real baby for one second, and a famous moment in which a drop of stage blood lands on the lens, which Cuarón initially wanted to remove and then kept.
"The blood landed on the lens. We were going to do another take but it was getting dark, so we kept it." — Emmanuel Lubezki, American Cinematographer (2007)
Bexhill-on-Sea played itself
The Bexhill refugee camp was filmed on location in Bexhill-on-Sea, a quiet retirement town on the East Sussex coast. Cuarón chose Bexhill specifically because its derelict seafront could be re-skinned with rubble, cages, and burned cars without losing the geometry of an English seaside town. The De La Warr Pavilion is briefly visible in the background of the climactic boat scenes. Production also shot heavily in London (Fleet Street, the Strand, Bishopsgate, the disused Aldwych Underground station) and at Battersea Power Station, where the Ark of Arts sequence was filmed inside the empty turbine hall.b8 Pinewood and Shepperton Studios handled interiors. (imdb, wikipedia)
The art department built the world out of the present
Cuarón directed the production designers Jim Clay and Geoffrey Kirkland to build the future from the materials of 2006 — no holograms, no flying cars, no future-tech. Cars on the road are 2005 production cars left to rust; phones and screens are commercial products of the time. The only futurist gesture is the constant low-grade advertising on commuter trains and bus shelters. The deliberate choice was to show a 2027 in which the future never arrived.
"We wanted to make a film in which the future was the past with a slight fold." — Alfonso Cuarón, The Guardian (2006)
Editing was Cuarón and Alex Rodríguez
Cuarón co-edited with Alex Rodríguez. Because so many sequences were single takes, the editing room job was less about cutting within scenes than about choosing among full performances of each long take and stitching the takes into the larger cross-cut structure. The editing was nominated for an Academy Award.
John Tavener provided the choral element; the score is mostly source music
There is no traditional non-diegetic score. Cuarón threaded source music through the film — Aphex Twin's Avril 14th in Jasper's cottage, King Crimson's The Court of the Crimson King in Nigel's Ark, Deep Purple's Hush in the car after Julian's death — and used John Tavener's choral piece Fragments of a Prayer (commissioned for the film, with mezzo-soprano Sarah Connolly) at the moments where the sacred breaks through, particularly in the stairwell sequence and the closing minutes.