I walked into the screening not knowing much about the story, and I hadn’t seen a trailer. I knew something about it taking place in the future, and the human race could no longer have children.

So due to my ignorance, the movie hit me like a ton of bricks. Unlike a lot of films that you can predict points a, b and c while you are watching, Children of Men moves around in its own way, and all the credit needs to be give to Alfonso Cuaron, the director of this masterpiece.

It's interesting talking to friends about this film. Most have heard about it, and a few are really excited to see it. But I get the vibe that most people really don’t know how amazing this film is. And I really think this is going to be one of those films that becomes a huge cult classic, something that years from now people will re-watch and wonder why it never caught on when it first came out.

And that would be a shame. This is a film that demands to be seen on the big screen. This is a film that is composed in such a way that nothing is wasted, everything you see was put there on purpose.

Now here is an unusual opening to an interview that I want you all to read.

Don’t.

At least not yet.

I’m telling you to not read this until you’ve seen the film. Not only due to the spoilers, but due to the respect the film deserves. I think Children of Men will be infinitely more powerful if you don’t know what to expect and if you read this, there is no way to avoid knowing too much. Imagine if you read a big interview with Harrison Ford where he discuses all the big plot points of Blade Runner and then you saw it, wouldn’t that take away some of the enjoyment?

When you decide to read the interview you can do it two ways. First is to just read it. The second way is to listen to it which you can do by clicking here.

The junket was held in the middle of November and just like most Universal press events, it was a press conference. But unlike most, all the questions were good and Clive Owen gave a lot of great answers.

Children of Men has just opened in select cities and it will be expanding in the coming weeks. I cannot say enough how good this movie is. See it, you won’t regret it.

And if you want to read Brian Orndorf’s review of the film you can do it here.

Question: Clive, you’ve been a part of several films with really extraordinary technical processes. The green screen of Sin City and the single takes of this. How aware are you of that process when you’re doing these movies?

Clive Owen: Yeah, hugely aware. I mean it’s one of the elements of making movies that I actually really enjoy. I love the collaboration of doing shots like those in Children of Men because there’s something about filmmaking that, you know, if it was just about putting great directors, great scripts, and great actors together and you’re guaranteed a great film, that’s one thing, but that isn’t the case. There aren’t any rules and there’s something sort of elusive that’s out of any individual’s control that makes a film work or not work and when you’re doing one of those hugely ambitious long sequences of one shot, it’s a genuine collaboration. It’s everybody pulling together to try and make something happen and the responsibility is a collective one. And the strongest memory from the movie was how much, how closely I had to work with the [camera] operator on those sequences because we would rehearse for a very, very long time and it was very painstaking and specific, but then when we come to shoot it, it has to feel like we’re catching it on the run. You’ve got to feel like you’re in the thick of it. And it’s all about pacing. If you hold a beat a bit too long, it will suddenly feel a bit manipulative like he’s held there so we see the tank just over his right shoulder so we work very, very specifically about what we want to see and what we want to catch. And then when we go for it, we’ve got to shape that up and keep an energy that is much looser than that. And they’re very adrenalized those sequences because there’s huge resets. It’s like, you know, some of those big ones are four, five-hour resets to try and go again for a take like that. So everybody is very adrenalized gearing up to go in for one of those takes and there’s something just a bit magical. I mean I think that technically some of this film is pretty staggering. The operator…most of the film is hand held and the operator did a really incredible job, I think.

When you were doing those long single takes, was the direction from Alfonso to just kind of keep going in case you stumbled or something happened?

Not specifically, no. Somebody’s there to abort if something early on goes wrong. There’s no point in going on and carrying on and blowing up the side of that building if very early on there’s something that is obviously amiss. No, it was really about rehearsing very, very thoroughly and then it was very cool of Alfonso because he then – sort of the pacing and everything – he then hands the trust over to George and I that we’re going to sort of do that thing. And the take… one of the takes of the big sequence at the end going through the thing, there was a unanimous sense at the end of that one that that was the one. Alfonso was then very worried because the blood spattered on the camera and Chivo and Emmanuel Lubezki said, ‘But that’s brilliant. That’s brilliant.’ But collectively at the end of that take, there was a sense – George, I, everybody – like that was it, we nailed that one. And Alfonso decided in the end we’re going with it because it worked. That was the best take.

Do you remember which take that was?

Yeah. Yup. Which number it was?

Which number it was.

I think on that sequence it was about the third one.

Having Clare as a complete newcomer to this, what was it that you talked to her about getting ready for the process of working with Alfonso and working with such a veteran cast of actors and was there something specifically that she came to you about and asked you?

No. You know, she’s a very talented and lovely actress and it’s just really about making sure that she feels comfortable in that environment. She hasn’t done that many films and it’s a big film and it’s an ambitious film and it was just really… You don’t have to talk about it, but it’s just everybody’s very aware of making her feel confident and comfortable. I mean you know it’s a given that actors do their best work when they’re confident. If the confidence goes, the work’s not going to be as good so you’re just constantly trying to create an environment where people feel comfortable and confident to do their thing.  But she was lovely to work with. It was great casting. You know, I think Alfonso is a very sort of pure visionary director and he just cast the best person for the part.

Could you describe these feelings of working with Alfonso and what qualities he brings as a director? What’s unique?

I was and now am an even bigger, huge fan of Alfonso’s. He’s very, very high on my ‘directors I’d love to work with’ list and even some of his films that were maybe not as commercially successful I think are very special. He’s a highly original, talented … huge talent. And when he first sent me the script, I wasn’t sure about the part. I didn’t quite know why he wanted me to do it. It’s a highly unusual lead part. If you look at that character, he’s in every scene but it’s very unusual traits that he’s got. It’s not the kind of part where you can sort of do your thing as an actor in a way. It’s about sacrificing yourself to Alfonso’s vision and not getting in the way of it which seems to me more important than doing any acting. But I went and I met him and I talked to him and I found him hugely exciting and he told me his whole vision of the film and his take on the movie and then I came on board and the first thing he said is, ‘This is now the bit I love. I love working with actors. I love the collaboration of that. We’re going to do this movie together and he was very true to his word. I signed on well in advance of the movie. I was shooting other stuff but we kept in constant contact. I then, as soon as I got a break, went and spent a few weeks with him in New York just holed up in a hotel room talking about the movie, talking about Theo. The collaboration continued throughout. It was a genuine, really brilliant collaboration through the whole movie. He kept me completely in the loop in all the post production. He sent me various cuts and edits and there was endless conversations and still now as we’re taking the film out there and sort of putting it out there, it still feels like that. So it’s been a very, very special collaboration and I do genuinely think he’s a very rare and unique talent. The thing about his movies is they are whole visions. They’re … He doesn’t do that thing of pandering to what he thinks the commercial market wants. He makes his movies. He has a very singular vision and he goes out there and does that. I think he’s very special.

Did you know the P.D. James novel before you came into this? And do you think there is a possibility for kind of a totalitarian society which the book and film envisage could happen in the U.K. down the road?

I didn’t know the book and I read it afterwards. It’s obviously like whenever you do an adaptation of a book, that was the starting [point] and the huge inspiration for the movie but then Alfonso had a lot of other things he wanted to discuss. Alfonso, I think, with this movie has been very clever. He’s actually using a film set 30 years in the future as an excuse to talk about present worries, concerns, and fears that we all have. It’s an incredibly relevant vision of the future because he’s really looking ahead and saying ‘if we’re not careful, this is where things could be going.’ And I don’t think the film is that futuristic. If you look at the opening scene, my character walks into a café, walks outside, and a bomb goes off. The beginning of the movie. That’s the world we’re in. That’s not futuristic, you know. That’s incredibly relevant. And I think it’s not that … it isn’t that farfetched. There are endless images in this movie that we’ve seen that we are sort of already familiar with and he’s obviously taken it further than the real thing but I just don’t think it’s…it’s not a fantasy.

Can you tell me how the scene of the child’s birth was done? Did you actually have a baby there or was it a doll?

There were a number of sequences in this where Alfonso was hugely ambitious. You know, we’ve talked about the long one-shot deals. Now when you’re rehearsing and setting one of those up all day long and the light goes and you haven’t turned the camera over and you’ve got to come back and carry on tomorrow, you can imagine the phone calls that fly around that evening with the studio going, ‘What is he doing? We haven’t turned over?’ And he had that sort of a tack on certain sequences and the child birth was one of those because we get there and he says, ‘I want to do it in one -- the whole sequence -- from the minute we come into that room to the baby being born.’  His sort of objective about this movie is to keep trying to viscerally put you in the action and the best way of doing that is to keep it as much real time as possible and to not cut away and not do this sort of manipulative, single, single, where you feel you know the sort of territory you’re in – the movie territory. He wanted to put you into the thick of it so that scene was about just trying to viscerally connect with the audience. That was the thing. Now I was present at the birth of both of my two children so I had those things to draw on. I was in the thick of it both times and I remember feeling a bit like Theo does in the movie. The strongest thing that I remember from that day was towards the end of the shoot it was a very, very long day and we went well into the evening because it was only one take and we had to make sure we had it. And Alfonso goes, ‘We’ve got to just try one more.’ And we would just keep going and keep going and we went, you know, the day turned into a night shoot as well.

So was that a doll or a baby?

No, there was an animatronic baby and some CGI stuff was done afterwards. But again it was…you’ve got all the camera work to consider, you’ve got the pacing of the scene because ultimately…  It’s very special when a director gives actors the responsibility of a scene of that length because we have to pace it in some way. We are dictating the pace, we have to keep the scene alive and it puts a lot of responsibility on the actors. But also technically it was very demanding for the operator again because the whole movement of the camera at the very end when the baby arrives it’s incredibly specific where that camera has to settle and sit so again it was one of those genuine collaborations where everybody was coming together and trying to achieve something pretty extraordinary.

I saw you as what I would call almost a reluctant hero, your character, an average man improbably thrown into an extraordinary situation. One of the things that struck me, I want to ask you, being barefoot. I mean it was just that whole sense of immediacy. Were you really barefoot most of that time running?

For some of it. I mean it’s a highly unusual lead character for a movie of this size really because the first half of the movie the guy doesn’t even want to be there. The guy’s dragged into the movie. He’s very reluctant. It’s very unusual to play a lead character that is apathetic, cynical, depressed, drunk, sad really, overwhelming sadness was the thing. Now they are unusual traits. That’s not usually the sort of lead character of a movie and eventually he does become engaged. It’s about the last … Theo sort of embodies the loss of hope. There’s a hopelessness about him. He’s given up. He’s given up. There is no point to anything. But through the movie he does become engaged again. Now the thing about the feet. People sort of crack jokes about the flip flops and things but it’s actually a real stroke of genius because there’s a point in the movie later on where suddenly Theo is becoming active. He’s become engaged again and he’s running around trying to save this girl which in turn could save the world and Alfonso, who has a huge sort of aversion to sentimentality, to stop any notion of we’ve seen this cliché where our guy’s gonna become active and do it, he put me in flip flops. And that’s never going to become the cliché action guy. It’s like it’s not going to happen. So that was a very deliberate thing on his part and then the thing just developed – the foot fetish developed throughout the movie. [laughs]

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