Alfonso Cuaron refused to show his Roma screenplay to the cast and crew because he wanted to "preserve the purity" of it.
The Gravity filmmaker's latest drama focuses on Cleo, a nanny living with a middle-class family in Mexico City in the 1970s. The film is semi-biographical, with Cleo being inspired by Cuaron's real-life nanny Liboria 'Libo' Rodriguez.
After having discussions with Rodriguez, Cuaron furiously wrote the first draft for Roma in three weeks and then never read it in full again, and he refused to show it to anyone, with the exception of a production boss.
"Nobody ever read that screenplay, not the actors, not the crew, nobody read the screenplay, the only one was my partner, David from Participant Film, who said, 'Well I need the screenplay just because of insurance'... I said, 'Yes, but it's for your eyes only.' And gave him the draft in Spanish. He doesn't speak Spanish," the Mexican director recalled during a talk at BAFTA in London. "I would open the pages but I would never read the screenplay from A to Z to check structure and stuff like that because I didn't want anything to taint the process."
He usually shows his screenplays to his fellow Oscar-winning Mexican filmmakers Alejandro Inarritu and Guillermo del Toro, but he didn't on this occasion because he didn't want anybody's input to distract from his vision.
"I knew they would give me a mix of suggestions and that will make me kind of sidetrack," he explained. "I just wanted to preserve the purity of those memories and the way they were."
Cuaron was recently nominated for a Golden Globe for his directing on Roma, which was named in the Best Foreign Language Film category.
Netflix executives released the film in a small number of cinemas to make it eligible for awards ahead of its release on the streaming platform on 14 December (18).
During his BAFTA chat, Cuaron explained that he didn't see a difference between Netflix and studio distributors like 20th Century Fox, but would prefer it if people saw Roma in a cinema.
"It's a film that is shot in 65mm and with Dolby Atmos, obviously it was not filmed in a way that was meant to be seen in a telephone," the 57-year-old said. "If somebody chooses to see it like that, well, that's their choice but I hope that people that care about the art of cinema will want to see it on a big screen."
