Alfonso Cuaron (center) directs Diego Luna and Gael Garcia Bernal in Y Tu Mama Tambien.

Alfonso Cuarón is reinventing his approach to moviemaking; reinventing its place in his life. A child of the movies, he has been working in one capacity or another in the industry since the age of 14, when he first began to sneak onto film sets in his hometown of Mexico City. A stint at Mexico's National Film Academy was followed by any number of production jobs, boom man, cameraman, etc., and ultimately, a decade of steady work as an AD. He worked on a lot of pictures, most of them low-budget American flicks shot in Mexico: "A lot of crappy movies. Mostly horror films, " he says.

After directing a few episodes of a local serial produced by a friend, who identified him as 'up-and-coming, ' Alfonso broke out with his first feature, a comedy called Love in the Time of Hysteria (1991). Though the film was never released in the U.S., he was soon making steady inroads in Hollywood, eventually landing a deal to direct The Little Princess (1995) for producer Mark Johnson. It was a job the director fought to secure, and his effort paid off. The film was a critical success and did respectable box office business, too. But his next picture, a modern retelling of Charles Dickens' classic, Great Expectations, was a weaker film and left the director questioning the course of his career.

Hungry for a fresh start, Curaón returned to an idea he and long-time collaborator Emmaunel Zabezki, the only DP Alfonso has ever worked with, tossed around years before: a film set in Mexico, about a couple of young guys on the cusp of manhood who take up one summer with a beautiful young woman several years their senior. A sexy road movie, a coming of age film, a dispassionate and often blunt take on modern day Mexican social and political realities, Y Tu Mama Tambien, slang for "and your mama, too', is everything the director needed to bring him back to the cinema he loves. In this interview with MM, Alfonso talked about the film's off-the-cuff visual and narrative style, where it took him as a director and how those pesky Mexican censors tried to take a cut out of the film's target audience.

Phillip Williams (MM): How was making Y Tu Mama Tambien different from your other films?

Alfonso Cuarón (AC): It was a complete departure from anything I'd done before. I tried a very objective approach, which is quite different from my other films, that were very subjective. I tried to be restrained and removed and let the actors go with the flow of the scenes. Trusting the material more; trusting the actors more. That was the biggest lesson.

MM: With the various observations the film captures about the current state of Mexico, the military presence and so forth, would you say that it's an anti-PRI film (the dominant political party in Mexico)?

AC: We tried not to make a judgement; we just tried to make an observation. For us, this movie is about identity. Two young men seeking their identity as adults; a woman seeking her identity as a liberated woman, more in a spiritual sense than an ideological sense. Together with that is an observation of a country that in our opinion is a teenage country looking for its identity as a grown-up country. So we were not trying to make a criticism of the PRI, it was just inherent in the situation. Whatever you see in Mexico will reflect on who has been ruling the country for the last 71 years. This transition toward a new identity is part of what Mexico is going through now.

MM: In terms of some of the more overt political content in the picture, the police stopping people on the side of the road and the student demonstrations, how much was in the script and how much did you add during production?

AC: Everything was pretty much in the script, but in the process of prepping the movie we were adapting everything. When my brother Carlos and I were writing the script, we decided that context was going to be as important as character. When we wrote the script we quoted certain events that then we had to adapt because reality was also dictating to us. What I mean is, there are little scenes in the script that we saw new possibilities for during scouting. In some cases we would photograph an event we witnessed first-hand and then reproduce it when we were shooting. In other instances we picked up material, documentary-like, while were shooting.

For example, the roadblocks set up by police, you are not supposed to shoot those things. We stole those shots. The second or third time that we crossed a roadblock the police became very suspicious (laughs). When the lead characters need to retrieve their car keys from one of their sisters, whose office is at the National University, the National University was actually on strike. The police invaded the university and arrested hundreds of students and put them in prison. So there was a massive demonstration of 150, 000 people demanding the release of these students. Instead of looking for another location our Director of Photography said, 'Why don't we use the demonstration?'

MM: I'm assuming you used just one camera and available light?

AC: One hand-held camera, available light and a lot of stress because it was a very fiery demonstration.

MM: Did you get what you wanted?

AC: Yes! I got more than what I wanted. And it was good because it was the first thing that we shot and it was like, 'okay, we have to do it. Let's do it.' And we were still doing costume tests and so on. We knew that whatever the characters were wearing in that scene they would be wearing for a large chunk of the film and the hair as well. So that morning we had to make a lot of quick decisions and just go for it.

MM: How do you prepare for a film?

AC: Preparing begins from the moment you start working on a story. It's amazing how your head works on the story even when you are not. Now that I'm coming back to write, I find it very enjoyable. Since doing Y Tu Mama I think I'll tend to be a little more loose in how I approach the work. I used to be so detailed about every single element and aspect of the process; now I'd like to rely a bit more on chance, to see what chance brings. Connect with life and see what life decides for you.

MM: Your next film will be a larger studio film again. How do you think you will prepare?

AC: It will depend on which film I'm doing, and even which scenes I'm approaching. With certain films it would be crazy not to storyboard, not to do a shot list. You have to organize a lot of people; a lot of people need to be in sync with what you are doing. I take a lot of pleasure in doing storyboards because I love the drawing process and I love how it becomes a common tool of conversation with the different departments, even though you don't always follow the storyboards. In a way it becomes a rehearsal for you. The problem was that I used to rely too much on that. Now I'm getting a lot more pleasure out of the human element of the process rather than the technical element.

MM: What is your feeling about how Y Tu Mama Tambien was rated here and in Mexico? It can only be seen by people over 18 in Mexico?

AC: Well, here it's a different discussion. In Mexico we sued the government. The thing is, when they rated the film as adults only we had the right to ask for a definition of, first of all, who rated it, and then how they came to their conclusion. What we discovered is that the same bureaucrat has been in power for the last 25 years and anything that is made in film or television goes through the same institution called the RTC, Radio, Television and Cinematography.

Everything goes through them for classification. The government says that there is no censorship, but when you have classification by the government they are able to use it for political censorship. We found that there is no clear definition of how films are classified; it's arbitrary. So it violates a lot of constitutional rights for Mexicans. We argued, for example, that it violates the rights of parents to educate their children. Our plea was: 'Let the kids go if they are accompanied by their parents.' And they said no. Because the bureaucrat knows what's best for your kids. It's part of this patronizing system we've lived under for the last 71 years. So we sued the government and they punished us by sending inspectors to the theaters and making people prove their age even if they were in their forties.

MM: Did you try to cut the film at all?

AC: I tried to do some cuts to get an R rating in the USA and IFC saw the film and said, 'Don't do it. You are butchering the film.' And I have to say the MPAA was really cool. They saw that the film was not an exploitation film and said, 'Hey, guys, we are who we are, the film is what it is.' We started to present cuts and even they said, 'Don't butcher the film.'

MM: Do you think that with the success of films like Amores Perros and Y Tu Mama, we are going to see more output from Mexico?

AC: I wish I could tell you that there is a whole movement, but that would be a lie. There are interesting individual voices, but unfortunately, part of this thing of coping with identity has affected filmmakers in Mexico and Latin America. I think that filmmaking in Mexico in general suffers from an acute disease I would call 'provincialism' and a fear of belonging to a global community of cinema. I'm so tired of seeing these Latino panorama festivals. Actually I find it very patronizing. I cannot blame the festivals, they are trying to help Latin American cinema. But for me, that's boring. I'd like to see Latin American cinema belong to the world, to world cinema.