Children of Men at 15: ‘London in winter is a good place to imagine the end of the world’

Fifteen years ago this Christmas, Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men arrived in US cinemas to a deafening roar of indifference. For some reason the idea of visiting a gritty near-future dystopia in which women can inexplicably no longer have babies didn’t exactly entice audiences away from unwrapping their presents. The film bombed, failing to make back its $76m (£57m) budget at the box office. Critics weren’t sold, either. “One small problem: I didn’t believe any of it,” sniffed The Independent’s Anthony Quinn. “Not the fertility cataclysm, not the police state, not Michael Caine as a boho activist.”

Children of Men is harder to disbelieve in 2021, provided you have read the news or looked out of a window. The film has enjoyed a critical resurgence in recent years, at least in part because of how prescient its depiction of an immigration-obsessed, post-apocalyptic Britain now looks. Among the film’s avowed fans is the American political theorist Francis Fukuyama, who has said that Children of Men is “obviously something that should be on people’s minds after Brexit and after the rise of Donald Trump”. According to Cuarón’s writing partner, Timothy J Sexton, the reason many of the film’s predictions have proved so accurate is that they weren’t really predictions at all. “We were very much trying to make a movie about the present,” says Sexton over the phone from Los Angeles. “We weren’t trying to guess our way into some future. We just wanted to make it like the present, only more so.”

Sexton first got involved in the project in August 2001 when Cuarón, fresh off the breakout success of Y tu mamá también, sent him a screenplay he’d been pitched to direct. It was an adaptation of PD James’s weighty 1992 sci-fi novel The Children of Men, and while the pair were initially intrigued by the premise of a world without children, they weren’t entirely won over. “We decided it was just a glorified B-movie,” remembers Sexton. “Then 9/11 happened. Alfonso called me from Toronto, where he was stranded, and said: ‘Now we have our way into this movie.’”

Cuarón never read James’s novel (set, incidentally, in 2021). “At that time, I was not interested in a science-fiction thing about upper classes in a fascist country,” Cuarón told Vulture in 2016. Instead, he and Sexton tossed aside everything bar the main characters’ names, the British setting and the premise of global infertility and began writing their own story. In the process, they were trying to make sense of how the world was reshaping itself in the wake of 9/11. Cuarón read political theory voraciously, inhaling the work of philosophers like Slavoj Žižek and John Gray and activist journalists like Naomi Klein, while the world outside made itself hard to ignore. In Milan to visit Cuarón’s partner, the pair accidentally found themselves with a front-row view of anti-globalisation protests. “We were there and they were happening, so they became significant in our understanding of the world,” recalls Sexton. “One of the things we said was that if it wasn’t happening right now, it didn’t belong in the movie.”

Cuarón told the website Coming Soon that when the film’s art department started getting excited about depicting a hi-tech future with supersonic cars and gadgets, he told them, “‘Guys, this is brilliant, but this is not the movie we’re doing. The movie we are doing is this,’ and I brought in my files. It was about Iraq, Somalia, Sri Lanka, Northern Ireland, the Balkans, Chernobyl, and I said, ‘this is the movie we are doing.’” They even created a fictitious timeline that ran from 2004 up to the start of the film, Cuarón told FILMdetail. “Just to sort out the events that happened leading up to our story… and the scary thing was that a lot of the stuff that we were predicting was going to happen 10 years on started happening immediately. There was a London bombing that we had in this timeline, and it was so shocking that [the 7 July 2005 bombings] happened during pre-production because this was something that was going to happen in 2012 [in our timeline]. It was really scary.”

He and Sexton finished the script during November and December in London, which at least gave them a pretty good idea of what their apocalypse might look like. “I’ll tell you, London in winter is a good place to imagine the end of the world,” says Sexton. “It was relentlessly grey and bleak.”

Their version of Children of Men takes place in 2027, at which point there have been no babies born for 18 years. Jaded civil servant Theo (Clive Owen) staggers through a London in decay, drinking steadily and hanging out with his pot-smoking hippie mate Jasper (Michael Caine). That’s until he’s kidnapped by the leader of pro-immigration militant radicals The Fishes, who happens to be his ex-wife Julian (Julianne Moore). She wants his help to smuggle a refugee named Kee (Clare-Hope Ashitey) to the coast. Only later does Theo learn what all the fuss is really about: the young woman in question is, miraculously, pregnant.

Julian’s comrades fear that if news gets out that the first child in almost two decades will be born to a “fugee”, as refugees are known, then the fiercely anti-immigrant police state will cover it up. As Jasper puts it at one point: “Poor fugees – after escaping the worst atrocities and finally making it to England, our government hunts them down like cockroaches.” Six years after the release of Children of Men, creating a “hostile environment” for immigrants became official Home Office policy. Sexton says he and Cuarón sensed the direction things were heading. “It’s not that different from what we experienced in the States,” he says. “When you’re evolving as a culture and the dominant class starts to give way, there’s an inevitable kind of violence that arises around trying to hold that position. As an American, you could feel that coming. There was a sense of the world changing, and a lot of fear around the ‘other’ and the immigrant.”

The film’s protagonist, Theo, is an unlikely hero. He’s reminiscent of Rick, Humphrey Bogart’s character from Casablanca: a cynic, who may at heart be a sentimentalist. “He’s a man who has given up,” says Sexton. “I think our description of him in the script was that he’s a ‘veteran of hopelessness’.” George Clooney, Russell Crowe and Matt Damon were all approached about playing Theo but it was Clive Owen who won the role and went on to significantly shape the character. “I can’t overstate the impact Clive had on the script,” says Sexton. “He was a collaborator with us. Alfonso and I were a little dogmatic in earlier drafts. For example, when Julianne Moore comes for him, and has him kidnapped and brings him to the room, and it’s revealed that she’s his kidnapper, we had it written that Theo was bitterly angry after all this time. Clive said: ‘I don’t know how to play that. I’ve been pissed off at her for 18 years, really?’” In the final film, Owen gives Theo a more muted reaction. “There were more consequential contributions that he had to the project, but one thing he definitely brought was a check on the humanity of the whole thing, and the humanity of this character,” adds Sexton. “He really, really understood the character.”

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It is Theo’s journey out of listless despondency and into action which helps the film resonate so strongly today, at a time when it feels easy to be cynical about the future of the planet. “I mean, personally, the hardest work I have in this moment in time is to not give in to cynicism,” says Sexton. “Because that’s when we start to shut down in meaningful ways. I think people think of Children of Men as an incredibly bleak picture of mankind in the future, but our intention was to be accurate about the moment, and to present some possibility of hope.”

As dark and gritty as it seems, ultimately Children of Men suggests there is hope even in the most hopeless of places. It’s the story of a miraculous baby that might save the world, and the people who take action to protect the fragile dream of humanity’s future. In other words, I suggest to Sexton, Children of Men is a perfect Christmas movie. “Why not? Probably not along the lines of Elf or Home Alone, maybe a little more toward Die Hard,” he says with a laugh. “But sure. You have the Mary and Joseph figures, and you have the promise of some new world being carried. The novel is very biblical, and those human myths connect the book with the adaptation.” Like the wise men schlepping to Bethlehem, it seems we’re all still looking for something to believe in. “You can call it religion,” says Sexton, “or you can call it some sort of path of hope.”