Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men was released in 2006 and presented audiences with one of the most terrifyingly plausible dystopian futures ever committed to film. Set in 2027, in a world where humanity has been infertile for eighteen years, the film follows burned-out bureaucrat Theo Faron as he’s pulled into a desperate mission to protect the first pregnant woman in nearly two decades. Featuring stunning long-take cinematography from Emmanuel “Chivo” Lubezki, a career-defining performance from Clive Owen, and a prescient vision of political collapse, the film has only grown in stature since its release. We’re telling the full behind the scenes story with 45 huge facts about Children of Men.

We covered the making of Children of Men in detail on the All The Right Movies podcast. You can listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, or on the ATRM website.

1. The source novel spent years in development limbo

Children of Men is based on the 1992 novel The Children of Men by English author P.D. James, best known for her detective fiction. The book was optioned by Beacon Pictures in 1997 when the company’s president, Marc Abraham, saw its potential as a feature film. Scripts were commissioned but nothing gained traction. When Abraham left Beacon to form his own production company, Strike Entertainment, part of the deal was that he took the Children of Men rights with him. Abraham said he knew he needed a director with a singular vision to bring the story to the screen, which is why those early scripts sat on a shelf for the best part of five years.

2. A road trip movie and a historic event changed everything

In 2001, Abraham saw Alfonso Cuarón’s Y tu mamá también (2001), a Mexican road drama that had drawn international acclaim. He thought parts of its visual style and tone could work for Children of Men, so sent the existing script to Cuarón. At the time, Cuarón was fielding so many offers that his agent would read scripts and summarise them for him. It was a summary of Children of Men that caught his attention. Cuarón later said that reading Hollywood screenplays was a generally depressing experience.

The studio brought in screenwriter Timothy J. Sexton, known for writing Boycott (2001), a TV film about Martin Luther King Jr., to help Cuarón develop the script. Sexton was hired because the studio felt his political sensibilities could strengthen the material. However, Cuarón said they couldn’t land on any ideas that excited him, and he left the project to direct Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004) for Warner Bros. instead.

Then came September 11, 2001. Cuarón was at the Toronto International Film Festival screening Y tu mamá también when the attacks on the World Trade Center happened. Stranded in Canada, he started thinking about Children of Men again, called the studio and said he would make the film after Harry Potter. Sexton later said that Cuarón phoned him out of the blue and told him he now had a clear vision for the story. Cuarón’s creative breakthrough was a simple, unsettling idea: the future isn’t some place ahead of us; we’re already living in a dystopian present. The film was finally greenlit in 2005 by Universal Pictures and Stacey Snider, then chair of Universal, told Cuarón something remarkable: she didn’t understand the film and had no idea what he wanted to do, but approved a $76 million budget anyway.

3. Early scripts laid the groundwork through an unlikely inspiration

When Beacon Pictures first optioned the novel in 1997, they hired British filmmaker Paul Chart to adapt it. Chart, who had been attracting attention with his road crime thriller American Perfekt (1996), wrote his draft as a road trip film. Given that Y tu mamá también is also structured as a road movie, this early direction may have been part of what drew Cuarón to the project.

The writing team of Mark Fergus and Hawk Ostby were then brought in for a rewrite. They said they struggled with how to adapt the novel for the screen until they landed on a surprising creative breakthrough: they saw structural similarities to Casablanca (1942), the classic wartime romance directed by Michael Curtiz. Fergus said they envisioned Theo as a version of Humphrey Bogart’s Rick Blaine: a scarred former revolutionary who had given up the fight after losing too much. It was this version of the script, with its disillusioned hero at the centre, that Cuarón read and that convinced him to take the project on. When Cuarón came aboard, one of his conditions was that he be allowed to further develop the screenplay, and the studio hired Timothy Sexton to work with him on additional rewrites.

4. Major Hollywood leading men were considered for the lead

Thelonius “Theo” Faron is the film’s protagonist: a burned-out bureaucrat who has lost his son and long since given up on the world. With the film’s development stretching across several years, a number of major Hollywood actors were considered for the role at various points. Matt Damon, Russell Crowe, and George Clooney were all reportedly in the conversation.

5. The lead actor wasn’t convinced he was right for the part

When Cuarón signed on to direct, he knew he wanted an everyman type of actor to play Theo. Clive Owen had recently taken on big lead roles in King Arthur (2004) and Sin City (2005), and Cuarón had the Children of Men script sent to him. Owen read it and didn’t think he was a good fit, but he was a huge admirer of Cuarón’s work, and that was enough to convince him. At the time, Owen was also reportedly wanted by director Edward Zwick for the lead in Blood Diamond (2006), the political thriller set in Sierra Leone. Owen turned that down to make Children of Men, and Zwick cast Leonardo DiCaprio instead.

6. The most important character was found at drama class

African refugee Kee is the heart of the film: the first pregnant woman in eighteen years, she’s smuggled through England by a resistance group called the Fishes.  At the time the casting call went out, Claire-Hope Ashitey was just 18 years old and attending Saturday drama classes in London. Her class instructor heard about the audition, thought his star pupil would be a good fit, and arranged for her to go in. It was only her third ever audition.

Ashitey’s agent (the same class instructor) received a call saying she had the job and would get a start date confirmation later that week. The very next morning, at 8am, a call came out of nowhere: there was a car waiting outside to take her for a camera test. She did the test, and the day after that she started filming.

Born in Enfield, north London, Ashitey was cast using her natural British accent, but the day before shooting began, Cuarón told her she had to perform the role with an African accent. Both of Ashitey’s parents were Ghanaian, so she said it wasn’t too much of a stretch to speak in their accent. She also brought a personal detail to the role: in the scene where Kee sings to her newborn baby in a foreign language, Ashitey is singing a Ghanaian lullaby called “Baby Do Not Cry” that her mother used to sing to her as a child.

7. Humanity was reborn where it all began

The character of Kee doesn’t exist in P.D. James’s novel. In the book, the pregnant woman is called Julian, a middle-class white woman. Cuarón wanted the pregnant character to be a Black immigrant, so Kee was conceived in an early version of the screenplay. The decision taps into the single origin theory, the scientific hypothesis that human life originated in Africa approximately 300,000 years ago and then spread across the globe. By making Kee African, Cuarón was symbolically placing the future of humanity back where it all started.

8. A major casting change made the story stronger

Some reports suggest that Julianne Moore was originally cast to play the pregnant character when the role was still closer to the novel’s version of Julian: a white Englishwoman from the ruling class. When Cuarón changed the pregnant character to Kee, he asked Moore to play Julian instead, reimagined as the charismatic leader of the Fishes resistance group. The change removed what would have been a white saviour narrative and opened up the film’s powerful themes around immigration and the treatment of refugees.

9. One actor based his performance on a music icon

Michael Caine plays Jasper Palmer, Theo’s ageing, cannabis-growing friend who lives off the grid in the woods. Cuarón revealed that Caine based the character on John Lennon, the former Beatle and peace activist. Caine had been friends with Lennon since they met at the 1965 Cannes Film Festival, where Caine was promoting the spy thriller The Ipcress File (1965) and Lennon was there for the Fab Four’s caper Help! (1965). Caine pitched the Lennon idea to Cuarón when they first discussed the role, and Cuarón loved it. Caine modelled Jasper’s body language and nasal voice on Lennon, and the makeup and costume teams gave him Lennon-style hair and round glasses.

10. A future star chose the film over a blockbuster

Luke, Julian’s second-in-command in the Fishes who takes over leadership after her death and reveals his plan to use Kee’s baby as a political weapon, is played by Chiwetel Ejiofor. Ejiofor’s film debut had been in Steven Spielberg’s Amistad (1997), and he’d been building a strong reputation through roles in Dirty Pretty Things (2002) and Kinky Boots (2005). He was cast after going through a standard audition process.

Luke’s henchman in the Fishes is Patric, played by Charlie Hunnam. Cuarón cast Hunnam after seeing him play a sadistic Home Guard officer in Anthony Minghella’s Civil War drama Cold Mountain (2003). Hunnam said he’d been out of work for almost two years when two offers arrived at the same time: Cuarón offered him Patric, and Zack Snyder offered him a part in the action epic 300 (2006). Being a huge fan of Y tu mamá también, Hunnam chose Children of Men.

Hunnam is from Newcastle, and while he usually has to adopt different accents for his roles, in Children of Men he plays Patric in his natural Geordie voice. There’s a chilling moment towards the end of the film where Patric executes a man who has been helping Theo and Kee find a boat. As he does it, Patric is singing “The Blaydon Races,” a beloved Newcastle folk song written by George Ridley in 1862 and still sung by football fans on Tyneside today.

11. The opening scene was shaped by real-world tragedy

The film opens with Theo stepping into a coffee shop, hearing a news report about the death of the world’s youngest person, and walking out onto Fleet Street moments before a bomb explodes. The scene was originally scheduled to be filmed on location in Fleet Street, but approximately a month before shooting began, the London bombings of July 7, 2005 took place. Cuarón said he never considered changing the filming location because London was so integral to the script – at that point it would have been impossible to film anywhere but London.

12. It was also a technical achievement

That opening explosion scene is presented as one continuous take, but it was actually filmed in two separate shots over two days. On the first day, the crew captured the coffee shop interiors and Theo walking out onto the street. On the second day, they filmed the explosion and its aftermath. Visual effects studio Double Negative then combined the two shots digitally to create the seamless illusion of a single, unbroken take. The transition between the two shots comes in the brief moment when Theo looks in a shop window and we see his reflection.

Double Negative’s work on the opening scene extended well beyond stitching the two shots together. The couple who are blown across the street by the explosion were stunt actors added digitally in post-production. The Shard, the distinctive London skyscraper designed by Renzo Piano, is visible in the background of the shot, but it wasn’t built until 2009. The effects team added it based on architectural drawings. Double Negative also created all the digital advertisements on the buses and screens visible throughout the scene, which serve as world-building: a mix of future technology and state propaganda that establishes the film’s oppressive society in a matter of seconds.

13. The novel’s author makes a brief appearance

The opening coffee shop scene contains a cameo from P.D. James herself. She appears as the older lady standing next to Theo, entranced by the television screen and holding a small dog. It’s a brief but fitting appearance, though, given what happens seconds later, not an especially comfortable one for the character.

14. The script is filled with literary references

Cuarón layered the screenplay with references to real-world literature and art. After the bombing, we see that Theo works at the Ministry of Energy. The concept of government ministries controlling different functions is taken from George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), the iconic dystopian novel about totalitarian surveillance, and also appears in Terry Gilliam’s Brazil (1985), a satirical film about bureaucracy run amok.

Shortly afterwards, when Theo is kidnapped by the Fishes, he’s bundled into a van marked “Holden & Sons.” This is a reference to The Catcher in the Rye (1951) by American author J.D. Salinger, whose protagonist, Holden Caulfield, is another disillusioned rebel at odds with the world around him.

15. A famous British cartoonist created artwork for the film

Jasper’s backstory establishes that he was once a political activist, specifically a political cartoonist. We see some of his drawings on display in his woodland home, and these were created by Steve Bell, the cartoonist for The Guardian newspaper. Bell was famous for his political comic strip If…, which ran from 1982 to 2021 and was known for its savage satirical take on British politics. Bell had also created artwork for Sandinista!, the 1980 album by punk band The Clash (who were not averse to a political stance). Among the cartoons visible in Jasper’s home is one depicting Bexhill, the film’s refugee camp, styled as a “wish you were here” seaside postcard.

16. One of the most time-consuming scenes involved creating an entire newspaper archive

When Theo is interrogated by the Fishes in their hideout, the room is covered in newspaper clippings. Every single headline was created from scratch by the production crew, who had to invent stories and then write, design, and print them as full newspaper pages. The headlines cover immigration crises, fertility drug failures, war, famine, nuclear fallout devastating Africa, and chaos in refugee camps. One headline reads “Charles Should Be ‘Throne’ Out,” proof that even in a world on the brink of extinction, the British tabloids still enjoy a pun.

17. A major character was dramatically reimagined

In the film, Theo’s cousin Nigel (Danny Huston) is an art-hoarding government official who has saved cultural masterpieces from destruction. In P.D. James’s novel, the equivalent character is Xan Lyppiatt, who is far more sinister: he’s the Warden of England, an authoritarian ruler who has abolished democracy and maintains control through fascist, oppressive policies.

The novel’s ending is also very different. Theo kills his cousin Xan to protect Julian and the baby, then takes the coronation ring from Xan’s finger and puts it on his own, assuming the position of Warden of England. The ambiguity of whether Theo will be corrupted by power is the novel’s final note, a very different conclusion to the one Cuarón chose for the film.

18. The film’s art collection hides layers of meaning

In the sequence where Theo visits Nigel at the Ark of the Arts, he walks past Kissing Coppers, a famous 2004 stencil image by the anonymous British street artist Banksy depicting two male police officers embracing. Cuarón had been interested in bringing Banksy in to work on visuals for the film and met Banksy’s manager in a coffee shop, though even that encounter was unusual: the manager sat behind Cuarón and fired questions at the back of his head. Banksy ultimately declined to work on the film but gave permission for Kissing Coppers to be used.

Also, when Theo and Nigel have dinner, Pablo Picasso’s monumental 1937 painting Guernica is visible on the wall behind them. Guernica was Picasso’s anguished response to the bombing of the Basque town of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War by forces loyal to General Francisco Franco, and its presence in the film reinforces the themes of governments committing violence against civilian populations. Guernica appears again at the end of the film, drawn on the wall of the tunnel through which Theo and Kee escape in a rowboat.

And there’s a Michelangelo reference when Nigel mentions he couldn’t save La Pietà, the marble sculpture carved in 1498 that depicts the Virgin Mary holding the body of Jesus after the crucifixion, currently housed in St Peter’s Basilica in Vatican City. This sculpture is echoed again later in the film: during the battle at Bexhill, there’s a brief shot of a woman cradling the body of a dead man. This image is based on an award-winning 1990 photograph by French photographer Georges Mérillon, taken during a protest in Kosovo. The photograph, which shows a woman mourning her dead son, became known as the “Kosovo Pietà.”

19. A classic album cover inspired a visual detail

The Ark of the Arts scenes were filmed in the Turbine Hall of Tate Modern gallery in London, but in the film the collection is housed in Battersea Power Station. A floating pig is visible outside the window of the Ark, a clear nod to the cover of Animals (1977), the album by English rock band Pink Floyd. That album’s cover features an image of Battersea Power Station with an inflatable pig floating above it. Animals was inspired by Animal Farm (1945), George Orwell’s allegorical novella about revolution against a brutal dictatorship, keeping the film’s chain of thematic references intact. And,with the film being set in 2027, it would have been the 50th anniversary of the album’s release.

20. The car ambush was a triumph of practical filmmaking

The car ambush sequence, where Julian is killed during a shocking attack on the road, was always in the script and spanned 12 pages. Cuarón had just finished working on Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban and his first instinct was to create the sequence using CGI. Director of Photography Emmanuel Lubezki disagreed. Lubezki, known by his nickname “Chivo,” reportedly said he would leave the production if Cuarón used CGI for the sequence, as it was completely at odds with the realism they had planned for the rest of the film. To back this up, when Julian is shot, the blood on Julianne Moore came from practical squibs, not digital effects.

Lubezki suggested building a custom camera rig for the car. They contacted Gary Thieltges, a cinematographer who owned a company called Doggicam Systems. Thieltges said he received a call on a Thursday saying they needed a proof of concept by Saturday, giving him just 36 hours. He delivered. Doggicam built a custom overhead camera rig: the crew cut the roof off the Fiat Multipla used in the scene, then suspended an H-shaped track above the car. The camera could slide front-to-back and side-to-side over the actors, then drop down into the cabin, all controlled remotely by camera operator Frank Buono. The camera rotates a full 360 degrees inside the vehicle. The Fiat itself was heavily modified: a fake roof concealed two stunt drivers (one for forward driving, the other for reverse), the actors’ seats were on hinges that could lower them out of frame, and Cuarón, Lubezki, Buono, and a focus puller rode in a translucent cabin mounted on top of the car. Buono later said they looked “like the Beverly Hillbillies rolling down the street.”

Like the opening sequence, the car ambush appears to be one continuous shot but was actually filmed in six sections at four different locations in Bourne Woods over the course of a week, with five digital transitions created by Double Negative. The shot was extremely fragile: if a squib mistimed, or the flaming motorcycle rolled wrong, or an actor missed a cue, the entire sequence had to be reset. That level of choreography made it impossible to capture in a single take. The moment the motorcycle crashes into the car is also CGI, but the transitions are seamless.

21. A burial scene layers Mexican, English, and literary symbolism

In the scene where Julian is buried, we see Miriam placing a Virgin of Guadalupe medal on top of Julian’s body. The Virgin of Guadalupe is the patron saint of Mexico, the birthplace of Alfonso Cuarón. The chant Miriam performs over the body, “Shantih, shantih, shantih,” is taken from The Waste Land, the 1922 poem by T.S. Eliot. In Eliot’s poem, the aftermath of World War I has left the world symbolically infertile, a direct thematic parallel to the film.

22. The director wanted to create the “anti-Blade Runner”

Production designers Jim Clay and Geoffrey Kirkland said that Cuarón gave them a clear directive: he didn’t want a high-tech future. He wanted the world to feel grounded and worn-down. His instruction was to create the “anti-Blade Runner.” Cuarón gave the design team a file of visual references that included images from conflicts during the Iraq War, abuse at Guantánamo Bay and the Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad, the aftermath of the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster in Ukraine, the Balkans conflict of the 1990s, and the Troubles in Northern Ireland.

That commitment to realism extended to every detail. The cars are all battered and barely functional: Jasper drives a Citroën with a crude plastic panel slapped on the front. Cuarón chose to shoot the early scenes in East London because he considered it “a place without glamour,” and told the set designers to “make it more Mexican” to strip away any remaining sense of capital city prestige. Even the police helmets were thought through: instead of displaying ER for Elizabetha Regina, they show CR for Carolus Rex, meaning the filmmakers correctly predicted that King Charles would be on the throne by the time the film is set.

23. The costume designer was given the same brief

Costume designer Jany Temime had previously worked with Cuarón on The Prisoner of Azkaban and was given the same instruction: make it the “anti-Blade Runner.” She interpreted this as meaning nothing should look like a costume; everything should look like real, lived-in clothes. Temime had a costume team of 40 people working to achieve that worn, everyday aesthetic across the entire cast.

24. One character’s backstory was darker in the novel

Jasper’s wife Janice, who sits in a catatonic state throughout the film, is played by Philippa Urquhart, an experienced British TV actress best known for the World War II drama Tenko (1981-1984). Janice’s backstory is that she was an award-winning photojournalist who was tortured by the authorities for exposing government abuses, leaving her permanently unresponsive.

In the novel, the equivalent character is called Hilda. She is elderly and senile, and her fate is far grimmer: she dies in a state-sanctioned mass killing ritual called the Quietus, where the military drown groups of elderly people on a beach. Theo’s failure to save Hilda is what drives him to join the resistance.

25. A familiar face from plays Kee’s protector

Miriam, Kee’s midwife and the person charged with delivering her baby, is played by Pam Ferris. Cuarón cast her after working with her on The Prisoner of Azkaban, where Ferris played Harry Potter’s unpleasant Aunt Marge. Ferris was also memorably terrifying as the tyrannical headmistress Miss Trunchbull in the Roald Dahl adaptation Matilda (1996). In Children of Men, she brings a warmth and maternal presence that provides some of the film’s few moments of comfort.

26. The refugee camp was built at real locations

Bexhill is a seaside town in East Sussex, and the film’s version of it as a nightmarish refugee detention camp was constructed across several real places. The bus arrival scenes were filmed at Bruneval Barracks in Aldershot, Hampshire. Royal Connaught Park in Hertfordshire was used for the camp’s interior, market scenes, and the room where Kee gives birth. The climactic battle sequence was filmed at RAF Upper Heyford in Oxfordshire, a derelict former U.S. Air Force base. Digital effects were used to add buildings and people to fill out the environments.

27. The camp drew on history’s darkest chapters

Cuarón said he gave the production design teams specific real-world reference points for creating Bexhill. He asked them to look at Nazi concentration camps, Japanese-American internment camps from World War II, and contemporary Syrian refugee environments. In the background of the Bexhill scenes, we can hear the song “Arbeit Macht Frei” by The Libertines, the English indie rock band. “Arbeit Macht Frei” translates as “Work Sets You Free,” the notorious inscription that appeared over the gates at Auschwitz and other Nazi concentration camps.

There’s also a direct visual reference to the Abu Ghraib prison scandal in Iraq, where the U.S. Army and CIA tortured and abused detainees. A widely published 2004 photograph, which became known as “The Hooded Man,” showed a torture victim standing on a box with a hood over his head and his arms outstretched. A prisoner at Bexhill is shown standing in that same pose. It’s clearly intentional.

28. Small details reveal how much thought went into the world

Theo and Kee are taken into Bexhill by Syd, a Home Guard officer played by Scottish actor Peter Mullan. The crest on Syd’s beret shows a map of Britain and the whole of Ireland, suggesting that the Republic of Ireland has been absorbed back into the United Kingdom. The film is full of this kind of background detail: earlier in London, Homeland Security signage is everywhere, billboards warn that “Avoiding fertility tests is a crime,” and a piece of graffiti reads “Last one to die please turn out the lights.”

29. A subtle clue explains how the Fishes infiltrated the camp

During the bus scene at Bexhill, a small but significant detail is visible through a window: members of the Fishes can be seen outside, pretending to surrender. This is how they gained access to the camp. Patric is among them, identifiable by his hair and jacket despite wearing a mask. There’s a similarly careful piece of visual storytelling earlier in the film: when Theo is on the train heading to Jasper’s house, one of the Fishes, Ian, can be spotted on a bus. That’s how they tracked Theo and found Jasper’s hideout later in the film. No plot holes here.

30. Earlier script versions featured very different character fates

Some significant changes were made from earlier drafts of the screenplay. At one point, the Quietus mass suicide ritual from the novel was how Janice died, rather than the torture backstory used in the final film. And Jasper’s death was originally far more violent: he was to be mauled by guard dogs while helping Theo and Kee get to Bexhill.

31. The film is built on a religious foundation

The religious themes in the film come directly from P.D. James’s novel. James took the title of her book from the Bible: Psalm 90 reads, “Lord, thou turnest man to destruction; and sayest, Return, ye children of men.” Theo’s full name, Thelonius, comes from the Latin for “belonging to God.” The name of the resistance group, the Fishes, comes from the fish being a symbol of Christianity for thousands of years. In the novel, the group are called The Five Fishes, taken from the miracle of the Five Loaves and Two Fishes described in the Gospels. At the end of the book, Theo makes the sign of the cross on the baby’s forehead. P.D. James was a practising Christian, and while Cuarón toned down the explicit religious elements for the film, the symbolism remains woven throughout.

32. The director avoided the novel

Cuarón said he deliberately didn’t read P.D. James’s novel because he didn’t want it to influence his vision. He asked Timothy Sexton to read it so they were aware of the book’s content without it constraining them. Several other changes were made from the source material: in the novel, the reason for the global infertility is that men have stopped producing healthy sperm, referred to as the “Ultimate Failure.” The film never explicitly explains the cause, which Cuarón preferred, as he didn’t like excessive exposition.

Other differences from the novel are substantial. Julian was the pregnant character (with Luke as the father). Theo and Julian’s son Dylan didn’t die in a flu pandemic as in the film, but was killed in a car accident. And Theo himself was American, not British. He wasn’t a low-level office worker but an Oxford University history professor who, as part of his depression, would go and sleep outdoors with groups of homeless people.

33. An unconventional composer was chosen

Sir John Tavener had never written a score for a film before and had made his name writing spiritually themed choral and orchestral pieces that had crossed over into the mainstream. His most famous works included The Whale, released in 1968 on Apple Records, the label founded by The Beatles; Song for Athene, which was performed at the funeral of Princess Diana in 1997; and Song of the Angel, written to mark the 50th anniversary of the United Nations. Cuarón hired Tavener because while writing the screenplay, he had listened to Song of the Angel on a loop. He said the piece gave him the spiritual footprint he followed for the entire film.

34. The composer scored the screenplay, not the finished film

Having never scored a film before, Tavener took a unique approach: he composed his music to the screenplay rather than to finished footage. He read the script and told Cuarón he saw themes of motherhood, salvation, and hope. Cuarón agreed, and Tavener wrote a 15-minute piece of music inspired by those themes. That piece became Fragments of Prayer, the main composition for Children of Men. It’s a choral work featuring sopranos and strings, with words in Sanskrit, English, and German, reflecting the film’s multicultural themes. Cuarón then edited the piece into sections and placed them at different points throughout the film.

35. The sound design broke mixing rules

The sound design team was led by Richard Beggs, who had won a Best Sound Academy Award for Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979). Beggs had worked with Cuarón on The Prisoner of Azkaban and was hired for Children of Men on the strength of that collaboration. The sound team deliberately broke standard mixing conventions by developing a new panning approach based on camera movements: as the camera pans across a landscape, the sound moves through the speakers in the same direction. The camera essentially functions as the microphone as well as the lens. This technique is a major reason why the film’s long tracking shots feel so immersive, particularly during the climactic battle sequence, where gunfire and explosions seem to pull the viewer physically into the scene.

36. The director and DP had been collaborating since school

Emmanuel Lubezki had been Cuarón’s collaborator since their student days at Mexico’s CUEC film school in the 1980s. Lubezki told Cuarón early in pre-production that they “cannot allow one frame of this film to go without a comment on the state of things.” They drew significant influence from The Battle of Algiers (1966), the Italian-Algerian war film directed by Gillo Pontecorvo. Much of The Battle of Algiers is shot handheld, which was a direct inspiration for the documentary feel of Children of Men. Cuarón also had Clive Owen watch The Battle of Algiers as preparation for his performance. Another visual influence was Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927), the silent film by German Expressionist director F.W. Murnau, whose long, flowing takes inspired the unbroken shots in Cuarón’s film.

37. A creative disagreement shaped the film’s visual identity

As well as the disagreement over CGI in the car ambush, another creative clash between Cuarón and Lubezki shaped the entire look of the film. Lubezki wanted to shoot with a Steadicam, believing it had more visual power than handheld cameras. They started production with the Steadicam, but after just one day of filming, Cuarón told Lubezki to get rid of it. From that point on, everything was shot handheld. Reportedly, Lubezki would take the Steadicam out of the truck every morning and every morning Cuarón would tell him to put it back. Lubezki did later concede that Cuarón had been right all along.

38. A classic technique foreshadowed death

There’s a recurring visual motif in the film where oranges appear on screen shortly before a character dies. Right before the car ambush, Miriam is eating an orange in the back seat. And just before the battle at Bexhill, Kee and Marichka, their Romani helper, are eating oranges. The technique is borrowed from The Godfather (1972), directed by Francis Ford Coppola, where oranges famously appear in scenes preceding violence and death. Coppola’s Director of Photography Gordon Willis originally said he was just adding spots of colour to the frame, but since then, showing oranges has become a classic visual shorthand for foreshadowing death in cinema.

39. The birth scene was changed at the last minute

Clive Owen said that Cuarón originally planned to shoot the birth sequence with conventional cuts to give himself more control over what to show. Once they were on set, however, he changed his mind and decided to film it as one unbroken take. The result is a three-and-a-half-minute handheld shot that is one of the most remarkable sequences in the film.

Several different effects techniques were combined to create the scene. Claire-Hope Ashitey was positioned in a set piece with a prosthetic lower body, and a prop baby was pushed through for Clive Owen to grab and hold. Cuarón originally wanted to use an animatronic baby, and one was built that could move its arms and legs, but Cuarón wasn’t satisfied with how it looked. That’s when visual effects studio Framestore, led by VFX Supervisor Tim Webber, got involved. In post-production, they replaced the animatronic baby with a fully digital version. The arms and legs were removed from the animatronic so they could be added as CGI limbs, and all the baby’s facial expressions were created by the animators. Framestore also added digital breath vapour to make the room look freezing cold.

Webber said the work was massively challenging. Because Cuarón changed the plan so late, there was no time to prepare as they normally would. The minimal lighting in the scene made it more difficult for the animators to track and replace the animatronic baby. At one screening, an audience member asked Webber if they had filmed a real birth, which he took as the best possible feedback. The pressure was enormous: if the baby had looked like unconvincing CGI at the moment of its arrival, the emotional impact of the entire film would have been undermined.

40. They predicted a global event six years early

In the Bexhill tower block scene, Theo is wearing a London 2012 Olympics fleece. London had won the Olympic bid in 2005, just before filming began, so the costume was added six years before the Games took place. The fleeces have since become available to buy online.

41. The climactic battle took weeks to prepare

The street battle that forms the film’s climax runs for 6 minutes and 18 seconds. It took Cuarón, Lubezki, and the crew 14 days to prepare and choreograph. The sequence was filmed in five separate takes at two locations: the disused RAF base at Upper Heyford and Pinewood Studios. The different shots were digitally stitched into one continuous shot by Double Negative. With the choreography being so precise, every retake required approximately five hours to reset everything.

During filming, the studio became concerned with how long the process was taking, and when Cuarón had nothing to show them after several days, executives visited the set. The crew managed a strong take, but camera operator George Richmond, the son of well-known cinematographer Anthony B. Richmond (who had shot Don’t Look Now (1973) and The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976)), tripped and fell at the end of it. They had one final attempt to get the shot, and that’s the take in the finished film.

42. An accident became one of the most talked-about moments

During the battle sequence, a spot of blood splatters onto the camera lens. Cuarón saw it happen and shouted “cut,” but he was drowned out by the sound of an explosion and the crew kept filming. Cuarón was initially disappointed with the take, but Lubezki started dancing and called it a miracle. He convinced Cuarón to keep the blood spatter in the final cut. It has since become one of the most discussed moments in the film, praised for making the sequence feel like raw documentary footage.

43. The film’s destination doesn’t exist in the novel

The Human Project, the group of scientists working on a cure for infertility from a base in the Azores, was created entirely by the screenwriters for the film. They don’t appear in P.D. James’s novel. The Human Project is the reason Julian arranges the rendezvous and the reason Theo is fighting to get Kee to the coast. Whether the Human Project can actually find a cure is left ambiguous, but there may be a clue: after the screen fades to black and before the end credits begin, we hear children’s laughter on the soundtrack. A glimpse into the future, perhaps?

44. The marketing may have sabotaged the film

From a production budget of $76 million, Children of Men grossed $105.4 million worldwide, meaning it didn’t exactly set the box office alight. Marketing experts have pointed to several reasons why Children of Men underperformed at the box office. The marketing agency Creative Partnership designed eight poster variants, but Kee was almost entirely absent from all of them, and Clive Owen was positioned as an action hero. The tagline was “He must protect our only hope.” The theatrical trailer emphasised a romantic plot between Theo and Julian (a character who is killed 30 minutes into the film), and TV spots used music that doesn’t appear in the film, most notably “Gimme Shelter” by The Rolling Stones.

In 2006, digital viral marketing was taking off, but Universal appears not to have capitalised on it. There was no guerrilla marketing, no alternate reality games, and no viral campaigns. By contrast, V for Vendetta (2005), released the same year, had its Guy Fawkes mask imagery spreading everywhere. To compound matters, Universal released Children of Men in the U.S. on Christmas Day, where it was up against Christmas classics Happy Feet (2006) and The Holiday (2006).

45. The film’s reputation has grown significantly since its release

At the Academy Awards, it received three nominations but won none: Best Adapted Screenplay for the writing team, Best Cinematography for Emmanuel Lubezki, and Best Film Editing for Alfonso Cuarón and Alex Rodríguez. The editing award went to The Departed (2006), edited by the legendary Thelma Schoonmaker.

The film has fared considerably better over time. On Rotten Tomatoes today, Children of Men holds a 92% critics’ score and an 85% audience approval rating. On IMDb, it sits at a respectable 7.9 out of 10. It’s a film that, for many, only improves with repeat viewings, and the world it depicts has only felt more relevant with each passing year.

And you’ve reached the end: 45 huge facts about Children of Men, one of the most prescient and powerful films of the 21st century. Please share on your social media channels, and listen to our full episode about the making of Children of Men on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, or on the ATRM website.