Trailer
Plot summary
Humanity has been infertile for eighteen years, and Britain has become a totalitarian state where refugees are detained and deported. Theo Faron, a cynical civil servant and former activist, is seized by the Fishes, a militant group that campaigns for refugee rights and is run by Julian Taylor, his estranged wife. Julian wants him to obtain transit papers for a young refugee named Kee, who is pregnant. Theo gets the papers from his cousin Nigel, a government minister, and agrees to escort Kee out of London himself. With the midwife Miriam and Julian, he leaves in a car driven by Luke, a Fishes member, heading for Canterbury.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Children of Men (2006)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- While Cuarón was preparing the film the London bombings occurred, but he did not consider moving the production, saying the shot of Fleet Street looking towards St. Paul's would have been impossible anywhere else. The opening terrorist attack scene on Fleet Street was shot a month and a half after the bombing.
- The "single shot" car ambush was not one continuous take: it was shot in six sections at four different locations over one week and required five seamless digital transitions.
- In the middle of one shot, blood splattered onto the camera lens, and cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki convinced the director to leave it in the finished film.
- The Shard tower was digitally added to London's skyline from early architectural drawings, because when the film was made the skyscraper had not yet been built, but would have been by the time of the film's setting.
- It took fourteen days to prepare the single shot in which Clive Owen's character searches a building under attack, and five hours every time they wanted to reshoot it.
- Impressed by Owen's creative insights, Cuarón and Sexton brought the actor on board as a writer. "Clive was a big help", Cuarón told Variety. "I would send a group of scenes to him, and then I would hear his feedback and instincts."
- Caine based Jasper on his experiences with his friend John Lennon, and it was the first time he had portrayed a character who would fart or smoke cannabis.
- Kee did not appear in the book: she was written into the film out of Cuarón's interest in the single-origin hypothesis of human origins and the status of dispossessed people, the child of an African woman reflecting that humanity started in Africa.
