It’s a commonly held belief amongst our generation that having children will somehow hold you back from your dreams; and while it may make things a bit more complicated, one need only look as far as Jonás Cuarón for proof that it may actually help win you an Oscar down the road. That’s because Jonás’ 54-year-old Oscar winning papi, Alfonso Cuarón, was just barely breaking 20 when his little bundle of joy came into this world — and now over three decades later Jonacito can not only take credit for co-writing Gravity, but he is also embarking on his own filmmaking career with some of his pop’s good buddies.
Last year, festival goers caught a glimpse of Desierto, his first live-action film starring Gael García Bernal as a desperate immigrant running through the borderland desert from a gun-toting minute-madman. Now young Jonás has signed on to direct a reboot of Zorro entitled Z, that will also star Gael in a new interpretation of the classic swashbuckling hero. This all makes perfect sense given that, in the words of producer Mark Amin, “Zorro is a hero who is charming, witty, and clever,” and that more or less perfectly describes GGB. In fact, Gael had been tapped to star in a similar Zorro reboot from 20th Century Fox four years ago.
And the similarities with that stillborn project don’t stop there. According to Deadline, Z will take the Zorro character into a version of the near future, which could mean anything from hover boards to giant border walls built by megalomaniacal pseudo-dictators. While the previously announced 20th Fox version spoke of a “post-apocalyptic… barren desert future,” suffice it to say that 2016 is wacky enough that you don’t have to use all that much imagination.
The film will commence shooting this fall in the Dominican Republic at Pinewood Studios, which will either involve radically changing the story from its original old California setting or end up using a lot of green screen. Whatever form this new interpretation of the classic story might take, we can all be sure of one thing: Zorro seems to be in good hands. Go on and make your papi proud, Jonás.