Before Alfonso Cuarón won his first Oscar for Best Director for the groundbreaking, visually stunning space thriller “Gravity,” it was just an idea the filmmaker and his son came up with to squeeze some money out of the studios. As Deadline reported, this weekend before receiving the Lifetime Achievement Award at the Locarno Film Festival in Switzerland, Cuarón attended the final session of the Masterclass series held there, where he discussed the consequences of “Children of Men” that led him to make “Gravity,” as well as the technical and financial challenges he faced in doing so.

“After ‘Children of Men,’ which was a complete commercial flop ($70 million worldwide on a $76 million budget), the desire to work with me dropped rapidly,” said Cuarón. “So I started writing and developing a film with my son. I started prepping it and the cast included Charlotte Gainsbourg and Guillaume Canet. It was about a road trip from the south of France to the north of Scotland. The financing was very difficult and the film fell apart. At the same time, I was going through the worst times in my personal life.”

Cuarón went on to say that he was “completely broke” and told his collaborators that he needed to keep working, “but not any artistic bullshit.” He needed a project “that a studio could write me a check for.”

Cuarón drafted the outline and script for Gravity with his son Jonas, but when they pitched it to Warner Bros., the studio was unwilling to give them much money. To make matters worse, Cuarón became even more upset when he presented the project to his frequent collaborator, cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki. He realized that the film might be more technically challenging than he had initially thought. He consulted fellow director David Fincher, but Fincher was even more dissuaded from pursuing the project.

“Fincher told us to forget it, there’s no technology, let’s wait six years. And he wasn’t wrong,” Cuarón said. “James Cameron told us how we could do it, but this was a $400 million movie. We told him only he could do it. And he said, yes, you’re right. So we developed our own way.”

Using Industrial Light & Magic’s LED-based StageCraft technology “The Volume” and a mix of animation, Cuarón and Lubezki found a way to capture the look and atmosphere of space on camera.

“We spent three or four years developing the film technologically,” he said. “Thank God we had a manager who was a real tech geek.”

Unfortunately, Warner Bros. also wanted to test Gravity with audiences before the film’s complex visual effects were completed. As Cuarón had predicted, the film was a poor test. Audiences loved the visual effects and the studio then began to show reservations about the project. However, he told the Locarno audience that the project was a commercial success “thanks to the film festivals.”

“The film premiered in Venice and the reception was overwhelming,” said Cuarón. “He was very popular in the studio at the time.”

In addition to winning seven Oscars, “Gravity” grossed $732 million at the box office, allowing Cuarón to return to personal projects, such as his 2018 Spanish-language Oscar winner, “Roma.”