For a guy regarded as a god of contemporary cinema, Alfonso Cuaron is pretty down to earth. Funny, too.

Cuaron is the writer and director of Children Of Men, a film set in the near future about a bleak and hopeless world where infertility is rampant and dictatorships are called democracy. Sound familiar?

"It's not science fiction," says Cuaron, who was in Toronto to promote Children Of Men. "I never tried to do science fiction. I was making a film about the state of things now. The intent was to take the audience on an adventure, in the mythical way of an adventure, which is nothing but a way of conveying a truth. What you witness in the film is what is happening now. We are so lucky. We live in such a sheltered reality. The majority of humanity lives pretty much how you see in the film."

Cuaron explains that he is taking the audience on a journey, and in the end, letting viewers choose if there's room for hope. "And if you decide there is room for hope, what are you going to do with that hope? Someone asked me if this film was a cautionary tale and I said, 'Are you crazy?' In the 1970s we had time for cautionary tales. We don't have time for caution now."

Cuaron seems to be using a camera to do his part in that transformation. (He didn't get his first camera until he was 12 years old, but he has always known that filmmaking was his calling.) "You know, in Goodfellas, it opens with that voice-over, 'Ever since I can remember, I wanted to be a gangster,' well, ever since I can remember, I wanted to be a filmmaker," he says, and he laughs. "Even my earliest memories were not of playing cowboys and Indians but of playing a movie of cowboys and Indians, trying to set it up or produce something I had seen in a movie. I was just fascinated."

Cuaron translated his fascination into a stellar career as a storyteller. He has directed The Little Princess, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, Great Expectations and Y tu mama tambien -- an interesting cross-section of fantasy, adventure, sex and Dickens.

The filmmaker was born and raised in Mexico City, and says, of his childhood, "You want to know about the painful thing, being a nerd and a loner. You want to get into that?" He laughs, and continues, "Going to the movies three and four times a day, lying to your family that you're going to play with friends, but you're really going to the movies." He has confessed to seeing Visconti's Death In Venice 40 times in one year.

Cuaron studied film and philosophy at the National Autonomous University of Mexico and made his directorial debut with Solo con tu pareja, which was the biggest box-office hit in Mexico in 1992. Cuaron was co-writer, too, and won an Ariel Award for the film. The Little Princess was his American feature film debut.

These days, he lives in London, England with his second wife, Annalisa Bugliani. They have two little children, a son of two and a four-year-old daughter. "She calls my work 'chinema' because her mom is Italian. For her, I think, cinema is something sort of like school, where I have to go."

What if she wanted to be an actress when she's older?

"I would send her to the nuns," he deadpans.

With his first wife, Mariana Elizondo, Cuaron has an adult son. He is very interested in children and the world in which they are growing up, all of which is underlined in his movie, Children Of Men, which was released in Toronto on Christmas day and has been praised by the critics.

"Children are the hope, the future. We belong to a generation where we had an all-right childhood in an all-right world, and before our eyes we've seen that world go down the drain. People of my generation, politicians, they feel guilty, so they are paralyzed when it comes to finding solutions and they cling to medieval ideas ... now we have to listen to the young generation, because the solutions will come from them." He says, "We have to look for renewal, prepare the ground as best we can and listen to the next generation."