It seems the rumors from earlier this month that Gravity director Alfonso Cuarón might be sitting in the director’s chair for the J.K. Rowling adaptation Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them were just that.

In an interview with the Global Post, Cuarón shot down any plans for directing Fantastic Beasts or any other film following the involved shooting process for the Oscar-nominated Gravity – even if he did love the experience of working on Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban:

“It was a very beautiful experience for me [making Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban]. I have a lot of love for that universe and I tremendously admire J.K. Rowling, but today, for the present, projects based around lots of visual effects don’t attract me. I’m coming out of a five-year process of doing visual effects and now I sort of want to clean my palate of that a little bit.”

It’s easy to see how the director might be wary about being in charge of Warner Bros. nextbig franchise-starter – particularly with a planned November 18th, 2016 release date. The preproduction alone could eat up the better part of a year (Rowling turned in draft of the script earlier this year, but there’s been no word on a response from the bosses at Warner Bros., thus potentially playing havoc with when the whole thing could go into production).

In the meantime, Cuarón is producing the thriller Desierto with his Y Tu Mama Tambien star Gael García Bernal.

[Sources: Global Post via ScreenRant]