Alfonso Cuarón has denied reports he will take on JK Rowling's new film trilogy, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them.

Speaking in the Italian town of Pietrasanta in Tuscany, Cuarón told the Efe newswire he had "no plans" for a follow-up to the Oscar-winning space drama Gravity, which took $716m (£424.9m) at the global box office. Recent reports have named Cuarón as a frontrunner for Rowling's project, which is set 70 years before the hugely successful eight-film Harry Potter film series.

"My near-term plans over the coming months are to take my kids to school and plan what I'm going to do this summer with them. Now, I'm once again connecting with life, I have no plans of any kind," said the Mexican film-maker, who directed 2004's critically acclaimed Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.

"It was a very beautiful experience for me. I have a lot of love for that universe and I tremendously admire JK Rowling," said Cuarón. "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."

Former editor-in-chief of Deadline Nikki Finke tweeted last week that Cuarón was "deep in talks" for Fantastic Beasts, for which Rowling is writing her debut screenplay. The proposed trilogy will feature the swashbuckling adventurer Newt Scamander. Its title is borrowed from the first-year textbook that Potter uses at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry in the novel Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone.

Cuarón also told Efe he would not be directing a rumoured prequel to The Shining, Stanley Kubrick's classic 1980 chiller. The Schmoes Know blog reported last week that studio Warner Brothers had offered the film-maker the chance to take charge of the project, which looks set to be titled The Overlook Hotel.