Cary Fukunaga
Cary Fukunaga
Cary Joji Fukunaga is an American film director, writer, and cinematographer. He is known for writing and directing the 2009 film Sin Nombre, the 2011 film Jane Eyre and for directing and executive producing the first season of the HBO series True Detective, for which he won the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Directing for a Drama Series. He has received acclaim for the 2015 war drama Beasts of No Nation, in which Fukunaga was writer, director, producer, and cinematographer...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionDirector
Date of Birth10 July 1977
CityOakland, CA
CountryUnited States of America
I love period pieces. But it's hard to get money to make costumed dramas, so we'll see.
I love the idea of 3D, but it's completely superfluous to most stories.
I'll definitely say that, before film school, I didn't have much of a film-history background. I didn't know much about classic cinema.
In TV, you have no time and sort of just carpet bomb the scene with as many angles as possible as quickly as possible and find it in the edit.
I have no idea what it would be like to be just one thing and speak one language. I feel enormously privileged to travel and be able to mingle and speak to people that, had I only known English, I wouldn't have been able to meet.
I'm better suited to be a director, I think. I see myself as the general author. I hate the word 'auteur,' because it sounds so solitary when filmmaking is anything but solitary.
I'm clearly not meant to be in front of the camera. I'm really not meant for anything but behind the camera.
If you're directing, it doesn't really matter any more if it's going straight to TV - what matters is whether you have the resources to make a story that moves you.
I'm not Mexican, and I'm not Central American. I'm from California.
I'm definitely sensitive to the idea of exploitation. You don't want to glamorize certain things.
In terms of tackling different subjects, I can't really think of anything I wouldn't want to try; that's the fun of it right? Each new style brings new challenges - not that you shouldn't focus on one and master it, but it takes so long to make a film, you just want to have some variety.
I'm not a very sentimental person, so you're not going to find schmaltzy scenes in my movies.
You work with the communities to make films. And you just don't go in and take over their territory.
Increasingly, there's much better material on television, but there's not always the time and money to make it, so you've got to make sure you make it in the right place. It also depends on time commitment; a lot of directors will make a pilot, but a series is just a whole other level of involvement.