CARY FUKUNAGA THE IN-DEMAND DIRECTOR IS BREAKING EVERY RULE IN HOLLYWOOD AND BRINGING BIG THINGS TO THE SMALL SCREEN
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picture and might have won star Idris Elba an Oscar for his role as the children’s Commandant if Oscar voters didn’t fear that Netfix might steal their jobs by sending moviegoers to TV. Elba slipped of a clif, nearly dying on the shoot, too. “Beasts felt like Fitzcarraldo or Aguirre, the Wrath of God,” says Fukunaga, referring to director Werner Herzog’s two legendary jungle epics, during the flming of which, star Klaus Kinski contemplated murdering Herzog. For Beasts, Fukunaga also ended up stepping in as cinematographer, on top of serving as the flm’s director, location scout, and overnight rewriter. Some days the actors didn’t show up, or got the uncontrollable giggles, delaying flming. There wasn’t enough money to fnish all the shots, but, through ruthlessly trimming scenes and flling in with voiceovers, he made it feel fnished. Fukunaga refused to presell the flm to a studio, which might have tried to insert a white star or stamp it with a Hollywood formula. “I defnitely come from a generation that is sick of [movies] telling us exactly what to feel,” says Fukunaga. “My reaction is almost contrary to what they want—rebelling.” But on Beasts, meddlesome studio suits weren’t the menace. “Snakes were everywhere,” says the director. “One day Idris tried to knock this giant snake of a branch overhead with mangoes, and you didn’t know if it was mangoes coming down or the snake.” Elba’s child costar, Abraham Attah,
who won the Venice Film Festival Best Young Actor award, was scared of the snakes, and also of Elba, who stayed tough even when the camera wasn’t rolling. “It’s because of their darker qualities that all my villains have some magical charm, bad-guy charisma,” says Fukunaga. “It’s the reason they attract people like they do.” Beasts, however, was not Fukunaga’s frst brush with cinematic calamity. While flming aboard a Mexican train for his debut feature flm, Sin Nombre (which won Best Director at Sundance), real gangsters ambushed the train and killed a passenger while another died in a police chase. “My career started fast,” Fukanaga notes, “which is nothing to complain about, but I hadn’t even graduated from NYU Film School. I thought I’d have more time to learn the craft. There were classical storytelling techniques I hadn’t had a chance to practice.” When Focus Features’ James Schamus ofered him the 2011 remake of Jane Eyre, Fukunaga viewed it as a chance to expand his repertoire. “Sin Nombre was a guerrilla production, so I wanted to see if I could fex dramatic storytelling chops and make this 160-year-old novel relevant today,” he says. “It’s almost a proto-feminist manifesto. Plus, I wanted to do a historical epic.” Fukunaga is taking on movie history, genre by genre. Jane Eyre gave him a chance to leap from the style of
Grooming Dick Page (Jed Root) Hair Ward for Living Proof (The Wall Group) Production Stephanie Bargas, Tucker Birbilis, Eva Harte (VLM Productions) Studio manager Marc Kroop Retouching Stereohorse
Writer/director Cary Joji Fukunaga, 38, was named after Cary Grant. He’s as immaculately natty and omnicompetent as any star he’s hired—or dated (such as arthouse heartthrob Michelle Williams). Roger Ebert hailed his “mastery of image and story,” and Emma Stone and Jonah Hill have agreed to star in his Netfix reboot of the Norwegian dark-comic series Maniac, about the heroic fantasy world of a mental patient. Not bad for a guy whose father was born in a U.S. internment camp for Japanese-Americans. Growing up in California between his dad’s home and that of his SwedishAmerican history professor mom and Mexican-American stepdad, Fukunaga wrote a Civil War screenplay as a kid. “My college thesis was on the Smithsonian’s censored exhibitions on Hiroshima and the internment camps,” he says. Infuenced by his Sundance mentor, Naomi Foner Gyllenhaal (Oscar-nominated lefty screenwriter mom of Maggie and Jake and ex of American Historical Association president Eric Foner), Fukunaga is an auteur for our time— rooted in multicultural reality, a director who started out making snowboard videos and is now shattering the TV/flm barrier, with a poet’s visionary gleam. “I got malaria and almost stepped on a poisonous snake in Ghana on Beasts of No Nation,” he says of his 2015 flm about African child soldiers. It became Netfix’s frst major motion