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
'Jane Eyre' was one of those films that I was familiar with as a kid, and I always enjoyed the story.
I was imagining films in my head and trying to gather friends together to make movies since I was a kid. I tried to do comedy skits and a horror film.
I think about a Richard Avedon photo series, the kind of faces he gets of real people, which I find so captivating. Fellini was also great in filling his films with this ambiance, this environment, sometimes chaotic and carnival-like, but people's faces were always amazing.
It's a treat and daunting to be directing someone like Judi Dench, who's made more films than I'll ever make in my lifetime.
'City of God' and 'Slumdog Millionaire' are both films that I really like, but they are stylistically the opposite of what I wanted to do.
I think any character has to be well-rounded, whether they are male or female - they have to be complex and make choices that maybe we don't agree with, you know? I guess that's what makes them human.
I wrote my first script, which was 50 pages, at age 15. It was about two brothers in love with the same nurse while they're convalescing in a Civil War hospital.
When I was 20, I was living in the Alps, snowboarding and studying political science. I blew out my knee, and I began to realize my days in the sport were numbered; the reality was I would never be a pro.
My ideas tend to be either really big in terms of like, the logistics, or really small.
My mom was married to a Mexican guy - a surfer - and so we'd kind of camp out on the beach the swell season.
My manager sent me the first two scripts for 'True Detective,' and I just thought they were so interesting and that the world they were depicting was so titillating to me.
Literally, I don't have a television. So I don't really know what's happening pop-culturally. I read the 'New York Times.' And there's one worldwide cabin blog that I look at.
When you have a script, and you're discussing what it can be, and who going to play what role, that's a kind of like a fantasy football game. You can imagine these different dream teams interpreting these characters that only exist in your head.
To be straight, I was kind of a dork, and in order to fulfill the creative fires burning inside me, I participated vigorously as a Civil War re-enactor through most of my teenage years, traveling across the country to participate in large scale reenactments - grandiose plays enacted by over weight history buffs and war enthusiasts alike.