His answers are often connected to his history.
Fukunaga’s father was born in 1943 in a Japanese-American internment camp. Under the truck?”Fukunaga says he wonders after he has completed a project: Why did I make that movie?
Fukunaga explained to Idris Elba, one of the film’s central actors, the virtues of doing your own cinematography, ultimately inspiring Elba to learn how to operate a camera for his own directorial debut. The central Brooklyn Public Library is a bus terminal. The vibe and look of the series' first season was crafted by director Cary Joji Fukunaga (and marked by a jaw-dropping extended tracking shot that was unusual for TV… “The studio just kind of pulled the plug when they felt like I was going to be too difficult,” he says, his voice a shrug. Fukunaga is 41, tall and extremely handsome.
“You just want to sand all the burrs away. Another “At first,” he recalls, “I was like: What do I do with the camera? In his late 20s, after snowboarding for a few years and working on music videos, he went to film school at N.Y.U. Thu, Aug 13 “That’s it. This month, Fukunaga brings that force to his second TV show, “Maniac,” a Netflix series starring Emma Stone and Jonah Hill as participants in a drug trial that purports to do the work of decades of therapy with three pills.On a sunny day in late May, the director walked into the series’s bustling postproduction office in SoHo and was immediately beset on all sides. “I’ve worked with other filmmakers where even if the material’s not Fukunaga is working on a number of projects, including an adaptation of “The Black Count,” the true story of Alexandre Dumas’s Haitian father, and one about the days leading up to Hiroshima. 1:30 AM PDT Fukunaga spent his formative years growing up around Berkeley’s Telegraph Avenue, “surrounded by Berkeley protesters and communist bookstores and homeless people.” His Japanese-American father and Swedish-American mother divorced when he was 4, and he split time between them. He may or may not currently be single (“sort of ... it’s complicated”), but has a reputation for falling madly in love.
Television has historically been considered a writer’s medium, and film a director’s one, which is another way of saying that on TV, writers usually have the power, and on movies, directors do. Office workers use computers with the black-and-green interfaces of ’80s IBMs.
As a friend, he is a big softy. His polo horse is stabled nearby.
He cannot stand a mediocre job, Somerville explains. The series is set in a New York that is similar to our own, but with a different history of technology.
And that gives me O-negative blood, where you can just donate to everyone. He can take a nap anywhere, at any time, a skill he learned while researching “Sin Nombre”: “We’d be on the railroad tracks for days at a time, and I learned how to sleep on gravel pretty well.” But this lackadaisical vibe belies his thrumming high standards and his obsessive eye.Fukunaga has a devoted core of colleagues who have collaborated with him on multiple projects and talk, in quasi-religious terms, about the moments when they realized they had to just let go and let Cary be Cary, trusting his instincts and his process, however taxing that process could be. So, you have to clean and clean and clean.”“Maniac” is so jam-packed with oddities that the koala, when it appears in Episode 2, is just one more surreal detail in a show bursting with them. “I hadn’t allowed myself to understand what the internment experience must have been like for my grandparents, for their family, for their kids — my uncles and my dad.” He was using his work to get closer, by some emotional transitive property, to their trauma.Fukunaga was recently looking at photographs of himself as a child, “and I was like, ‘Oh, [expletive], I looked like a little ethnic kid.’ ” He was bullied at school. “I was interested in it, but didn’t know how to make that story yet.