For a filmmaker as exciting and interesting as Cary Fukunaga, it’s hard to wrap your head around the fact that his filmography is fairly limited. It’s been almost 15 years since his debut film, and in that time he has one TV series credit and 3 other films. Not a crazy amount of productivity from the director. And he knows it.
Most notably, Fukunaga has had a 3-year gap between his last film, the Oscar-nominated “Beasts of No Nation,” and his upcoming Netflix TV series, “Maniac.” But that doesn’t mean the director has been resting on his laurels.
“Between directing ‘Beasts of No Nation’ and directing ‘Maniac,’ it was three and a half years of no production,” Fukunaga says in a new interview with GQ. Time “vaporized. Just gone. And without a break. I was working the entire time. You’re like, ‘I’m in the prime of my directing life.’ That’s a long time.”
During that directing “prime” he was famously attached to write and direct the horror adaptation “IT.” However, as we know, he left that film after some creative differences between himself and the studio. Or at least that’s what the publicity surrounding the departure said.
“I think it was fear on their part, that they couldn’t control me,” explains Fukunaga about his “IT” experience. “No, they thought they couldn’t control me. I would have been a total collaborator. That was the kind of ridiculous part. It was just more a perception. I have never seen a note and been like, ‘Fuck you guys. No way.’ It’s always been a conversation.”
Since then, Fukunaga was working on the TV series “The Alienist,” before that series was delayed and he had to depart yet another project. Now, he’s lining up the release of his upcoming Netflix series “Maniac,” starring Jonah Hill and Emma Stone. But even then it wasn’t smooth sailing to the screen.
The filmmaker says that halfway through writing the series, he and his collaborators ended up throwing away the scripts and starting from scratch. “That was me. I was saying this wasn’t good enough. We need to look at this again and tear it apart and go again,” explained Fukunaga. “I was like, ‘The whole joy in this is to be able to play with different worlds and we’re not doing that. So we need to figure out a way to make that happen.'”
As you can see in the trailer for the series, “Maniac” definitely plays around with the “different worlds” that the main characters inhabit. So it appears, at least without seeing the series ourselves, that Fukunaga’s decision was for the best.
Either way, the good news is that more Fukunaga’s on the way, and it couldn’t have come at a better time!