Soldier Boy
BEASTS OF NO NATION | True Detective’s Cary Fukunaga brings us a gut-wrenching tale of child combat.
I don’t think making a child soldier movie was necessarily the obvious choice after True Detective,” muses Cary Fukunaga. “But this is something I promised myself that I’d make.”
The Californian-raised director, who recently wowed audiences having directed the entirety of the first season of the HBO crime show, is talking Beasts Of No Nation, hot off its premiere at the Venice Film Festival.
Hitting film festivals before streaming to a TV set near you, this harrowing Netflixproduced tale has already drawn rave reviews for its frank portrayal of a young orphaned boy, Agu (Abraham Attah) living in an unnamed war-torn West African country, who becomes a guerrilla fighter under the watch of Idris Elba’s charismatic but cruel commandant.
Based on the book by Uzodinma Iweala, Fukunaga first discovered it in 2005 and wrote the script a year later, while still in film school. While he got waylaid with his 2009 directorial debut Sin Nombre and his acclaimed follow-up Jane Eyre, the 38-year-old always intended to make Beasts Of No Nation, taking several research trips to Sierra Leone and Liberia before production began.
When he finally returned to the film post- True Detective, Fukunaga admits he wasn’t put off by the glut of other child soldier films, including Jean-Stephane Sauvaire’s Johnny Mad Dog and the Oscar-nominated War Witch. “That would never have stopped me from making my film,” he says. “That’s like... after Guardians Of The Galaxy, everyone giving up on comic book movies.”
Mixing professional actors like Elba with non-pros (Attah was found on the streets “playing hooky from school”), the result, the director hopes, is about more than just Third World violence. “Focusing just on child soldiers is too limiting. You have to focus why the conflicts starts in the first place.” Just don’t expect to be lectured. “This is not a message film in any way. It’s an emotional film.” JM ETA | 16 Octobe r Beasts Of No Nation is on Netflix from next month.