CARY FUKANAGA
Director Cary Fukunaga on how the chaotic shoot of BEASTS OF NO NATION prepared him for James Bond
Beasts Of No Nation revisited.
HAS ANYONE HAD as eclectic a career as Cary Joji Fukunaga? The filmmaker burst onto the scene with Mexican thriller Sin Nombre, dabbled in English melodrama with Jane Eyre, helmed watercooler TV hits such as True Detective and Maniac, and will (hopefully) soon be shaking and stirring with 007 in No Time To Die. But his most acclaimed work remains 2015’s Beasts Of No Nation, based on the book by Uzodinma Iweala. Set in a never-named West African country (heavily inspired by the real-life civil war in Sierra Leone), it’s a harrowing, sweeping war film about child soldiers, hinged around a masterful performance by Idris Elba as the menacingly charismatic rebel leader Commandant. Released as the first-ever Netflix Original, the film now earns a coveted place in the Criterion Collection, a feat Fukunaga describes as “a dream come true” — but as he explains here, it took years of research, a tumultuous shoot in Ghana, and a minor bout of malaria to get there.
Congratulations on the Criterion release. This must be the final stage of a very long passion project for you…
It first started when I was still an undergrad,
working on my thesis. I saw a professor whose office had all these news snippets on his door outside about child soldiers and Rwanda and Uganda. The concept had never really occurred to me at that time. And then, when I graduated, I applied to NYU for film school with this short story about a village being overrun in Sierra Leone. I was reading Sebastian Junger books, and getting deeper into research about what that war was like in Sierra Leone, and ended up going to Sierra Leone in 2000 to do research while working on a documentary. So the subject was something that I was definitely passionate about.
I was trying to figure out how to write a feature when I got sort of sidetracked by my immigration story. That ended up becoming [Fukunaga’s debut feature] Sin Nombre.
You’d been working on the project before you came across the book, right? Was there almost a very different film to the one that ultimately got made?
I had a few ideas. A lot of them were about the displaced person’s journey, which in a lot of ways ended up becoming Sin Nombre, strangely enough. And then a friend of mine had read Beasts Of No Nation and said, “You might find it interesting.” I thought that Uzo [Iweala, the author] had done an incredible job writing it. I could really picture it, but I hadn’t even thought about necessarily adapting it yet at that time, when I walked into Focus Features in January of 2006. I was there for a meeting about Sin Nombre and I happened to have Beast of No Nations in my hand, walking in the office. One of the executives at Focus saw the book and said, “I love that book! I want to make that into a movie!” And I was like, “I love this book! I want to make it into a movie!” And so
I walked out of the offices that day with Focus optioning Sin Nombre and starting the contractual process on Beasts Of No Nation.
Wow. Quite a big day.
Huge day. I mean, life-changing.
But Beasts was ultimately made outside of the studio system. Was it a hard project to find money for?
Yeah. I made Sin Nombre in 2007. That came out in 2009 — the same year as Johnny Mad Dog [another war film about child soldiers in West Africa]. My intention was to do
Beasts Of No Nation next, but Johnny Mad Dog did not perform well on the international market, and this was right in the middle of basically the entire economy collapsing. So Focus Features decided to pass on Beasts.
It got shelved for a while. I didn’t give up on it. I went off and I made Jane Eyre, and I made True Detective — and while I was making True Detective, I found producers who were down to produce it independently.
Was casting Idris Elba instrumental in getting it made?
It’s funny how things happen. Steve Golin, one of the main producers on True Detective, and I were sitting on set — I remember the exact day, because we were shooting the long take sequence in episode four — and you know, there’s a lot of reset time when you do a long take. I was talking about Beasts, and he’s like: “Idris Elba!” I was like, “I love Idris, but I don’t think he’ll do this.” He’s like, “He’s a client! Why don’t you reach out to him?” So I was able to get a phone call in with Idris Elba while shooting True Detective, and Idris just signed up for it. You know, there are no white people in the story to get this thing financed. It is a small story about this child’s journey. And I wanted it to be authentic. What was amazing about Idris is his father’s Sierra Leonean and his mother’s Ghanaian. So he’s 100 per cent West African. Just having Idris involved was huge in getting the film off the ground — it allowed us to basically hire unknowns for the rest of the film.
Also, I can’t actually imagine another actor pulling off the complicated layers that that role required. You need that charisma to pull off such a dark, manipulative character.
So you shot this film almost back-to-back with True Detective, right?
Yeah, I think we wrapped on True Detective in the summer of 2013. I did post-production up until January. It came out in February — and I was already on a plane to Ghana by February.
How was the shoot in Ghana, then? It seems like a challenging place to make a film on this scale.
It was quite difficult. The infrastructure, the remoteness of the shoot, the terrain, the bureaucracy… I think of other people who have shot there, like Werner Herzog. Werner’s done some of the most complicated shoots on this planet, but even Werner said that Ghana was one of the most difficult places he ever shot.
Is it true you got malaria in pre-production?
Yeah, two weeks before we started shooting. They pushed the shoot by one week, but I couldn’t stop working because I was writing and prepping. I was in a meeting with my costume designer, looking at the military uniforms, and I just felt like I had to sit down. I’d never felt so tired. Later on, the second AD was knocking on my doors telling me to go to rehearsal. I was like, “No, you don’t understand, I can’t get up.” So I saw a doctor, who took my blood and said, “You have pretty bad malaria at this point.” But it was good, because it gave me more time to write.
As well as directing, you were also cinematographer and camera operator. That seems like a lot on your shoulders — figuratively and literally…
I had planned on being a cinematographer. But I had not planned on operating. On our very first
day, on our very first scene, the A-camera and Steadicam operator pulled his hamstring. He couldn’t operate the camera with any kind of movement. I mean, I’d already lost weight from malaria, but then operating every day, and just having a deficit of calories… I think I lost about 20 lb on that shoot. But it worked out fine.
Much of the film — such as the scene where the village evacuates — seems like organised chaos. How did you maintain control of that?
I mean, it was partially organised chaos. We shot the chaos! That scene, where the cars are filling up and people are fleeing, we couldn’t put wardrobe on all the extras. So we asked the extras to show up in their own wardrobe. It was fascinating, because people showed up like it was a costume party. People were wearing Christmas tree costumes and dressing up as Santa Claus. They were hanging ornaments off themselves. It was as if this was a festival rather than a realistic moment of war, or terror, I should say, on a civilian population. It was impossible to control. The expression ‘herding cats’ is completely applicable.
It’s such an ambitious film. How do you look back on it, in the context of everything you’ve done since? Did something of this scale prepare you for a film like No Time To Die?
You’re always trying to improve things, right? You want every shot, every scene to be living to your fullest potential. And even on Bond, I’d get there and I’d see a better version of doing this. I became so used to just adapting on my feet in Ghana. As chaotic as it seems, it’s a better way of doing things. Why lock yourself into something, if there’s something better that you can do? On a Bond-style production, which is far more traditional — you pre-vis things, second unit goes out and shoots things, you plan weeks and months ahead of time with storyboards and all of that — that feels in a way very limiting, because you’re just imagining ahead of time what the best version of it is, and not seeing what the moment gives you. So on set [of Bond], sometimes I’d go through the plan, but sometimes I’d be like, “I want to see if we can make this better. How about we do the camera like this instead? And move these extras this way?” Trying to find something that is far more elegant in its execution. It does create chaos, but it also just gives you much more beautiful things. You’re seeing what the light of the weather of that day provides you. You’re seeing what the actors are giving you at that moment. You’re just taking advantage of every spontaneous thing that’s happening. From my end, I enjoy it. I think for other people, it might drive them crazy.
It was Netflix’s first original film. Did it feel like a leap of faith at the time? They weren’t the major filmmaking studio they are now…
I mean, I knew that Netflix were going to be huge. I should have bought stock! But I remember the feeling. It was very interesting. I had to do a call with [Netflix Chief Content Officer] Ted Sarandos to really sell me on Netflix, while I was in a jungle in Brazil, in the hills above Rio de Janeiro. I needed to get these shots in the jungle that we never were able to do in Ghana, getting these nighttime explosions, while talking to Ted. I wanted this film to go to cinemas. But I knew that going with Netflix would put the film in front of more people. I remember being in that forest and just thinking, “Okay. My ego wants it to be in the theatres. But I know the best thing for the film, for this story, and for everyone who worked on it, will be for Netflix to make sure more people see it.” So that’s the way I went.
Do you feel vindicated? Netflix is such a huge player now — and you were the first.
I don’t know. I still think we’re in the middle of it. We were pioneers in something. We were a guinea pig in some ways, too. I love cinema, I love going to the movies, I love watching movies with people. What I think would be the most tragic thing for Bond is if we don’t get the full audience participation. Because that movie was shot to be experienced in a group. I shot Beasts Of No Nation also to be experienced as a group, too. The vindication is the Criterion release.
BEASTS OF NO NATION IS ON CRITERION BLU-RAY
FROM 27 SEPTEMBER