The Director's Cut

From True Detective to his latest mind-bending series, Maniac, Cary Fukunaga has proven himself a master of creating the perfect tone on screen.

- Zach Baron

Cary Fukunaga isn’t entirely sure if he has a reputation for being difficult. But it’s something he’s heard from time to time. He heard it in the wake of shooting HBO’s True Detective – a series that became a phenomenon following the fourth episode, which concluded a virtuosic six-minute-long tracking shot of Matthew McConaughey stalking his way through a robbery that turns into a bloodbath. The show’s creator, Nic Pizzolatto, thought Fukunaga was being wilfully idiosyncratic just for insisting on a shot like that.

“Nic wanted to cut it up in post-production,” Fukunaga says. “He did not like that I was pushing for that one at all.” But the show had been a lot of talk, and a lot of philosophising, before that. Fukunaga wasn’t trying to showboat. He just thought, “Let’s do something fun.”

And then there was It, the 2017 adaptation of the Stephen King novel, which Fukunaga wrote and was prepared to direct. He ultimately decided to leave the project two weeks before shooting began, after the studio started treating Fukunaga like he might go rogue. “I think it was fear on their part, that they couldn’t control me,” he says.

And… Were they right?

“No, they thought they couldn’t control me. I would have been totally collaborative.”